freeform goodness

My Favorites for 2003

As submitted to the Loud Fans year-end poll.

1. Haha Sound - Broadcast
2. All Your Summer Songs - Saturday Looks Good To Me
3. A Strangely Isolated Place - Ulrich Schnauss
4. Hate - the Delgados
5. Sheath - LFO
6. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below - Outkast
7. Hearts of Oak - Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
8. Give Up - The Postal Service
9. Room On Fire - the Strokes
10. Up In Flames - Manitoba
11. One Step More And You Die - Mono (JP)
12. The Decline of British Sea Power - British Sea Power
13. The 21st Door - G D Luxxe
14. Dear Catastrophe Waitress - Belle & Sebastian
15. Chigliak - Adam Johnson

:: Dave Walker 12:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

Seeing Other People’s Lists

I always wait until about the last possible moment before finalizing my best-records-of-the-year list. My “formal” list is always the one I submit to the Loud Fans mailing list for it’s annual poll, and it’s rules give me a bit of wiggle room: it’s a top 15 instead of a top 10. As it stands now, I still have some cutting back to do — my current draft has 18 records and I haven’t even started trying to decide an order yet.

While I dither, I’ll point you to a few lists others have put together:

• Dan “Techno Rebels” Sicko
• Hans “TechnoTourist” Veneman
• “Citizen” Keith Hanlon

:: Dave Walker 11:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

I Need A Luck Dragon

• “Any moron can tell you a price war against free is not a good thing.” An imperfect but still thought-provoking article. I’m (barely) old enough to remember “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.” Things changed once, they can change again.
• Big ol’ techie cluster-f___ / format war brewing over next generation DVD standards. How big is your laser?
• The Codepoet (c’mon, you can tell us your name, we don’t bite) is making significant progress on what looks like it will be pretty decent specialized b-link log software.
• Scary porn spam subject line of the week: Anorexic Girls Gone Wild in Psych Ward

:: Dave Walker 16:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Cranberry Juice

Made homemade cranberry sauce the other day, which is pretty labor intensive but worthwhile. Had a bunch of fresh cranberry juice left over, which we stored in the fridge. Managed to drop the container a few minutes ago, and it looks remarkably like we’ve murdered someone in the kitchen.

:: Dave Walker 16:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/foodanddrink]
:: tags: foodanddrink

:: Comments (1)

Oh Christmas Flu, Oh Christmas Flu…

How fully you kick my bo-oo-ty. If I stare at the tree long enough, it starts to multiply before my eyes.

:: Dave Walker 19:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal]
:: tags: personal

:: Comments (0)

Heidi Got The Hambone

We had a nice spiral sliced ham yesterday. Today we gave the hambone to our dog, Heidi, as one of her Christmas presents. We’ve jokingly begun referring to it as “the Precious”, owing to her rather possessive posture…

:: Dave Walker 19:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/pets]
:: tags: pets

:: Comments (1)

7th of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

Exercising Another Sadly Underused Tag

Now with extra semantic seasoning!!!

I ❤ My Spool

Such crystalline, concentrated bile. Does a body good around the holidays.

Yeah, that’s about right.

“For those to whom this is all Greek, Atom is a new form of AI technology that visits all websites simultaneously, looking for anyone badmouthing you or those batting for your team; it responds by firing back custom-made insults and denunciations including but not limited to accusations of hypocrisy and pot-kettle-black.” [source]

Yes, I’d Prefer The “No Slapping Yourself With A Sea Bass” Section

“The problem with smoking is not that it kills but that it doesn’t kill fast enough.” [source]

The Healthiest Corpse In The Graveyard

“I did some rough “back of the envelope” calculations and determined that if I were to eat my daily sandwich on a “carb-counting” bagel instead of a regular bagel, and otherwise did not change my daily food consumption in any way, after three months I would lose one pound and kill myself.” [source]

:: Dave Walker 06:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

6th of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“May we dance with yo’ dates?”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

So Now You Find Yourself in ‘82

“…The disco hot spots hold no charm for you”

heh… anyone else remember the South Park episode where the boys (or at least Cartman, IIRC) dropped Asia’s “Heat Of the Moment”?

Brent Simmons’ nifty post about 1982 prompted me to try to remember what was going on in my life then…

I was a high-school sophomore.

I was already into music. I liked that Asia single, but I thought the album was wholly ass, because I already knew (and owned records by) Yes and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and I knew even then that the album was watered down poo constructed to appeal to a radio market that was lapping up stuff like Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon.

My favorite song that year was “Senses Working Overtime”, which I had on a 7” single backed by “English Roundabout”. I loved the hell out of that record, but I couldn’t afford to buy the album (English Settlement)because it was an import double LP, which means that it cost over $20 in 1982 dollars, and I was only bringing home about $11-$14 a week from my paper route. There was a single album US version, but even in ‘82 I was enough of trainspotter not to want any part of that crap.

That was a great year for singles anyway. It was the year that MTV really started to make an impression, and early on it meant that a lot of highly visual new wave bands got airplay. Some more singles I loved: “Shock The Monkey” by Peter Gabriel, “Space Age Love Song” by A Flock of Seagulls, “Rio” by Duran Duran, “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, “Six Months In A Leaky Boat” by Split Enz, “Mesopotamia” by the B-52s, “Save It For Later” by the English Beat (three cheers for getting this past the censors, who never quite figured out the subject), “Invisible Sun” by the Police, and a fat stack of others.

When I wasn’t listening to music, I was playing games on my Odyssey², playing classics like Pick Axe Pete! and K.C. Munchkin! (note that the exclamation points were integral parts of the Odyssey² experience, and are never to be omitted.)

I didn’t have a computer at home yet, but there were a pair of Apple ][+’s that we wee geeks in the Aquinas High Computer Club had access to. I wouldn’t have a home computer for another year or two, and I’ll fully visit that in another entry. 1982 was also the year I first played Dungeons & Dragons, and our (Catholic, yet!) high school was immune enough to the alarmist hype being spread in the press at the time that we had a school-sanctioned D&D club (complete with a teacher/moderator who secured a classroom for us) that met once a week. Computer Club and D&D club (somehow I dodged Chess Club, though I had some friends who managed to hit the loser trifecta… and beyond, we had a drama club and A/V club too!) — is it any wonder it was a full two years later before I went on a real date with a girl?

:: Dave Walker 11:27 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal]
:: tags: personal

:: Comments (0)

Hello, MacSurfer

Well, I suppose this is as close to a Slashdotting as I’m ever likely to get, so make yourself comfy, sit a spell, and please be kind to my poor iMac DV+ on a cable modem…

ps: throttled rocks.

:: Dave Walker 09:33 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

5th of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“Yeah! Let’s go get sushi and not pay!”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

iTunes “Grouping”

iTunes 4.2 adds a “Grouping” field on the tag screen, which sounds interesting, but it’s currently undocumented. I did a Feedster dig and found this thread on Apple’s discussions board. Sounds interesting — some folks are using it as a subgenre field, others have different applications. Well, more metadata to key smart playlists on is always a nice thing. One wacky thing is that it seems to have picked up the Emusic classifications scheme (for tracks I downloaded from that service), which implies that whatever field ID3 Apple is calling “Grouping” is being used for other things by other people.

:: Dave Walker 20:05 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (4)

4th of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases:

“The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!
We don’t need no water let the ____________ burn!
Burn, ____________, burn!”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

Space Porn

These come from NASA’s newly named Spitzer Space Telescope. (spotted by Randy Charles Morin)

:: Dave Walker 12:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (1)

3rd of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“Hey man, is that Freedom Rock? Well turn it up!

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (1)

Creating Titles For Links Posts Enforces Discipline

• It looks like SciFi might be commissioning new episodes of Battlestar Galactica after all. That’s pretty cool. I enjoyed the miniseries from earlier this month. Truth be told, it was considerably better than the original series, which stripped of the gauze of nostalgia was a little… okay, massively cheesy.

• The new festival, which would begin in 2005, will keep jazz at its core but also showcase Detroit’s Motown legacy and the city’s unique contributions to blues, rock, R&B, gospel and techno. (the Freep)

  The nearly quarter-century old Labor Day Detroit Jazz Festival is apparently repositioning itself as a more general music event in an effort to get from underneath crippling debt. I’m disappointed that continuing as a more “purist” festival isn’t feasible. I haven’t been paying attention to the legal machinations surrounding whatever the Memorial Day electronic music festival ends up being called next year, I just hope this doesn’t bode ill for it.
• “Meanwhile a Miss Perfect comes along and places it at the top of her worst corporate blogs. Geesh.”
• Hee. “Because, you know, it would be nice to have real specs that don’t only exist on sites with cat pictures on them.”
• Results of the Reg’s Jennicam Poetry Competition.
• Not even a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening. It would have to be approved by voters, and as it’s both intensively stupid and, well, a tax increase, I just don’t see it happening.

:: Dave Walker 11:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

2nd of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“Everybody on the dance floor!”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

LiveJournal Bits and Atomic Energy

via 2lmc: The Mood of LiveJournal and this, which I suppose everyone who is serious about LJ already probably knew about.

More interesting to me is the news that LJ is now pumping out a million Atom feeds at http://www.livejournal.com/users/[username]/data/atom. Paired with the previously sneakypeeked news that Blogger will also shortly be emitting Atom feeds points to a pleasingly steep uptake curve. It’s time for the aggregator vendors to respond in kind. Apparently Bloglines has.

:: Dave Walker 10:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (1)

1st of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“So throw your hands in the ay-uh
and wave ‘em like you just don’t kay-uh!”

:: Dave Walker 13:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/wotd]
:: tags: wotd

:: Comments (0)

In The Land of the One-Liner, the Unordered List Tag Is King

in which we carefully avoid using angle brackets (escaped or otherwise) in our item titles… (yuk yuk)

• This is Detroit. Things like this happen here sometimes.
• Scoble: “Just over the weekend there was a corner turn in the Atom camp.”
• Preciousss isss my Bling Bling (Flash link) (via Davezilla)
• Tim Bray: “I despise, loathe, revile, the place; a few notes on why and what that might mean for retail in general.”
• This beotch was actually only $37 at Best Buy and it’s region-hackable, plays MP3s, does slideshows and is about the size of a coffee cake. My first DVD player (which I still own) was over $300 and is heavier than God.
• jwz: “Thank god there’s no chance that anyone will ever build a very sensitive reader, then. Or stand close. They’d have no incentive to that, surely.”
• jerakeen: “I think it’s an attitude about unix bods that’s a few years out of date, personally.” (referencing this, of course)
• This is what happens when you have a punditocracy that depends on at least semi-regular releases to justify its existence and finds the rug pulled out from underneath it. Specifically the last line of item 3. I mean, really, WTF does that actually mean? More zero-sum thinking from folks that don’t (can’t?) understand anything else?

:: Dave Walker 11:12 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Tentative Favorite Singles of 2003

Employing my own private, perverse definitions of both “single” and “2003”…

1. Hey Ya - Outkast
2. On My Own - Ulrich Schnauss
3. All You Need Is Hate - The Delgados
4. Ultimate Stars - Saturday Looks Good To Me
5. Freak - LFO
6. Milkshake - Kelis
7. House of Jealous Lovers - The Rapture
8. Before We Begin - Broadcast
9. 12:51 - The Strokes
10. Hendrix With Ko - Manitoba
11. Frontin’ - Pharrell feat. Jay-Z
12. Pass The Dutch - Missy Elliot

:: Dave Walker 12:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Name An RSS Song As Catchy As Blondie’s “Atomic” and We’ll Talk

Just kidding… anyway, the Atom 0.3 spec is out, with validation support, a Blosxom plugin, a Movable Type template, and new, shiny, valid FFG atom feed. (via Mark Pilgrim)

:: Dave Walker 15:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (0)

This Entry Isn’t Going Anywhere

Just a few random musical thoughts. I was going to write a really long music entry, but it’s Friday night and I probably ought to be social instead, so here are some “notes”, I guess…

In late 2003, it’s quite acceptable to talk about really liking the work of a given production team (say, Timbaland, or the DFA, or the Neptunes) almost independent of performers. Even during periods of singer-songwriter and/or rock-god dominance in days of yore, you might find yourself following the work of a Trevor Horn or a Butch Vig or a Giorgio Moroder, but not to this extent. Interesting.

One of the dubious pleasures of getting to be a auld f***er is that you find yourself buying albums by well-hyped young bands, only to find out that you bought the albums they’re ripping off when they were brand new. The first time this happened in a major way to me was with Elastica (Wire), but these days it’s an absolute deluge: Interpol (Joy Division), The Rapture (the Cure, Gang of Four, first couple PiL records), British Sea Power (Echo & the Bunnymen) I don’t really mind this — theft from one’s elders has a long and storied history in popular music.

The last few physical CDs I’ve purchased have had sizeable, colorful booklets with lots of artwork, lyric sheets, nice, heavy paper, etc. I wonder if this is a conscious response to P2P, or just a coincidence. Regardless, I throw them in the CD-ROM drive once, encode them (usually as 160K AAC files these days), throw them into the shelves, and never look back. My love of those objects is just not enough to overcome the convenience of instant random access and the Power of the Smart Playlist. The record industry still needs its own version of the DVD commentary track, the one feature that’s compelling enough to turn casual copiers into purchasers. They’re not there yet.

I’m not sure what to say about Steve Jobs’ interview with Rolling Stone, except, yeah, that’s pretty interesting.

:: Dave Walker 19:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

alanoldham.com

via Dan, Alan Oldham’s started a new site, dedicated to his artwork, comics, and his influential early 90’s radio show. (He already has a separate site for his music & DJ projects.)

both sites require Flash

:: Dave Walker 18:27 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Atom Presentation

Next time someone tells you that Atom should just adopt RSS as a feed format, or that underspecification is close enough for horseshoes and hand-grenades, or whatever, bonk ‘em in the gums with this. I wish I could have seen the full presentation.

:: Dave Walker 18:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Catching Up

I haven’t blogged in nearly a week (sorry) so I’ll try to make amends by Scobling a bit this evening. Batten down the aggregators!

:: Dave Walker 18:23 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

Not Learning From The Past. At all.

Oh boy, one more god-knows-what listening for god-knows-who to send god-knows-what-unchecked-bytes to god-knows-which high port. Let’s not, and say we did, m’kay?

:: Dave Walker 09:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Bush Backdrop Generator

(link)

:: Dave Walker 06:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/linkfarming]
:: tags: linkfarming

:: Comments (0)

Yesterday’s Technology Tomorrow

Rael Dornfest explains how a “revolutionary new blogging feature” that’s being hyped in some quarters happens to be something that Blosxom’s already done for years.

I don’t think I ever explicitly mentioned it here on FFG, but category-based feeds work here, too, and, indeed, work on any dynamically-served Blosxom blog. It’s one of those cool things I always took for granted, like oxygen. Anyway, if, for example, you like my music posts but think I’m completely full of it whenever I talk about technology, you could subscribe to my music subfeed at http://www.freeke.org/ffg/entertainment/music/index.rss20. Just look for the “breadcrumbs” after any given post to let you know where in my hierarchy a given sort of post resides. The cool thing is that those feeds can start anywhere in the hierarchy, so http://www.freeke.org/ffg/entertainment/index.rss20 would get you all of the posts about not just music, but any other “entertainment” subcategories, like books and food.

Of course, this being Blosxom, these subcategories work not only for RSS 2.0, but for any content type I’ve built a flavour for, for example RSS 1.0, or HTML, or Atom, or printer-friendly, or mobile-ready. Even “cool URI’s” like http://www.freeke.org/ffg/entertainment/music/dbsweden work (they give you the HTML rendering.) Not bad for a few hundred lines of Perl, eh?

Just remember, next time someone tries to sell you a “revolution”, check for prior art. :)

:: Dave Walker 05:48 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (1)

The Voice of Reason

Once again, leave it to Sam Ruby to gracefully and succinctly provide some much needed moderation and wisdom amidst the sturm und drang.

In other Atom news, this looks terribly clever, though I really don’t have time to play with it now. One immediately apparent issue is that it doesn’t play unless you have client side XSLT happening in your browser, which rules out Safari and quite a few other browsers, but it looks like static rendering would be trivial to handle with an external script that called your favorite external XSLT engine from your language of choice.

:: Dave Walker 11:14 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Symmetries

All worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there. [+]

Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names. [+]

Hmph.

:: Dave Walker 21:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Drum and Bass invented in 1952. In Sweden. By Jazzbos

Not really. That’s what I dreamed last night, though. I was in a friend’s house (I can’t remember whose), in their living room. I can’t recall what I was doing there, though I recall feeling as though I should probably be leaving as quickly as possible. They had one of those old-fashioned standup wooden hi-fi’s, with the built-in speakers and the turntable down inside of the cabinet under a lid (all of you under 30 may continue to look at me, blankly.) Coming from this thing was the most incredible music. There was a beautiful melody, played on saxophones and strings. Behind it was fast, busy, and incredibly intricate drumming, and a deep, rounded bassline chugging along at half the tempo of the drums. In other words, a pretty close match to the music generally known as drum & bass. It was obvious, though, that this was a very old recording — it had that warm patina of clicky fuzz you hear from old records, and when I opened the lid I saw that the recording was in fact an old 10-inch vinyl record. The label said that the song was called “Oleystrina”, and the performers were the Inger Wendt Orchestra. There was a 1952 copyright date. At this point, I realized that I was dreaming (yeah, I’m one of those freak lucid dreamers, at least when I eat ice cream right before bed) and realized that I had to make myself remember as many of the details as possible so that I could let everyone know that drum & bass was invented in 1952. In Sweden. By jazzbos. (Of course, my sleepy mind was fogged enough to realize that I was dreaming, but not coherent enough to put together that, duh, this is a dream, silly.)

:: Dave Walker 09:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/dreams]
:: tags: dreams

:: Comments (2)

Leftovers

• The turkey was nice and juicy. I left the dressing in the oven a few minutes too long, but it recovered when we ladled some turkey broth over it. The rolls didn’t rise as much as I would have liked — I blame the yeast. The cranberry sauce was surprisingly good. I mean, really, I’m-never-buying-the-canned-stuff-again good. Pies were sweet potato and key lime. We didn’t bake either of them, but they still rocked.
• I have a comments feed. It’s nothing special, but it exists.
• “How the hell do I pound a nail with this screwdriver? It must be broken!”
• Reasonably friendly solution for Palm handheld owners with OS X Macs who are still, after two years, waiting for a stupid conduit from these clowns.
• Netflix comes through again. Currently immersed in this.
• “Ellzey said Wal-Mart officials called later Friday to ask about her sister, and the store apologized and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her.” How nice.
• My Playstation 2 is broken. This is not an uncommon thing (can you say engineering defect?) If you know the magic words, though, they’ll fix it for free.

:: Dave Walker 16:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (1)

The Sun Isn’t Up Yet

:: Dave Walker 06:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/family]
:: tags: family

:: Comments (1)

Antipixel, Channeling

Quoted in full, because I loved it so much:

Every so often (OK, every day) I look down the page here and see a string of completely unrelated items masquerading as some sort of half-baked Weltanschauung and must force myself to imagine that one person’s complete and utter lack of focus is another’s vibrant eclecticism.

Just thought I’d share that. Hope you’re enjoying the vibrant eclecticism.

(Jeremy Hedley) (link)

Very nice. A day. Have one.

:: Dave Walker 13:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/linkfarming]
:: tags: linkfarming

:: Comments (1)

Hug A Senior Citizen Today

I am a Norwegian boy
which have some question
I have only 13 years
and I am crazy of you

“Penpals” by Sloan

Okay, so I have slighly more than 13 years today, and I fail to be Norwegian by a pretty spectacular margin. Thankfully, that didn’t stop a few folks from getting me birthday gifts. Tammie bought me all sorts of flattering, slimming black clothing, so I’m now fully equipped for stealth.

Beth sent me an iTunes Music Store gift certificate, which was pretty darned cool. You get a card via email with a clickable link. When you click, it opens iTunes, asks you to confirm that you want to redeem the certificate, and adds a little LCD-like readout to the upper-right corner of your iTunes window that shows your remaining balance. Slick. Thus equipped, I headed over to the iTMS to do a little “record” shopping. I decide to buy a couple of full albums, since up to this point almost all of my purchases there have been singles.

My first pick was the wonderfully titled (in true 60s fashion) The Tornados Play Telstar & Other Great Hits. Nothing says “you’re buying this for the hit single and a bunch of filler” like one of these old-school album titles. The art is perfect, too, of course — it would certainly be worthwhile to hit up the local Goodwill bin to try to find a full-sized version of the original album cover. You’ve probably heard “Telstar” even if you don’t know the title. It was the legendary Joe Meek’s biggest hit, and is one of the best selling instrumentals of all time. The thing that prompted me to take the plunge on the whole “album” (quaint term, that) was the presence of a Meekified version of Theme from “A Summer Place”. The best known of version of this song is the ultra-syrupy million-and-one strings rendition by Percy Faith, which I love with every fiber of my being. (Don’t act so surprised — I’ve confessed my hidden, shameful love which dares not speak its name for this kind of stuff before.) I’m really enjoying the Tornados record overall — it’s fun to listen to how much sound they were able to wring out of two-track recording technology. It doesn’t hurt at all that tracks like “Stingray” and “Robot” are every bit as fun and loopy as you’d expect from the titles, and the version of the Lawrence of Arabia theme is a stitch. “Life on Venus” even starts with a fake news bulletin, and “The Ice Cream Man” has a killer hook.

In keeping with my onrushing dotage, I picked as my “new album” purchase the debut album the band British Sea Power, The Decline of British Sea Power. Besides having a really great band name, they’ve been tapped as sort of a throwback to the golden age of UK postpunk indie-ness. They’re usually compared to early-to-mid period Echo & the Bunnymen, and while I can definitely hear the influence, I think I hear a bit of Kitchens of Distinction (and an occasional noisiness via maybe the Pixies) as well. It’s a little comforting to me to hear people still trying to make a go of this sort of sound in 2003, without a drumloop, autotuned chorus, bass-free garage-band sneer, or guest appearance by Sean Paul in sight. How quaint. ;) I’m interested in seeing them live.

:: Dave Walker 12:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (3)

Whilst Idly Poking Around In My Mail Logs

Wouldn’t it be utterly badass if, upon encountering a message that scored, say, a 15 or above in SpamAssassin, your MTA could not only tag it with a spam header but could, optionally, fling it back across the internet, with a flaming bag of soggy dogcrap attached, into the face of the sender? Maybe in version 3.0.

:: Dave Walker 16:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/mail]
:: tags: mail

:: Comments (0)

Filling In The Blanks

A long time ago I realized that, given half a chance, I tend to rattle on a bit. (at this point, you sit back, say, “Duh, you’re a freakin’ blogger, numnuts…”, and continue to sip your coffee) I made a conscious decision to strive for a bit of (false?) economy in my writing, a nip here, a tuck there, and eventually I’m only boring the world 50% as much as before. The danger with doing this is that sometimes you forget the people reading aren’t sitting inside your brain, participating in the editing process, so you omit or elide things that you really should have made a bit more explicit.

My last entry was a bit of a vent in which I talked about the hazards of interface customization. The first line was:

The mantra of moderately-to-very experienced computer users is “customization customization customization”

which Sven quite rightly calls me out on. Looking back at my post I see something that was very clear in my mind as I was writing it but entirely absent from the actual post: that I personally am not a fan of completely customizable interfaces — all too often, a completely customizable interface is a cop-out for developers failing to deliver a usable default interface at all. This was completely clear in my head, but of course it never actually shows up in the actual entry. I’m not an interface tweaker at all — I’m much more likely to want to mod an application’s underlying functionality via wild-eyed patching and plugins than I am to ever want to muck with the interface. More clearly stated, what you often run into in places like Slashdot, Ars Technica, Mozillazine, OSNews, and on technical folks weblogs are people clamoring for more tweakable interfaces. Throwing more toolbars and widgets at these people (who, quite sadly, are quite often the same people responsible for writing project reviews, which only fuels the vicious cycle) may shut them up (temporarily), but it thoroughly screws the pooch for the novice user.

:: Dave Walker 11:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all]
:: tags: all

:: Comments (0)

Overly Customiziable Toolbars

The mantra of moderately-to-very experienced computer users is “customization customization customization”, but sometimes we forget how much the customization options built into software for “us” can destroy usability for the less experienced. I just spent 15+ minutes on the phone with an Internet Explorer user who managed to completely obscure his menus. He had all the useless “Sign up for Hotmail NOW!” and “Get Your Free MSN Shotglass” garbage in the toolbar, but the actual menu commands fo using the application were compressed into a tiny, nearly invisible corner of a toolbar with nothing but a couple of small angle brackets to indicate that they existed at all. Why? Because his mouse slipped the other day while he was hitting a link, and IE (ahem) helpfully allowed him to “customize” his interface into unusability. Even figuring out the problem took several minutes, because the visual indicator that IE uses to show that a toolbar is usable is subtle to the point of invisibility to anyone who doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for. This led to uncounted repetitions of “look for the slightly raised vertical line next to the slightly smaller indented line next to the ‘links’ bar and move your cursor really slowly until it turns into a two-headed arrow… no, not that one, the _other_ links item…” I understand (well, not really, but for the sake of this argument let’s pretend I do) why someone might want their program menus moved over to, say, the right hand side of a second level toolbar, but why not make it somewhat harder for the naive user to shoot themselves in the face with the option? Would a confirmation dialog be such a bad idea here?

:: Dave Walker 12:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/win32]
:: tags: win32

:: Comments (0)

Anyone Speak Swedish?

Sometimes you find great songs in places where you aren’t even looking for them. I had iTunes rolling in shuffle mode and came across this brilliant track, Vackra Kristaller, by Komeda (6.6MB), and it blew me away again. It’s really remarkable — as catchy as it’s possible for a pop song to be, with a really strinking arrangement: check the marimbas, harps, tasty scratch guitar derring do, fretless bass, and tight drumming all bundled-up in a crystalline mix that bounces and shimmers and gives every element ample space. I still don’t know what it’s about, and I don’t give a rip, but it sounds wonderful. Ah.

:: Dave Walker 16:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

Certifiable

Matthew Thomas wrote an excellent post on the usability nightmare that security certificates and certificate authorities represent. Sven tackled a related issue as it applies to email.

As unfashionable as it is to suggest a public sector solution to a problem that is (allegedly) being handled by the private sector, I think that personal certificates, at least, are something that governments, particularly at the state or province level, are well-positioned to provide. There’s already a level of institutional trust when it comes to these agencies, particularly drivers’ license bureaus, when it comes to identity verification. At least in the USA, a state-issued driver’s license is accepted as proof of individual identity virtually everywhere, as is a federally issued passport. Since the state and federal governments already have identity verification mechanisms (via birth records, etc.) in place, the most obnoxious part of trying to get a certificate validated (all the various dicking around with notaries and the like) can be avoided. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a CDROM with a state-signed certificate (in the various necessary formats at the same time you got your drivers’ license or passport? You’ve already done all the legwork of providing identity documentation to these agencies. For businesses, processes like filing formal incorporation papers or sales tax licenses could serve a similar purpose. Why not leverage this? It’s too late for this to happen, though. There are already entrenched private firms with a business model to protect, and, as we’ve seen with the record companies, an industry with even a demonstrably broken business model will fight like a cornered animal to protect its turf.

:: Dave Walker 09:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all]
:: tags: all

:: Comments (0)

Drawing The Line

The comment spam skirmishes of the past few months are now a declared war. Adam Kalsey posts the manifesto, FFG supports it. The Whoop-Ass can is open.

:: Dave Walker 10:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (1)

Full Feeds, Please

A recent schedule change means that I do the great majority of my weblog reading in an aggregator now. Indeed, for much of the time I’m reading, I don’t even have the option of visiting your site directly — I’m offline. Full feeds rock. I know that your site looks wonderful, and when I’m browsing full-on in Safari or Firebird, I’ll visit it in its full glory (to get that Barton Fink feeling!), but when I’m sitting in a waiting room somewhere with a handheld, a title and a link doesn’t do much good. I’ll try to walk the walk as well, providing full text as much as is practical. I’ve edited a couple of older entries so that they now include full content.

:: Dave Walker 21:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

Review: Gameshark Media Player [✯✯✯✯]

The GameShark Media Player for PS2 is an interesting oddity. It’s a client/server application (the client piece runs on an ethernet-enabled Sony Playstation 2, the server is supported on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux [though it should be usable on any platform with a modern Java VM]) which streams digital media over your wired or wireless network.

I’ve been interested in something like this for quite a while. Like many people, I’ve invested a fair amount of time and effort storing audiovisual content on my home computer network. I have tens (soon to be hundreds) of gigabytes of (legally licensed, mostly) music, video, and digital photographs stored on my network. I have media organizing tools on my workstation that I can use to store, categorize, archive, and share this content. All of these tools are centered around the computer, the “dogital hub”, as it were. That happens to be the problem. Watching a movie, listening to music, or viewing digital vacation snapshots on a computer means sitting at a desk, in a straightbacked chair, two feet or so from a small screen and small, cheap computer speakers. Wouldn’t it be nice to enjoy this content while relaxing in a den or family room setting, reclining on a couch or a comfy chair or even in bed, while looking at a large screen and listening via decent speakers? Wouldn’t it be great to make use of another paid-for piece of equipment to do this? My thoughts exactly.

I already owned a PS2 (with a sadly underutilized network adapter), attached to a decent television and an OK stereo in my bedroom. When I initially read about the GSMP (neé QCast Tuner) it sounded like the ideal solution. (the product is developed and maintained by BroadQ and marketed and distributed by MadCatz as part of their GameShark line of products.) In practice, it’s a flawed but largely worthwhile product that I can recommend, if not unequivocably, to people who already have a PS2 and a lot of digitized media.

Tested configuration

• GSMP v. 2.0.11
• Sony Playstation 2 (model SCPH-30001)
• PS2 Network Adapter (model SCPH-10281)
• Mac OS X 10.2.8, Mac OS Runtime for Java 1.4.1 (stream server)
• 100Mbps switched ethernet LAN (Linksys BEFSR41 router)
• Mac OS 9.2 personal filesharing (music and video storehouse)

The initial setup was pretty simple. The package includes 2 CDs: a server disc (for the computer) and a client disc (for the PS2). The server disc simply contains a zip file which you uncompress on the machine you plan to use as your stream server. You invoke the installer (depending on your platform and JVM) by double-clicking the installer or running it from the command line. The installer prompts you for a CD Key and an email address, connects to BroadQ’s servers, and downloads the latest version of the server application. BroadQ mails an unlock code for the application to you at this point, so you need to use a real address. This leads into my first concern about the product — it does a whole lot of “phoning home”, connecting back to BroadQ’s servers for many functions. More on this later. After you enter the unlock code, the installer sets up the server software, then prompts you to set up a (local) user account and create network media shares (which can be optionally passworded — I didn’t bother.) This happens in a completely unremarkable but functional Java Swing GUI. This setup tool then launches the server software itself. (obGeeknote: looking at the software installed on the server, it looks like they’re using the Apache Project’s Xerces and XML-RPC libraries)

The PS2 client piece requires that you have 700kb free on a memory card. Presumably this is where your network configuration and any diffs between the CD-based playback software and the current, updated code are stored. On first boot, the software reads your PS2 network settings (assuming you already configured the adapter to work previously with your game software) from your memory card. My PS2 simply grabs an address by DHCP, and I’ve never had a problem with it. Sure enough, GSMP had no problems talking to the network and quickly showed me a list of available media servers on my LAN (I wonder what they’re using as a discovery protocol?). There was only one, the Mac I’d set up above, but it appears the client can talk to any number of media servers on a given network, which might be fun in a dorm setting. The only real negative in the console setup problem was the boot disc itself, which made the most unpleasant series of noisy seeking noises to emit from my PS2. It sounds like the console was really struggling to load the disc, which worries me (more on this later.), and a full load from power-up to initial menu screen takes at least a minute and a half.

Post-configuration, the software presents a screen from which you can select Playlists, Video & Music, and Pictures. Apparently you can import .m3u (Winamp-compatible) playlists (which lots of programs will export), but I haven’t tried it. I didn’t have any photos shared yet, so I went directly to the Video and Music option. The next menu presents you with a list of your shares, which you can navigate to using the PS2 controller (or the cool little remote) Selecting a share causes the software to present you with a list of subdirectories and a filtered list of files (based on extension, apparently) to choose from. Here I ran into some bugginess. The directory lister is rather slow in the best of circumstances. Even for small directories, there’s a lag of several seconds between a button press and directory traversal. Large directories present a bigger problem: at a certain size, large directories cause the software to freeze up entirely, requiring that you reboot the PS2 to continue. Considering the noisy, slow, boot process, this is unfortunate. I haven’t quite found the maximum size directory that the software can handle, but I do know that my iTunes library, with 380 artists at its top level, is more than it can deal with. I’ve managed to work around this by creating a dummy share stocked with (alphabetical) symbolic links to artist directories. Once you’ve successfully navigated into a directory, you can add items (music and video) to an ad-hoc playlist either one-at-a-time or via an “add all” link. You can toggle between the directory and playlist views using the L1 and R1 shoulder buttons. In the playlist view, hitting the x button starts playing the playlist (which has shuffle and repeat options, naturally) starting with the selected file.

With videos, you get a brief (2-3 second) loading screen and then the playback starts. The visual quality is quite good, depending on the source material. I tried various MPEG 1, MPEG 2, and Divx files. Frame rates were solid and visual artifacts were minimal on well-encoded files. Occasionally the video was a little “soft” but I attribute that to the various codecs tradeoffs. It seems they do some sort of “sweetenening” pass applied to the video. One thing to be aware of is that the GSMP doesn’t support some high-bitrate encoded, hi-res Divx files. Due (apparently) to processing limits imposed by the PS2’s CPU, some of the higher-res files can’t be supported. Informal testing using videos I had on my server and a few things (cough) borrowed (strictly for testing purposes, I swear!) via BitTorrent found this not to be a problem with most current-generation movies you’re likely to aquire online or digitize with your own hardware.

Sound files give your a very basic but functional display of elapsed time and a few ID3 tags. It would be a natural to bring all the beefy 3D hardware in the PS2 to bear on flashy visuals to accompany the music, I would think, but this release doesn’t support any visual modes. The audio sounds fine, as good (or as poor) as the MP3 encodes you throw at it. There don’t seem to be any (practical) bitrate restrictions — I tried everything from 24kbps OTR shows to music encoded with LAME’s --preset insane setting.

In summary, the player does great with the audio (MP3, OGG, AIFF, WAV) and video formats it supports. Unfortunately, that support misses a great many file formats you likely have laying around on your drives: Quicktime, Windows Media, Real, AAC. I believe the application’s architecture means that additional format support can be added via “over the wire” updates, and these formats would be great to have.

As mentioned earlier, the application “phones home” (for updates) on every launch. I haven’t busted out the packet analyzer to look at exactly what data goes back and forth over the wire, but a media player that does this is a potential case for concern, given the fanatical litigiousness of the subpoena-happy Copyright Cartel.

On tbe server end, the overhead of running the Media Server seems pretty minimal. The application uses very little RAM and doesn’t seem to use much CPU, even when actively serving content. Also, BroadQ’s engineering staff seems to be very accessible. They hang out on the support forums and are pretty upfront when answering questions, acknowledging limitations of the project, and soliciting requests for improvements. They have indicated that improvements for some identified issues are in the pipeline, though they’re careful not to overpromise. As I understand it, the product is currently available for North American NTSC systems, though they’re working on a PAL version. Overall, if you already have the hardware and a media library worth sharing around the house, the GSMP’s a pretty good product. It’s not as polished as it could be, but the price ($49) is reasonable and it’s already made a big impact on the way I use my personal media library.

:: Dave Walker 21:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/gadgets]
:: tags: gadgets

:: Comments (14)

Panther Remainders

One to skip if you don’t care about Macs.

random unrelated aside: don’t you love those Pale Saints songs where they do all that kooky tempo-shifting shit? Shoegazing — a criminally underappreciated era of pop.

Since I’m about the last Mac geek in the ‘hood to get around to installing Panther, I’ll skip quickly over the things I’ve been reading everywhere else (Exposé is really cool, the Finder’s still fairly ass, fast-user switching will really be useful at my house…) and touch on some other things I haven’t seen mentioned as much.

I installed the Mac OS X Public Beta on this machine the day I bought it. When 10.0 shipped, I wiped the drive and reinstalled from scratch. That was the last time I did a clean install. Everything since (10.0.1-10.0.4, 10.1.0-10.1.6, 10.2.0-10.2.8) has been an upgrade install. I’m happy to say I’ve kept my streak alive. :) I had to tweak a few things, but I’d say that’s pretty impressive. The only thing that was truly broken this time around was my Java installation, and I’ll explain my fix for that in another entry (for Google’s sake)

I’ve never really been one of those people who bitches about the metal appearance, but it’s really annoying with the Finder. The combination of the iTunes-style left sidebar arrangement and the metal styling means I’m constantly confusing Finder windows with the iTunes window at first glance. Irritating, especially when I’m using the Finder to work with a directory of MP3s, in which case the confusing effect is magnified. I find it particularly goofy that, as the standard Aqua appearance continues to improve, they’re de-emphasizing it. I think the current iteration of Aqua, with the (further) de-emphasized pinstripes, the return of menu separator lines, and the subtly rounded and shaded titlebars is really clean and effective. The metallic appearance just isn’t as polished. The Finder’s incremental file-find functionality is actually useful now, though.

Continuing on the theme of visuals, it looks like some minor tweaks were made to font rendering/hinting/metrics. Some of the default system fonts have been slightly altered — both Lucida Grande and Cochin seem noticably narrower, for example, and slightly more readable at small sizes. Even Times New Roman seems less ugly [probably still too ugly for Sven, though ;) ] Font rendering is an area where OS X is still far beyond its competitors, IMO. (no, ClearType isn’t even in the ballpark)

Under the hood, it looks like they’ve been playing around with the way the VM subsystem allocates new swapfiles. Previous OS X versions would create new 80 megabyte swapfiles as memory use increased. This was fine in most cases, however a machine that temporarily needed to create new swap space could create many of these files at the same time. If the machine’s root drive was low on disk space, this could have catastrophic effects. (OS X has an unfortunate tendency to completely shit itself when low on disk space, and all those caches the OS uses to keep things speedy get corrupted, with nasty results.) Check man dynamic_pager for the geeky details, but the new allocation scheme is much less likely to steal the last few bytes on your hard drive than the old one, which will be a comfort for us running the OS on small drives.

I suppose the switch from Sendmail to Postfix is a good thing, though it caused me some extra work. :) MacOSX Hints set me straight, as usual. (if there were an MVP award for Mac websites, they’d get my vote.) I went ahead and set up SpamAssassin, as well, for the hell of it, to stress test the Perl 5.81 installation and to see if the Panther team had made dealing with Perl modules any better. They have.

Webkit is beginning to be deeply integrated into the OS. Both the new versions of Mail and the Help Viewer use it, for example. Webkit has improvements both major and minor. One trivial but fun example can be seen by selecting the “light” layout for this weblog (currently only in Safari 1.1 and later) — support for soft shadows a la CSS3. Useless, but cool. Interestingly, a subset of XUL is being implemented in Webkit.

Preview knows how to deal with PostScript now (yay!) Do you know how many little old ladies we would have gladly run over back in the early 90’s for transparent Postscript rendering in the old Mac OS? A whole Bill Knapp’s worth. That makes cool things like the following script (jacked from macosxhints.com) possible:

#!/bin/sh
man -t $1 > /tmp/$1.ps
open /tmp/$1.ps

Yum.

:: Dave Walker 21:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (6)

Full Lunar Eclipse

We had a really good view of last night’s eclipse. It was a completely cloudless night, cold as hell, and manageable light pollution. At twilight (between 5 and 5:30 or so), the moon was low to the horizon, orange, and huge. As the sky darkened, the moon rose higher above the horizon. A slight shadow started to creep from the bottom left of the moon’s disc, peeking just over the edge. It was fascinating to watch. The edge of the shadow was very sharp and easy to see. Over the next 2 hours, it made slow yet steady progress, until at about 8PM, when the moon was perfectly shadowed. Pretty.

:: Dave Walker 15:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Hans Is Blogging!

I didn’t realize that Hans Veneman was blogging. Wonderful — blogrolled. Hans is one of the original Flying Dutchmen, the crew behind the excellent Technotourist website, an expert on electronic music and an altogether great guy.

:: Dave Walker 14:06 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/friends]
:: tags: friends

:: Comments (3)

Express Train To Hell

Make your own church sign.

Batteries not included. Not responsible for non-removable sulfur stains on clothing.

:: Dave Walker 09:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/linkfarming]
:: tags: linkfarming

:: Comments (0)

Pieces of Flair

Hooray for a little Blosxom community-building! Rael Dornfest has made available various Blosxom-flavoured knickknacks for our enjoyment. There aren’t many software packages out there good enough to justify my buying fan merchandise, but Blosxom is definitely at the top of that very short list for me.

:: Dave Walker 08:49 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (0)

Directors Label

Compilation videos from Palm Pictures. The first three feature Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. Cool.

:: Dave Walker 13:33 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/tv]
:: tags: tv

:: Comments (0)

ITMS / MPEG4 Audio Roundup

• AAC Quality
  The following page (which I must have missed before) makes me feel a little bit more secure about buying songs from the iTunes Music Store (and encoding to .m4a from iTunes.) Apparently Quicktime’s encoder is quite highly regarded. I’ve been encoding my AAC files at 160 kbps, but some reading suggests even this might be overkill. Traditionally, I’ve encoded audio to MP3 with LAME’s --preset-standard, which works out to be a variable bitrate MP3 in the neighborhood of 192kbps to 224kbps for most material. I’ve been very satisfied with the quality I get from that setup, but it has 2 problems — it’s very slow (at least 3 or 4 times slower than an AAC encoding on the same hardware) and the file sizes are considerably larger (an issue when I’m trying to fit an album on a USB keychain or rsync it to the office over my piddly cable modem upstream.)
• Some other links I found:
  • Dolby’s AAC Homepage and official AAC licensing page.
  • A nicely info-stuffed AAC wiki.
  • Hydrogen Audio’s AAC Forum.
• McDonalds and Apple to offer 1 billion free songs? Yes? No? Maybe? It seems almost inevitable that some sort of sponsorship/patronage business model is going to evolve to fill the vacuum left by the implosion of the traditional record industry.

:: Dave Walker 11:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

Does My Members Only Jacket Have Enough Zippers?

Gawd, I watched too much MTV.

:: Dave Walker 15:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/linkfarming]
:: tags: linkfarming

:: Comments (0)

Whew!

Darwin samantha.freeke.org 7.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0: Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc

Still fixing some stuff. I’ve got Perl modules to reinstall (sob).

:: Dave Walker 08:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/general]
:: tags: general

:: Comments (0)

Down for OS Upgrade

My domain will we out of order starting Friday night and should be back up sometime Saturday. Don’t all cheer at once.

:: Dave Walker 16:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/general]
:: tags: general

:: Comments (0)

Novice Users and Personal Sysadmins

I can’t recommend this entry (and the associated comments) highly enough. I visited some of the issues discussed here a few months ago, and if anything the issues raised are even more problematic now than they were then. via Mark Pilgrim

:: Dave Walker 13:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

FreeBSD 4.9 Released

My favorite x86 OS just announced a new release on its production branch. My work machine [the one I actually like to use ;) ] is running one of the betas — I’ll CVSup my way to glory later this week. The trolls are in full flower on Slashdot, of course. A great bulk of the posts that aren’t the billionth repetition of the “BSD Is Dying!” trolls are predictable license flames.

addendum: This is why I love free software — can you imagine Longhorn shipping with a note like this in its documentation? (from the cvsup manpage)

At present, the GUI does not support changing the parameters specified in the supfile. That is planned for a future release. Despite its relative uselessness, the GUI is fun to watch.

:: Dave Walker 12:40 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os]
:: tags: os

:: Comments (0)

jEdit and Stuff

My copy of Panther is in the hands of UPS, and there’s no shortage of reviews for it anyway, so I’ll talk about some other software.

It’s well known that my current favorite text editor is Hydra SubEthaEdit. I can’t use it on my office PC, but I have found something to use there that I like nearly as much. It’s called jEdit, and it runs as a Java desktop application. I know that sets off alarm bells in some people’s heads, but it’s really quite nice. It’s very responsive (even as a non-native application), and the interface isn’t particularly jarring (I’m notoriously not picky about interface consistency when I’m in Windows, I’ll admit.) Since it’s Java, it runs in most every modern OS. I’ve run it in OSX, Windows, and I’m going to try it on FreeBSD later. It does everything you’d expect from a modern programmer’s editor, and benefits from one of the coolest plugin architectures I’ve seen in any application. The plugin manager is fully web-integrated: it connects to a server and presents a fully up-to-date list of modules, complete with descriptions, that you can download and install with a single click. It handles dependencies automatically, too. The only negative is that plugins require a restart before they become active, which is subobptimal, but hardly a deal-breaker.

Unconnected observation — the Delgados are really, really good. They’ve been around a while, too — I wonder how I missed them.

:: Dave Walker 11:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

Seasons Are Nice

Shelley Powers has posted some really nice fall colors pictures on her blog. Ooh and aah here.

:: Dave Walker 09:36 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Full-text Book Searches At Amazon

Wow, this looks cool. Amazon has apparently indexed 33 million pages of text, so you can now perform full text searches inside of books. I haven’t tried it much, yet, but it looks really impressive.

Oh, and don’t forget to show me how much you love me.

:: Dave Walker 09:14 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (2)

My Schwingdom For A Linkdump

• “Introvertster is an online community that prevents stupid people and friends from harrassing you online.”
• “mod_musicindex is an Apache module aimed at being a C implementation of the Perl module Apache::MP3.”
• Fred “Rerun” Berry dies at 52.
• Best Gift Evar. I love teh Intarweb.
• Basic Channel now has an official website (and an RSS feed.) They even have a mail order link so you now have no excuse for not knowing why this matters (tip: BC-03, BC-07, BC-08, M-2, M-3, M-4, M-5, BMD-1, CR-01, CRD-03, CRD-04.)

:: Dave Walker 12:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Hard Drive Performance

I originally tried posting this as a comment on another blog, but it didn’t go through for some reason. I’ll post it here because a full clipboard is A Terrible Thing To Waste…

Sven has a problem with hard drive performance on his Powerbook. Well, this doesn’t directly address his issue, but I found this article (via Slashdot) to be very interesting — a reminder that cheaper isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just… cheaper. Sigh. For many years Macs shipped with SCSI drives by default, but ironically enough (in an Alanis sense) they did it when their machines were shipping a single-tasking largely unthreaded operating system that didn’t exercise the storage susbsystem’s potential. Now they ship modern OS with server tasks and real virtual memory and they ship all their machines (except the custom configured ones) with good-old brain dead (but cheap cheap cheap!) polled-I/O IDE drives. Why? Because the beige box vendors realized they could shave dollars off their bottom lines by bundling in cheaper (and in this case clearly less performant) hardware. When you have to compete on price with “the cheapest possible hardware that will work”, you don’t have a lot of options.

:: Dave Walker 10:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all]
:: tags: all

:: Comments (1)

The Baggy Revival Starts Here

At this point, I imagine it’s a little less than fashionable to admit loving “baggy”, or “indie-dance”, or whatever you want to call it — that brief period in the late 80s/early 90’s when British indie bands got loaded on disco biscuits and went clubbing. I used to listen to the stuff by the ton back around the turn of the decade. Though much of that stuff hasn’t aged well at all (who these days would admit to having ever listened to Northside?), some of it aimed (and hit) pretty high. I’ve been dusting off some old discs over the last few weeks (finally getting around to seeing 24-Hour Party People certainly helped.) Along with my seriously enormous tumbler of coffee this morning I indulged in 99 cents worth of fully worthwhile nostalgia.

A Baggy Mix
(note: the fastest way in the world to get the kid behind the counter at your record shop to laugh at you is to buy any of these records. Screw him. I bet he listens to emo.)

• One Love (long version) - The Stone Roses
• Loaded - Primal Scream
• The Only One I Know - The Charlatans
• She Comes In The Fall - Inspiral Carpets
• Kinky Afro - Happy Mondays
• Mother Universe - The Soup Dragons
• I Believe - EMF
• Hippychick - Soho
• Only Love Can Break Your Heart - Saint Etienne
• Hyperreal Selector (Jack Dangers Remix)- the Shamen
• Something Good - Utah Saints
• Strawberry Fields Forever - Candyflip
• Grey Cell Green - Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
• Sheriff Fatman - Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine
• Info Freako - Jesus Jones
• Wrote For Luck (there are at least 3 great mixes of this track - pick your favorite) - Happy Mondays
• Fools Gold - The Stone Roses

:: Dave Walker 13:22 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (4)

iTunes 4.1

Sven already covered a lot of the relevant bits in his review. I have a few observations for the “Mac at home, Windows at work” crowd.

It’s probably just my biases showing, but I never really found a Windows music player I really liked. They were either butt-ugly (WinAmp) or resource hogs (Sonique) or retarded (Windows Media Player) or expensive (most of the others), and none of them had the seamless library handling I was used to. I now have a Windows audio player I’m comfortable with.

I downloaded it at work, and then copied a few of my purchased tracks from home (Mac) to test. After “authorizing” the PC, they worked fine. The interface is pretty much identical. One really nice thing is that it supports Rendezvous, so other iTunes users on your local network segment (Mac or PC) can share their libraries and playlists.

I’ve been manually syncing my libraries using the doohickey. I’m thinking that you could do some amusing things with rsync over ssh that would make the process even simpler, at least for the microscopic subset of folks who like to pretend anything involving cron jobs and shell scripts is ever really simple.

:: Dave Walker 06:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

Microsoft Windows Security Bulletin Summary for October, 2003

Ah, crap. Looks like my work day’s been planned for me.

:: Dave Walker 08:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/win32/pys]
:: tags: pys

:: Comments (0)

Harmonies of Texture and Color

“A squid eating dough in a polyethelene bag is fast and bulbous, dig me?”

-Captain Beefheart

Observed approximately 7AM, at the intersection of Grand River and Washington Blvd., Detroit, MI, USA:

A man, roughly 325+ pounds (147 kilograms), wearing much gold jewelry, clad in a yellow-orange track suit, eating Cheetos and drinking Faygo orange soda.

I had no camera.

:: Dave Walker 08:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/people]
:: tags: people

:: Comments (0)

Like A Caveman To Fire

Those little USB keychain flash disk things finally got cheap enough so that even my penny-pinching ass would buy one. I got a 64MB model for $25, which seemed pretty reasonable. I love the thing. It’s truly tiny, and holds over three times as much data as the first hard drive I ever owned (which probably retailed for $500 new.) It also, wonder of wonders, is truly plug and play. I plugged it into my Mac’s USB port, and an icon showed up in my Finder window. I copied an album I’d encoded earlier that day onto it. Then I unmounted it from the Finder’s menu and physically unplugged it from the USB port and placed the protective cap over the USB connector. I brought it to work this morning, and plugged it into my FreeBSD machine. I wasn’t even sure if USB mass storage support was compiled into my kernel, but I figured I give it ago anyway. I created a mount point and executed the mount command, and (whee!) there were the files I copied from the Mac. I deleted the files with rm, then umounted the volume, then did a camcontrol eject and removed the device from the port. I walked the device over to my Windows 2000 machine, plugged it into the USB port, and it mounted the device instantly, without any driver installation. Cool, plug and play, on three different OS platforms. It’s kinda nice when things actually work.

:: Dave Walker 08:46 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/gadgets]
:: tags: gadgets

:: Comments (0)

Low-tech Anti-Comment Spam for Blosxom Writebacks

I’ve had an increasingly annoying problem with comment spam in the writebacks for some of my older entries. The usual suspects have devised semi-automatic comment spamming scripts that look for blogging-related entries via Google and serially spam comment-enabled weblogs with links to the expected sorts of things. Most of the discussion I’ve seen online about preventing this has been geared towards Movable Type-hosted blogs. Noticing that most of the comment spam happens in older entries that probably aren’t going to see any legitimate new comments, a lot of folks simply close discussion on older entries after a few weeks, which I think is natively supported in MT.

Closing comments for a Blosxom entry is pretty simple, as well: just make the writeback entry read only. On Unix platforms, just change the mode of the writeback (.wb) file to 444. I don’t know the Windows equivalent, but I’m sure it’s just as simple. If someone (usually a spammer) tries to post a writeback to one of your old entries, they get (at least in the default writeback setup) the message: “There was a problem posting your writeback.”, which is fine for my setup, though I suppose it’s easy enough to customize the message if you like.

I imagine it would be about a 3 line perl script to simply walk your writebacks file tree and close all extant writebacks older than a certain number of days, but I’m a little too lazy to do that today.

edit: Blosxom folks: there’s a blacklist plugin here.
MT People: there’s a blacklist plugin here.

:: Dave Walker 14:40 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (3)

Nice Hiphop / Downtempo Night Last Saturday

I met up with my good friends Dan and Matt Saturday at Harry’s Ballroom in the Cass Corridor. I go past that very corner every day on the way to work, but I’d never noticed the place. It’s located about midway between the Fox Theatre and Cass Tech.

The featured performers were :Brownstudy, a new hiphop project from Jason Hogans, who a few of you might recall from his excellent work on the Planet E label, and the Trüby Trio, who record for Compost. We had a great time. I’m really looking forward to :Brownstudy’s upcoming release — the music was really fantastic, forward looking stuff, really rhythmically inventive. Trüby Trio played a sort of 3-man tag team DJ set, lots of exploration in the intersection of NuJazz / broken beats / latin house. It really got the crowd moving. The crowd was also worth noting — it was a great ecelctic multi-culti blend reminiscent of an early 90’s Bankle Building crowd, before everything became 16-year-old suburban kids suckin’ on pacifiers.

:: Dave Walker 14:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

People I Saw Yesterday, But Dared Not Approach

in order of appearance

• The mouthy pregnant woman who verbally excoriated the older woman who had the temerity to sit down next to her on the completely full bus, even though she’d draped her less than svelte frame across both adjacent seats to discourage such a thing. After witnessing her (loudly, oh, so loudly) complain, in colorful, yet barely parseable language about this dread infraction, I wondered how miserable it must be to go through life with that much of a chip on your shoulder, and I said a silent prayer for the as yet unborn future victim of years of verbal abuse.
• The guy with the Jheri curl mullet.
• The woman with two small children, a boy (about 5) and a little blonde girl (about 6 or 7.) The woman and her son were walking towards and past me, the little girl was about 15 or 20 feet behind, on crutches. with her right leg extended in front of her. The woman told the boy he could pick something out when they got to the store, then yelled back at the little girl to “hurry up.” The girl looked a little wounded, then tried gamely to speed up her awkward three-legged pace. I felt a little part of her world die.

Please $UNIVERSAL_LIFEFORCE, more bad hairdos, and less people who scream at others over trivia.

:: Dave Walker 19:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/ruminations]
:: tags: ruminations

:: Comments (0)

OneOfUs, OneOfUs, OneOfUs…

Thinking, um, different.

:: Dave Walker 19:14 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/net]
:: tags: net

:: Comments (1)

The Day Emusic Died

Note: This is an edited version of a mailing list post I made earlier today. The subject is the downloadable music service Emusic, which (formerly) offered an all-you-can-download catalog of high-quality, legal MP3 music on independent labels for a very low price: $9.99/month. Today they informed their subscribers that they were moving to a much more restrictive set of subscription terms. On many occasions, I have raved about the value of the service.

I don’t mind the new price in theory — 25 cents a track is great — for an a la carte service. If they paired their current selection (assuming they retain their current label signings and continue signing new labels of equivalent quality and variety) with an intelligent buying interface like Apple’s or BuyMusic’s they could have a great specialist service for people like the ones who have been Emusic subscribers on this list. As it stands, though, the subscription service plans really break the service for someone like me. The album that really sold me on the service, my very favorite album from 2002, Ilkae’s Pistachio Island is impossible to download under the basic 40-track subscription plan. How messed up is that?

What Chris Prew said pretty much hits home for me:

“I’ll miss being able to download an entire album just because the band name was cool, etc.”

The new pricing structure (assuming I stick around — I haven’t decided yet) means I’ll only ever download sure things. There won’t be any more taking chances on outside-my-stock-genres stuff. I would never have downloaded Opeth’s _Blackwater Park_, Mono’s _One Step More And You Die_, all those wacky old Cantebury-school prog records on Voiceprint, all that cool skronky stuff on Atavistic, and dozens others I could list. The joy of immersing myself in the unfamiliar and discovering diamonds is gone, and I doubt I’ll ever see its like again. For me, it was never “let’s see how many metric tons of music I can download for $10 this month”, it was more like “it costs me next to nothing to maybe find my next favorite band or label. Let’s go clicky clicky through the new release list. Hey, Aaron really liked this hiphop record (queue). Stewart wrote nice things about this jazz disc (queue). Jeffrey and Roger dueted in the shower to this band (queue).”

Damn.

I’d heard of Merck before, but it took downloading the first 5 or so releases they posted on Emusic last year for me to realize how much I loved what the label was doing. Under the new plan, I’d download a couple of albums that are getting good reviews from the usual suspects, or new releases by proven bands, but where’s the fun in that?

:: Dave Walker 21:05 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Sometime I Love Teh Intarweb

• The One True Ruby
• Nixon’s Tapes. These should be available as MP3s or something, dontcha think?
• “No”, Cliff said to Lauren, “you think the other kids don’t like you just because you’re popular. They really hate you because you’re lousy.”
• “Clearly I have lost the plot…”
• Get legal arcade ROMs for your emulator. Mostly Atari classics, for now.

:: Dave Walker 17:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Everybody’s Doing It!

Dock porn.

Pinned bottom left. Low magnification.

Finder, Apple Mail, Safari, iTunes, Photoshop, SubEthaEdit, Address Book, Sherlock, Quicktime Player, Terminal | Home Folder, Downloads Folder, Trash

I actually do most of my app launching from the Terminal, thanks to this tip.

:: Dave Walker 00:14 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx]
:: tags: osx

:: Comments (1)

Killing a Mosquito With a 12-Gauge

After playing around with VoodooPad, which I quite like, I decided I’d register it and start using it as my personal organizer, so to speak. Then I thought a bit more and realized that, no matter how much I liked the app, that wasn’t going to work out very well. I don’t have a PowerBook (sob), and I’m primarily limited to Windows machines at work, and if I end up going mobile with a Hiptop or some other PDA then it’s inaccessible there, too. Then I realized — I have a webserver!

I looked at Alex King’s Tasks, which looks really good. But really, it’s not really the sort of thing I’d really use. I need something more freeform — I don’t really need all the alarms and “project 50% done” indicators and all that. What I really need is a virtual scratchpad where I can record semi-random stuff:

• things to pick up at the grocery store
• which libraries I need to download and install so app-xyz will compile
• what website had the walkthrough for level 16 of Aliens Eating Cheeseburgers III
• what the secretary on the fourth floor said her printer did when she plugged it into the Ethernet jack
• the notes for my review of the new Shaggs record

and a million other of the trivial details that fill my life. I’d been using VoodooPad for these sort of things, but, as mentioned above, it doesn’t travel with me so I needed something web based. I’ve grown fairly comfortable with Wiki -style editing, and I definitely love being able to create new pages basically “at the flick of the wrist” (by joining wiki-words), so I started to think: Why not just configure some proper WikiWikiWeb software? I already have AwkiAwki installed to serve my FAQ pages, but it’s not exactly feature-ful. I tried PurpleWiki as well, but had some problems setting it up (adding Perl modules on OS X usually involves invoking dark forces.) MoinMoin is powerful enough to have served the Atom project, and it was dead simple to set up at work (praise Jebus for the FreeBSD ports system), where I’m evaluating it as a possible internal tech-support mechanism, so I decided to try it here. Frankly, the installation was a pain in the ass (mostly my fault), but I got it working.

Anyway, I get full text searching and an index and stuff “for free.” I can see myself using it as an idea scratchpad for long blog entries, for the book about absolutely nothing I may write someday, and whatever else.

I’ve restricted it by IP address for now (Google, world, and dog don’t need my grocery list), so I can reach it from home, the office, and I figure any other place I might need to have access from in the future is just a SSH session away.

You don’t have to tell me that normal people don’t do this. Well, duh… Proudly without a life since at least 1985…

:: Dave Walker 21:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (1)

Ketchup Links

New for me, out-of-date for you…

• Dell’s FugliPod (a/k/a :the Digital Jukebox) via 2lmc, Sven, and Erik Barzeski. Still wondering how a computer company can take in billions of dollars in annual revenue and only divert about 50 cents worth of it into industrial design. Savages.
• This goes back a while, but Matt Dillon did a short evaluation of the small form-factor VIA-chipset motherboards and cases for use as small, lightweight, quiet, low-power home servers. I’m likely to go in that direction myself (using FreeBSD.) Putting this note here so the link will get indexed…
• A CCIA study takes on the (lack of) wisdom of trusting information infrastructure to a software monoculture (something I’ve been known to drone on about at length.) Saying what you really think can get you stomped, though.

:: Dave Walker 11:11 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Video - Love Will Freak Us

Oh my. Missy Elliot vs. Joy Division. This rocks with the power of a thousand suns. It’s a 22 MB Quicktime movie that you ought to grab before the lawyers show up.

:: Dave Walker 18:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Yes, yes! Name it Atom!

Morbus Iff (of Amphetadesk fame) has stirringly (and convincingly) argued that the name of the Pie/Echo/Necho/Atom syndication project is and should remain Atom. I think this is a wondrous idea — it stops a lot of sniping and pre-empts a lot of FUD, and it’s an acknowledgement of the de-facto state of affairs: namely this technology is Atom now, for better or for worse, and we should roll with it.

“NameFinalVote has already been done by the community, and they have chosen Atom.”

+1

:: Dave Walker 13:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (1)

OutKast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below [✯✯✯✯]

I’ve been marinating in the new OutKast 2-CD set for most of the day and for the most part I’m really enjoying it. At 39 songs (two hours and fifteen minutes), it’s doubtlessly too long for its own good, but the stronger tracks are completely fantastic. You’ve probably already heard “Hey Ya”, which is pretty much a shoo-in for single of the year, at least in the alternate universe where I hand out all of the Grammies. I’m finding I’m enjoying the set best when I let iTunes scramble the tracks so that the Big Boi and André 3000 tracks jumble together in a freeform fashion.

You can find videos here. They’re pretty good.

:: Dave Walker 20:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Too Rambly and Verbose To Be a Linkdump…

…not coherent enough to be a proper entry.

• An excellent, detailed love letter to (the satellite) Galileo, from the New Yorker. For all the criticism NASA gets from time to time, it’s good to read something like this and remind yourself why “rocket scientist” is a term of admiration.
• Sometimes the uninitiated demonstrate perfect clarity

  Tonight I had dinner with Jamie and his sister Margot. Somehow emacs came up, and since Margo is not that heavily involved with computers we had to explain what it was. Once we were done she said “I’m not a computer person, but even I can tell that’s stupid.”

  from Louis’ Ramblings

• Kimbro Staken’s Syncato looks really cool. Since the whole weblog system is basically a sophisticated query interface to an XML database, you can pull all sorts of wacky data into your entries, like so. Unfortunately, installation appears to be slightly more grueling than passing a basketball-sized kidney stone, so I’m going to pass on playing with it for a while. Maybe after I finish (start?) building my new fast, lightweight webserver (in a tiny, silent, energy efficient package, of course) and my DIY PVR/mediaserver and my Macquarium, new dog kennel, and… It’s times like these that I wish you could package some of these projects into some kind of big, friendly, furry statically linked fuzzball that you could drop in a directory and just point at with your webserver software.
• Certain folks’ weblogs (I’m not naming names) use the <meta http-equiv="refresh"> hack to refresh themselves every (x) minutes. Kinda obnoxious, don’t you think? I just noticed a certain not-to-be-named blog reloading itself in one of my tabs a few seconds ago. I’ve got a reload button in my browser and I know how to use it — let me choose when to take that (admittedly small, but present) CPU/bandwidth hit, mmmm-kay?
• Congratulations to Tony Shalhoub for winning the best actor Emmy award for Monk. It’s still one of my favorite shows, and even the curmudgeons at teevee.org agree that his performance is something special.

:: Dave Walker 21:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (1)

I’m Sure I’m Not Alone On This One

Whenever I’m browsing on a Wiki, “Jam On It” by Newcleus starts going through my head.

:: Dave Walker 11:31 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/net]
:: tags: net

:: Comments (2)

How Much Convenience Do You Want?

I was reading an entry on the Blosxom mailing list and I realized something (funny? embarassing?) about myself. I go out of my way to make certain technical tasks more difficult than they strictly need to be.

Here’s the post that started me thinking in this direction. Two listmembers immediately and helpfully posted links to plugins which will automagically handle graphic linking and sizing. Fine, I thought, I suppose I could use those plugins too, to simplify adding graphics to new posts… and then I stopped. I don’t want to use those plugins to make marking up graphics easier. I actually enjoy the process of:

1. Jacking a graphic from somewhere. If I can grab it using curl rather than some wimpy old web browser, all the better.
2. Running file and/or jpeginfo or tiffinfo to get the file’s dimensions, color depth, etc.
3. Running some hideously long chain of piped NetPBM and ImageMagick (built from source, naturally) commands against the downloaded file to size, smooth, sharpen, invert, crop, or whatever needs to happen to the graphic to make it fit.
4. Entering the <IMG> markup by hand, including the width, height, align and alt values, plus hspace and vspace, if necessary.

Now this is just crazy. I’m sitting in front of a Macintosh. I should be using Photoshop or GraphicConverter or whatever else to do this in 2.5 seconds. Instead, I’m busting out the man pages, typing command lines that sometimes wrap twice, and all the rest. Why on earth am I doing this? I’ve even got tools that will take closer-to-English wiki-ish and Textile markup and convert it to HTML automatically, yet here I sit in a text editor tagging this entry using no macros.

Why? Because, at some sad level, I like doing it this way. I can’t explain it. It makes no logical sense. I guess it’s some twisted reflection of the impulse that compels the fisherman to strike out to the lake at 5AM with a pole over his shoulder, rather than spending 2 minutes at the fish counter at the local market. Only the fisherman gets to spend time communing with nature, and I just end up making my wrists hurt a little more.

Of course I didn’t install the Blosxom automatic image plugins. That wouldn’t be sporting.

:: Dave Walker 18:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (1)

Saturday Morning Google News Cut and Paste Frenzy

• “Showtime has renewed Dead Like Me, a primetime series set in the afterlife, for a second season.” (link)
• “First music, then movies — now Internet file traders have tuned in to television, going online to download their favorite shows.” (link)
• “Less than 24 hours after first being detected, the Swen blended-threat worm picked up steam Friday, gained a foothold in the United States and the United Kingdom, and accounted for more than 35,000 interceptions by E-mail filtering firm MessageLabs.” (link)
• “Privacy advocates are warning that recent changes to the .com and .net database of domain names by VeriSign could violate the privacy of millions of Internet users, inadvertently sending confidential e-mail content and Web surfing data to VeriSign’s systems.” (link)
• “On Sunday, September 21, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft will end 14 years of exploration in spectacular fashion: by crashing into Jupiter.” (link)

I’m contemplating a links sub-blog, or maybe a rolling b-link sidebar. Still playing with design ideas.

:: Dave Walker 09:40 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

1939 World’s Fair home movie

As a followup last week’s World’s Fair post, I stumbled across a home movie someone shot at the 1939 New York fair (think Trylon and Perisphere.) It comes from the Prelinger Archive, a huge archive of freely available video files hosted at the Internet Archive.

:: Dave Walker 09:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Arrrrr

Ahoy, mateys! Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, so ye scurvy dogs had best be honoring the event or I’ll keelhaul ye. Arrrrr!

:: Dave Walker 08:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/international]
:: tags: international

:: Comments (0)

Space Station Crew Photographs of Hurricane Isabel

There are a few more breathtaking images available from the Johnson Space Center (including a really high-res version of the picture to the right.) It’s so pretty from above, and such a bastard up close. Good luck to those of you on the U.S. east coast.

:: Dave Walker 16:52 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

F**kin’ Internet

note — to simulate the appropriate degree of bile, read the following items with a strong Mancunian accent

Two things:

1. There’s a zero-day OpenSSH exploit. I suggest locking down sshd (or just disabling it for now, if that’s workable) to strictly trusted IPs until vendors get their ducks in a row and we can all patch our shit.
2. Verisign breaks DNS. This is really quite evil. Every non-resolvable .com or .net address now returns a Verisign ad instead of the proper “no such domain” response. This is seriously broken behavior, and will actually cause failures in real world scripts, applications, and spam filters.

:: Dave Walker 16:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (0)

A Little More Night Sky

I may just be imagining this, but it seems that, since the blackout, the street lights in our area have been dialed back, just a bit. I have no way of objectively measuring this, but it seems that the street lights may be as much as 25% dimmer. In any event, the night sky has been much nicer in the neighborhood over the past few weeks. We’ve had decent views of Mars for pretty much the whole time, and last night / this morning I was able to count at least 5 stars in Orion’s scabbard. I’m used to seeing none at all there — we would generally only get the brightest outlining stars of that constellation. These are all naked-eye observations — I don’t have a telescope (yet.) I never bothered because our light pollution was so bad.

I sure hope this “kinder gentler” nighttime lighting is here to stay.

:: Dave Walker 08:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Ford and Linux on the Desktop

Looks like Ford is going to be doing something with Linux desktops (via the Reg and /.). I am actually drooling (drooling, I say!) when I think about the all the Ford-dependent Windows-based automotive suppliers in the Detroit area who are going to need some *nix-savvy consulting as this happens. cha-ching!

:: Dave Walker 18:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all]
:: tags: all

:: Comments (0)

Funbundle Plus Plus

• This looks interesting. Apparently there’s stubbed-out encryption support in iChat.
• My eyes! It’s like 1994 threw up all over Netscape 3. (via Davezilla)
• Good friend Matt MacQueen hosted Interdimensional Transmissions label head and Ectomorph main man BMG on his radio show the other night. BMG did quite a fascinating DJ set, using Ableton’s Live software to slice and dice all kinds of dance music, from the distant past to the present. Live is definitely the thing that’s going to get me on the laptop bandwagon.
• Serialism, Minimalism, 12-tone rows, and lots of other ways to get your longhair on. I listened to a couple of the episodes over the weekend.
• PersonalWiki is desktop WikiWiki software for OS X. I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know whether it’s as elegant as VoodooPad.

:: Dave Walker 17:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

World’s Fairs and Expos

The Internet enables many different types of obsessions. Some of them are even healthy, or at least harmless. Perhaps the most rewarding of these is the ability to “drill down” into some field of knowledge of which you have only the slightest pre-existing familiarity. I went on one of those adventures this evening, and just for kicks I’ll share a bit of what I found. Today I learned about World’s Fairs.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 02:22 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/books]
:: tags: books

:: Comments (2)

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-039

Buffer Overrun In RPCSS Service Could Allow Code Execution (824146)

Originally posted: September 10, 2003

Summary

Who should read this bulletin: Users running Microsoft ® Windows ®

Impact of vulnerability: Three new vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could enable an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user’s system.

Maximum Severity Rating: Critical

Recommendation: System administrators should apply the security patch immediately

End User Bulletin:
An end user version of this bulletin is available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms03-039.asp.

:: Dave Walker 10:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/win32/pys]
:: tags: pys

:: Comments (0)

Sometimes My Arms Bend Back

• I do my worky stuff here now. The usual blogging disclaimers apply. I will say that the building is beautiful — it’s a 7-story Depression-era building designed by Albert Kahn, with history peeking from every corner.
• The Law (and Order) of Diminishing Returns: CBS is launching a third CSI franchise in yet another city.
• The Timeless Template: “You dab your eyes at the end and wonder what is so wrong about the love of a lesbian for a dinosaur.” (link)
• The Pixies reunion rumor from a few weeks back has been confirmed. (or has it?) As one of the (minority of?) listeners who loved the Pixies to death but never much rated Frank Black solo, and even less so the Breeders, I have high hopes. I only got to see the Pixies once, opening for Love and Rockets at the State Theater in Detroit. Much ILM wailing and gnashing of teeth here.
• Weather forecasts via RSS. I’ve been (kinda) waiting for something like this (I was even looking at the feasibility of writing some (gack) XSLT to hack a feed from weather.com’s web services API; thank God I came to my senses, minimal as they may be. I haven’t watched the feed for long enough to know if it’s truly useful or not, but I like that someone’s working along these lines.

:: Dave Walker 21:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (2)

QTVR Volcano Eruption

Pretty freaking amazing Quicktime VR panoramas of an erupting volcano. My friend Jim and I played around with QTVR panoramas about 5 years or so ago, back when I was with RTS, and they’re a lot of fun to make, even with the very crude equipment and software we had to work with at the time. (This was back in the days when doing QTVR meant wrestling with MPW and some decidedly dodgy Applescripts.)

:: Dave Walker 16:12 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Peeve: Horn-blowers

I’m sitting in my living room, with all the doors and windows open, because it’s frankly a beautiful day. The breeze is blowing across my face, the sun is high in the sky, my dog’s asleep and I’m a million miles away from it all… and then some mouth-breather in a rolling barge pulls in front of the house three doors down and leans on their car horn. For a long time. They wait a few seconds, then they lean on the horn again. They get no response, so they pull their land-barge away from the house. I give them the nastiest glare allowed by law as they drive off.

Here’s a thought: slowly lower the greasy Doritos from your lips, get your fat, lazy, American ass out of the muthafuggin’ car, walk the five or ten meters to the front of the house and knock on the door. There, now, that didn’t kill you, did it?

:: Dave Walker 14:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (1)

Sundays Are Like Mondays

• A very happy (quarter-life)+1 birthday to Sven.
• Joe Gregorio talks about some interesting possibilities for content editing (including Wikis) using the forthcoming Atom API, based on a conversation on IRC.
• Human or replicant? Highly amusing: a San Francisco magazine administers the Voight-Kampff test to the city’s mayoral candidates. Most fail.
• New York Times article on spyware from a few days ago. Not a whole lot of new information, but it does have some fairly interesting bits, like an estimate that about half of Windows PCs have some form of spyware installed. There’s some self-serving defense of the practice from places you’d expect, like Gator’s marketing arm. It also mentions that a lot of people who keep their antivirus software up-to-date are surprised to find spyware on their boxes, mistakenly assuming that the AV software blocks all threats to their PC’s health.

:: Dave Walker 12:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Recipe: Pan-Grilled Garlic Steak

By no stretch of the imagination am I a great cook. I have a fairly limited repetoire, but I do have a small set of really tasty, foolproof dishes that work pretty well in most any circumstance. I’ve decided I ought to note them here and there, for the sake of the folks out there Googlecooking.

Obviously, when possible, charcoal grilling is the optimal method for preparing steaks. There are times, due to weather or convenience, or whatever, that you might wish to prepare your meat on the rangetop. This dish is not healthy, but it is tasty.

Quantity	Ingredient	Notes
1 or more	halfway-decent beef steaks	New York Strip work great — anything reasonably tender should work
1/2 tablespoon	butter or olive oil	do not use margarine
2 cloves (more or less)	fresh garlic	finely minced
1/4 teaspoon	salt	to taste
1/4 teaspoon	pepper	to taste
1/4 teaspoon	meat tenderizer	if necessary

Rub the steaks with the salt, pepper, and tenderizer approximately 30-60 minutes before cooking. Mince the garlic cloves finely with a sharp knife or food processor. Melt the butter in a non-stick or iron skillet, add the minced garlic. Lightly toast the garlic in the butter over moderate heat, evenly coating the surface of the pan. Place the steaks in the pan over low heat. Turn the steaks frequently to evenly distribute the garlic flavor over the surface of the steaks. Sauté the steaks to desired doneness. If desired, quickly sauté chopped onions and/or mushrooms in the beef/garlic drippings over high heat — it’s good to leave a little crunch in them. Serve with fresh corn on the cob or potato. Approximate prep time: 45 minutes (or less — you can cheat on the tenderization time if your meat’s good enough), serves as many people as you have steaks.

:: Dave Walker 17:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/foodanddrink/recipe]
:: tags: recipe

:: Comments (4)

Epitaph (including March For No Reason and Tomorrow And Tomorrow)

…in the Court of the Crimson One-Liners

• Fall 2003 US prime-time TV season premiere dates. Worth a bookmark.
• Wired looks at the Universal Music Group price cut.
• Sars-like viruses found in China — “Fears that animals carrying Sars-like viruses could trigger another outbreak have been heightened by a testing programme.”
• A New York Times article about the pizza delivery man who was killed by a bomb in a bizarre incident last week.
• Push-button bugle to play taps at military funerals.
• And, oh yeah, patch yo’ shit.

:: Dave Walker 10:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

UMG Cuts CD Prices

Could this be? Some sort of positive action from the record labels, instead of the usual complaining about filesharing and tossing subpoenas around? The next question is whether the other majors (and indies?) will follow UMG as far as cutting prices. I would think that they almost have to. One interesting point — UMG cut their wholesale price by $3, but they’re pushing a $6 lower SRP, which means they’re expecting resellers to hop on board and cut their margins, too.

In other music news, George made a big splash with his test of whether the right of first sale still exists with commercial music downloads.

:: Dave Walker 09:46 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

My left wrist is sore (uh-oh…)

• I’d like to wish a very Happy Birthday to my aunt, Betty Ann Kelly. She’s my Dad’s big sister.
• I notice that all of the “exhibition entries” in the ReUSEIT! design contest sport blue, underlined links. Heh.
• I didn’t know RuPaul had a blog.
• Burning Man 2003 postmortem. A more cynical take.
• I love a good d___ joke as much as the next person. (NSFW)

:: Dave Walker 10:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

More Fun Than A Barrel of Monkeys

Yay, a new toy.
Geekier than normal content follows. Mom, you should skip to the next entry.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 22:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

This Vale Of Tears

It’s late 2003. Do you know where your web developers are?

Here is the error message you get if you try to access a video on Yahoo’s Launch service running a Webkit or Gecko-based browser on a Macintosh. Here is the error message you get if you try to access a video using Internet Explorer on a Macintosh. Here is my response to Yahoo’s Launch.

The Metro Times brings the snark. Nice.

And so, to the people of Detroit — all 2.1 million of you — News Hits offers an admiring pat on the head. The world, apparently, is in awe because you were able to go nearly 48 hours without lights and, blessed with the benefit of having a broad-shouldered hip-hopper in firm command, somehow managed to keep from burning this city to the ground. Big props all around, y’all.

“When cyberpunk wasn’t over, I had a lot of Joy Division albums, on Factory vinyl.” - William Gibson (+)

Ken Kutargi says that the Playstation 3 will play both PS2 and PS1 games. Cool. Though I never thought it was a feature I’d use much, I’ve often found myself playing some silly little PS1 game on my PS2, and of course you can find dirt cheap old PS1 games in discount shops and yard sales across the land.

:: Dave Walker 21:16 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

It’s been raining for the last 7 hours

…which pretty much puts a (literal) damper on folks’ Labor Day barbecues and picnics. Ah well, there’s always this stiff-backed chair and the toxic glow of my monitor screen. My dog doesn’t even want to go outside to do her, um, business.

• Various free classic books in PDF form. I don’t think there are any books here that you can’t already get from Project Gutenberg, but these are nice because they’re already nicely formatted for printing or reading on a PDA or eBook reader.
• This is so weird. (Investigators Probe Bizarre Bomb Death of Pizza Man) It sounds like something you’d see on CSI.
• Okay, I’m betting Duke Nukem Forever ships first. Maybe that’s for the best.

:: Dave Walker 21:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (1)

Clear and Present

• Universal apparently screwed up the transfer of the new Monty Python’s Meaning of Life DVD. Yuck. Thanks to Mickey for the heads up.
• Keeping the world safe from fearsome script kiddies is dangerous business. Count the chins on this guy— I’m figuring at least 3 and a half.

• Zeinfeld: What makes you think that Bill (Gates) does not read Slashdot?

  dipipanone: His money. If *you* had all those billions in the bank, would you be sitting here reading this drivel?

  Gleng: Yes, but wearing a top hat and a monocle. (+)

• Curses-based RSS reader for *nix, for those times when a GUI just isn’t an option. Small makefile tweak required for compilation on BSDs.
• IRC client for OS X that borrows iChat’s interface. No DCC support (yet.)

:: Dave Walker 15:38 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Hello Dubuque! Are you ready to rock?!?

• If even the corporations who shower us with screenful after screenful of legal gibberish can’t be arsed to read them and comply, why then should consumers be held to them? A tale of woe from a guy with a new Dell.

  She looked up the call log to get the background info. She insists she doesn’t have copies of the agreements, and that I’m supposed to go online and look them up myself. (?!) She says to use a public computer if I have to. I ask how to know what companies have software on my disk. She goes away for a bit, and says she doesn’t have that information, and there’s nothing they can do. [And there’s no supervisor available.] She asks why I don’t want to agree to the license. I explain I haven’t *seen* it. She says “it just says you won’t copyright any of the files”. I ignore the mistake, and explain that licensing agreements are long, long documents that say much more than that, and that anyway, the screen says that I have to have *read* it.

• Snakes and gerbils (but no lions, tigers or bears, oh my!): This isn’t rocket science, but apparently most people think that Google operates by loading up your page in IE and taking screenshots.
• The Devil’s Dictionary, 2.0. Heh.
• Rolling Stones: Sympathy For The Devil—(Neptunes Remix)
• Mike Brown reminisces about a long-gone favorite wrecka-stow, and and tries to find the proprietor. (speaking of which — Bryan Caillouette, if you’re out there, drop me a line.)
• Today’s fun I Love Music thread.

:: Dave Walker 09:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (8)

Site trivia

Not blogging about blogging, but blogging about under the hood site arcana, which is probably just as bad…

There are two changes — one’s a bug fix and the other is an efficiency increase (maybe.) (205 words)

See more …

:: Dave Walker 13:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

My Head Hurts

• More in the patch yo’ shit department. (via mjb)
• God knows I love the BBC, and I realize that it’s the license fees of British citizens that finance it (thanks guys — seriously — can I get you folks anything? Pringles, lemonade, baby back ribs? I’ll even forgive you guys for sending Simon Cowell over. Just say the word…), so it worries me a bit that some folks want to clip its wings a bit. The real reason I’m mentioning this is to link to the MeFi thread, which has deep links to all kinds of swellegant content on the Beeb’s site that I never knew existed.
• Sven pretty much nails it, concerning Hydra’s new name. SubEthaEdit. Sigh. I’m guessing that this Windows IRC client was the source of the name conflict. I like the fact that it pays tribute to Douglas Adams, but I hate the fact that it’s so hard to say. Guys, you never place two vowel sounds next to each other in a trade name. I like the new RSS feed, though.
• The Neptunes record is a little uneven, but the high points (e.g. the Clipse tracks, “Frontin’”, “Loser”, ODB’s track, and all those impossibly crisp bass and drum sounds) are sonic treats.
• If anyone cares, you can find my NetNewsWire stylesheet here. If you want the fancy classed links with the teeny icons (they work with my feeds, Todd Larason’s, and a few others — I wish more folks would use them — then copy the icons from here) I cribbed a little bit from everywhere, but it works for me.

:: Dave Walker 23:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Blackadder

Speaking of the BBC, for the next few days (probably until Saturday AM, UK time) there’s an audio documentary on the great comedy Blackadder. Go listen before it turns into a pumpkin! (via Neil Gaiman’s Journal)

:: Dave Walker 19:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/tv]
:: tags: tv

:: Comments (0)

Johnny Cash - ‘Hurt’ [✯✯✯✯✯]

I don’t know how long this has been out there, but I just stumbled upon it today — a video of Johnny Cash performing Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” If you can make it all the way through this one with a dry eye, you’re a much stronger man than I. Devastating.

:: Dave Walker 08:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (8)

Monday Linkcrawl

• It feels a little like piling on, but hell, it’s all over Slashdot and Blogdex so here you are. As I’ve said before, I think the real issue is the monoculture, but explaining that one takes longer than a second and a half and so… ooh shiny, what were you saying again?
• A thoughtful take on the BBC archive announcement.
• A read-only (for now) NTFS filesystem for Darwin. Cool. I don’t have an immediate use for this, but I can think of quite I few situations where it would be a good thing to have.
• I’ve never plugged these guys before, and I should, because they put out good stuff. They’re an electronic MP3 label, and some really talented folks (including Ilkae, Lackluster, and Md) have released stuff there. You can get the whole Monotonik catalog via BitTorrent (which I believe is a first), plus the Internet Archive also mirrors their music. Try the new Fictions and Fires EP by Crashed By Car. Besides, as a good friend of mine likes to say, “Free?!? You just can’t f*** with free!”
• Jenny-J passes along an interesting obituary. Pretty good, but I can’t agree that it’s the best obituary ever. This is the Best. Obituary. Ever.

:: Dave Walker 09:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (3)

Dead Like Me, Insomniac [✯✯✯✯]

I don’t write about television much here, because, generally, it’s only marginally more interesting than the most boring blog topic — blogging about blogging (shudder.) I’m going to break one of my self-imposed rules and talk about a couple of TV programs that I really enjoy.

The first is a program that’s relatively new. It started airing on Showtime earlier this summer. It’s called Dead Like Me (site), and follows the adventures of a recently undead young adult as she pursues her afterlife career, as a Grim Reaper. I’ve watched almost all of the episodes, despite my not being a Showtime subscriber (hint: the Darknet is your friend), and I’ve really become a big fan.

The genius of Dead Like Me is how mundane they’ve made the day-to-day business of collecting souls. The protagonist, young George (Georgia) Lass, isn’t some sort of undead superhero bristling with eldritch powers and mystical knowledge. Instead, she’s a low-level, socially awkward entry worker who’s been given the bare minimum amount of information she needs to get her job done. Grim Reaping doesn’t even provide a salary, so she and her fellow reapers work part-time jobs and run scams to provide for their un-living expenses. The writers have gone in quite an unexpected direction as far as setting up the world these Reapers function in. Where they might have been expected to build up an elaborate mythology (as with Buffy or the X-Files), they’ve deliberately kept the backstory minimal. Like George, the viewers are given only the barest information about how the business of the dead and their souls works. The Reapers receive their daily assignments on ordinary Post-It notes in the morning, while eating breakfast at a very thinly disguised Pannekoeken Huis, then go on about their business. For George, this means working at Happy Time Temporary Services, for others it means working as meter maids or as petty thieves.

Another favorite of mine is Insomniac, on Comedy Central. It’s a really minimal show (do you sense a theme here?) It essentially just consists of the host, Dave Attell, staying up all night in various cities, crawing from pub to pub, stopping in at oddball all-night businesses, and chatting with the locals. It must cost all of 50 cents to make, but theres an amiable, goofy charm to the whole affair. Host Attell is a very funny guy, quick with a quip, but never meanspirited. It’s amazing to me how much more interesting I find this show than all of the tiresomely over-conceptualized “reality” programming that overwhelms the airwaves every summer.

:: Dave Walker 17:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/tv]
:: tags: tv

:: Comments (0)

Testing HyperEdit

I’m playing around with HyperEdit, a new WebKit-savvy text editor that does a couple of cool things of note. Like Hydra, you can preview HTML via a fast, correct renderer. What’s new to HyperEdit is the ability to take advantage of your installed JavaScriptCore and PHP engines as well — I imagine this would be a killer feature if I worked in either of those languages. You can also attach external CSS to the HTML file you’re editing — for example, I’m editing this in HyperEdit’s window and it’s previewing with a local copy of blog’s stylesheet (I want this feature in Hydra.) Though I haven’t tried it yet, there’s apparently a way to reverse the process so that you can watch stylesheet changes affect an HTML file in real-time (that could be really, really handy if you’re contemplating a redesign, I imagine.)

It definitely shows promise, though it currently lacks the polish of a Hydra or a TextWrangler. It insists on controlling the file extension, for example — if you’re in HTML mode, you have to save the file with an HTML extension. My weblog entries are all have to end in .txt, that’s how Blosxom decides whether to render them or not, so I’d have to do a manual rename if I used HyperEdit to edit them. There are a dozen other little annoyances on this scale — none of them a show-stopper in isolation, but cumulatively enough to keep me firmly in the Hydra camp for now. Still, I’m intrigued, and I find myself agreeing more and more with John Gruber that Webkit is the big behind-the-scenes story in the Mac world this year.

:: Dave Walker 17:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

When the end comes I know, I’ll be just a gigolo — life goes on without me

And on with the morning news hoover:

• Alan Connor smites word snobs: Blog is a perfectly cromulent word: This is what dictionaries do. (via 2lmc)
• Another look at the risks presented by the current operating system monoculture. (via 2lmc)
• When even the tabloids catch on to your pump & dump scheme, it’s safe to say the gig is up: “At software company SCO Group, insiders sold $1.3 million worth of shares - which raised eyebrows because the company is embroiled in a nasty legal dispute with IBM and others.” (New York Post)
• Um, wow. Does this mean that classic episodes of things like Monty Python, The Prisoner, Red Dwarf, and the like will be available as free, unencumbered downloads? That would be, as we say in Ecorse, the whip. I’m sure there are a myriad of licensing issues, but this could be huge. (via Scripting News)
• Sasha Frere-Jones leads a major offensive from one side of the trench warfare between the two major strains of pop music criticism. (via I Love Music)

:: Dave Walker 10:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

The LJ Times

This is beautiful, in its own, cracked, way. Steven Frank has written a script that takes random LiveJournal post headings and combines them with actual wire service photos to create a surreal newspaper front page. He wrote about doing it manually the other day (be sure to check the linked screenshot, for deep, deep giggling.)

:: Dave Walker 20:39 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Lyrical Backdrops

Reading this really nice explication (thanks, 2lmc) of Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” makes me realize two things:

1. To enjoy a really well-written pop song, you needn’t know every detail behind it
2. Knowing at least a bit of the background can, in some cases, give you an extra appreciation of the song

In this spirit, I offer a little extra background for the White Stripes song “Hotel Yorba.” If you’ve never visited Detroit, then there’s probably no image in your head that would distinguish the actual Hotel Yorba from any other lodging — say, your typical Howard Johnson’s or Holiday Inn. The thing to know, though, is that the real Hotel Yorba is nothing like either of these places. The real Hotel Yorba is a ten story or so building situated on in southwest Detroit, just a few blocks away from the Greyhound bus station and not far from the Ambassador Bridge (which connects Detroit to Windsor, Canada.)

The Hotel Yorba, it must be said, is not a 4-star hotel. You will most assuredly not find it in the Michelin guide. Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a flop house. Though I’ve only ever been inside it once, and then for only a few minutes about 5 years ago, my impression was of the type of place you’ll find in the poorer areas in every large American city. It’s the sort of place where folks who don’t have a realistic chance of scaring up enough money at any one time to afford the standard 2½ 1/2 months rent you need to lease an apartment pay for a room a day or a week at a time. The people who live in these places are thrown together for various reasons — un- or under- employment, infirmity, drug problems, or maybe just plain bad luck.

Embedded deep in the psyche of just about every Detroiter is concept of “up north.” Detroit is located pretty near the southern border of the state of Michigan. As a general rule, the further north you go in the state, the less populous it becomes. Hence, since the early days of the auto industry, it has always been a status symbol among the striving classes to own vacation land “up north”. The further north the better, and if you can manage your own cottage (or even better, a vacation home with lake frontage), then you are well and truly blessed, with status to spare among your fellow toiling wage-slaves. Folks toil for decades at jobs they hate, squirreling funds away to afford that “up north” land, ideally with a color-coordinated boat. For those at the lower end of the income scale, this yearning is very nearly an unattainable fairy tale.

“Hotel Yorba” is a cool enough song in its own right, but I think knowing this little extra bit of background puts tension and release in the lyrics into sharper relief.

:: Dave Walker 15:48 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (1)

100 Degrees Fahrenheit in the U.K.

I guess today was the hottest day on record in London, at 100 degrees F (37.9 degrees C.) While scientifically the Celsius scale of course makes a lot more sense, it’s events like this that serve to remind why the Fahrenheit scale retains its adherents in the English-speaking world — in human terms, its milestones tend to occur at more dramatic intervals. The cutover between “really unpleasantly hot” and “damn, really unbearably dangerous to children, animals, and the elderly” happens around the same point where the Fahrenheit scale adds that crucial extra digit. That’s got to count for something. Likewise, when the Fahrenheit scale hits 0 degrees , you know that you’re dealing with some serious cold. In Michigan, when the Celsius scale hits zero, it just means it’s time to break out the sweaters.

Anyway, as is customary when momentous events overtake us, it’s appropriate to fall back on the words of those more learned than ourselves. Therefore, in the words of the immortal Mark E. Smith:

British People In Hot Weather
as performed by the Fall, from the album Extricate

Fill green envelopes and send them to ya
On train ride, read Marx tracts
Play walkmans loud behind ya
Demonstrate on Oxford Street
About what the Hell they couldn’t tell ya
British people in hot weather
Have a heart-to-heart with your sister
People in shorts drunk before ya
Beached whale in Wapping
His armpit hairs are sprouting
Serpentine ah…. Serpentine grrr…
British people in hot weather

Press hot houses waste tree statements
Compare your pearls before the King of Monks
I’m telling ya, oh
Do they know they can get cancer?
Designer tramp goes grrr…
Looking jolly from Stoke
As he walks through and makes up
Titles like this, to order
They’re well off their trolley
Smoking like a chimney
Bespectacled stare-out
British people in hot weather

I was a candidate for club 18-30
but I’ve been through all that shit before
British people in hot weather
That’s it, I’m looking straight for the car
If that’s how you feel, let’s go
British people in hot weather

:: Dave Walker 15:05 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/international]
:: tags: international

:: Comments (0)

Master Blaster

(sigh)
(this)
(that)
(the other)

:: Dave Walker 14:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/win32]
:: tags: win32

:: Comments (0)

Wherein D.W. Clears Out His Aggregator and Link Stickies

• Here’s a pretty darned funny look at the videogame “console wars.” via Slashdot
• Paul Boutin at Slate writes about the fab, stylish home generator to have ready at the house in time for the next power grid failure. via Gizmodo
• Mark Pilgrim has an example REST implementation of Atom’s API available for perusal. Looking it over, I’m pretty much a caveman reading up on particle physics, but hey, it’s good to see it out there.
• Power Mac G5s actually start shipping today. (Apple press release) I don’t have a PayPal link here, so if you’re feeling really appreciative of the service I provide…
• Some neat observations about old records on vinyl and beatmixing from Kent Williams. There was a time about 5-10 years ago when I was seriously playing with the idea of investing in a pair of 1200s and trying to learn how to mix, but the necessary combination of time, resolve, and toy-fund money never happened. I haven’t looked at the new generation of tools (Traktor, Final Scratch, etc.) in any detail, but they sound like fun.
• Merck is one of my very favorite current labels, so I’m very happy that they’re an Emusic signee. I just downloaded a bunch of new things, from Lackluster, Adam Johnson, Esem, and Blamstrain, and they’re all up to the high standards I expect from the label.
• A brutally overlong but occasionally funny and accurate illustrated compedium of the personality types you tend to find in mailing list and forum flamewars. via Don Park
• Steven Frank crystallizes the wireless experience to its very essence: “So, the P800 remains a mystery, but at least for now I can check my email every 5 seconds like a hamster with a pellet button, which is of course the main thing.”

:: Dave Walker 14:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (8)

Wesley Willis Passes Away At 40

I am saddened to hear that Wesley Willis has passed away from leukemia complications. He was truly one of a kind. At one office where I worked, it was a ritual for us to play “Rock & Roll McDonalds” every day at lunchtime.

:: Dave Walker 14:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/obits]
:: tags: obits

:: Comments (1)

More One-Liners

• George notes that tonight is the premiere of Smoking Gun TV.
• A Warren Zevon update.
• (a few days old) Bruce Perens tidily deflates SCO.
• Heehee: “Well, yeah. God was punishing us with that blackout. You can’t put that many mullets in one place and not expect God to throw down.”
• Please go patch yo’ shit so the rest of us don’t have to hear about it later.

:: Dave Walker 12:13 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Email Viruses

Whenever I hear about some email bug or another that is supposedly raging across the universe, I observe the same phenomenon. The Exchange-based corporate networks I have accounts on are swamped to the point of near-unusability, at least until their virus definition strings are updated, primarily by users on these networks opening attachments indiscriminately, despite being warned almost continuously by IT departments not to do so. The free-email service I use for disposable communications (this account is ordinarily spammed mercilessly, of course, as I’ve used the address on Usenet and in web forms everywhere) attracts a few copies of the virus du jour, almost certainly from spammers’ machines that have been infected.

Most interestingly, the third category of accounts, the locally hosted ones I maintain myself and which I use for most of my personal mail (both formal and informal) almost never get any copies of these viruses. From this, I can only draw one conclusion: my close associates (personal and professional) who have these addresses in their address books aren’t morons. Cool. I love all y’all (but not I Love You, which would be the subject line of a message you’d probably receive from me if I were a moron.)

:: Dave Walker 08:39 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (0)

This is funny to me on so many levels, only some of them public.

Remind me to revisit this entry in a month or so…

“Well the internet was designed to survive a Atomic war..so that the remaining military bases can download pornography.” - Jake of 8bitjoystick.com (+)

:: Dave Walker 17:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/net]
:: tags: net

:: Comments (0)

This just in

Some fuckwit on the radio is implying that this outage may have had something to do with the MS Blaster worm. Media outlets require that anyone dispensing medical or legal advice be qualified before they let them talk about such matters on the air. Why do they let any baboon with a pulse pontificate on computer issues?

:: Dave Walker 13:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

Lit

Our power was restored at about 1:25.

:: Dave Walker 13:35 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

An extinguished light at the end of the tunnel?

I just heard on the radio that power has been restored for 130,000 of the 2.1 million DTE Energy (link currently down, as I suppose it ought to be) customers. We cooked all of the food in the fridge that we could; the dog’s getting a lot of it. It’s drizzling outside, and it would be nice if it cooled things down, but it’ll probably only make it more humid.

:: Dave Walker 13:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

Stone-Aging

Well, this sucks. I’m writing this entry in longhand, medieval monk-stylee (including markup!) hot and bored and I’ve got a pen. It’s unfortunate that this big blackout happens to coincide with the hottest, most humid week of the summer. Of course there’s no air-conditioning, but there aren’t any fans, either, which is pretty hardcore. The heat means that my usual unplugged activities, like cycling, are less pleasant than usual, but it’s something to do. I’ve got about $4 in my wallet, and the ATMs are all powered off. That’s not too much of a big deal, as there’s nowhere to spend money anyway (including that usual hot summer fallback, the air-conditioned movie theater.)

Last night was pretty wild and wooly. It was really, really dark here in the neighborhood. On the plus side, that meant that we could actually see some stars in the night sky. That doesn’t normally happen around here, as we have pretty-much noonday skies around here most nights — light pollution is horrible here. The area is dramatically overlit, sodium-vapor lights everywhere, a pretty regrettable state of affairs for anyone who enjoys the night sky. Well, that wasn’t a problem last night. On the downside, a few area idiots decided that the cover of darkness was a great excuse for doing all manner of dumb shit. Someone actually ran between our house and the house next door, apparently running from the cops. My doggie, who is quite a gentle sweetheart, but, like most, also, very territorial. I don’t know if she took a nip at him or not, but she definitely barked bloody murder and certainly scared the crud out of him. According to one neighbor, the cops caught him and <hearsay>beat the shit out of him</hearsay>. Another set of neighbors decided that last night was a good time to start screaming and chasing each other up and down the side street. Sigh.

:: Dave Walker 12:17 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

Blackout

Power lost at 4:11. Bleargh. Powering down the UPS.

:: Dave Walker 16:11 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

Short Quotes, in Isolation

• Steven Frank: “The series of dull thuds you hear in the background are merely my head gently caressing the wall.”
• Erik Barzeski: “So you qualify for an “I Survived Gigli” t-shirt.”
• strongo hulkington: “music isn’t a series of binary oppositions.”
• William Gibson: “As someone else points out, I’m not experientially qualified to describe what it feels like to be a woman either, but I persist in doing that as well.”
• William Safire, via Spiro Agnew: “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

:: Dave Walker 18:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

List of Pie/Echo/Atom Resources

The Atom engineering effort is, as people following the evolution of the spec probably already know, centered in a Wiki that lives at http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/FrontPage. There are several lesser known places to pick up project information, too. What follows is a list of most of the major sites of information of which I’m currently aware.

• The wiki. The epicenter of development. Can be an intimidating place thanks to its size and sprawl. It’s being worked on.
• Formerly Echo, following the development of the syndication framework formerly known as Echo. A weblog that provides “one-stop shopping” for events in the Atom development community. If you only have time to follow a single resource but still want to keep half an eye on the development of the format, this is the site bookmark or subscribe to in your aggregator.
• The Atom Syntax mailing list. “The atom-syntax mailing list is for developing a syntax for Atom (as compared to talking about its motivation).” Lots of nuts and bolts implementation discussion happens here.
• #echo on irc.freenode.net. A good place to hang out if you want to chat with some of the developers in real-time. Also, the place where “wiki gardening” is hashed out — discussions of major refactorings in the Atom wiki space happen here (see the Wiki or Formerly Echo to see when these events are scheduled.)
• Two (current) snaps up:
  • A draft of the current Atom API (draft 7)
  • A snapshot of the syndication format (0.2)
• This list is (obviously) not all-inclusive. I’ll add additional links as I find them, or if you know of a significant one that’s missing, point it out in the comments.

:: Dave Walker 10:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

:: Comments (1)

This Is Not My Beautiful Car

Full disclosure: a longtime family friend, Nathaniel Elem, is running against this person in the upcoming city council primary. Even if he weren’t running, I’d post it anyway, ‘cuz it brings teh funny.

---

DEFENDERS, KAREN DREW: “Hi, I’m Karen Drew from Channel 4. I wanted to talk to you about you parking here illegally by the fire hydrant.”

MILLER: “Who’s parking illegally?”

DREW: “You are.”

MILLER: “I don’t understand.”

DREW: “Is that your vehicle?”

MILLER: “I have no comment.”

:: Dave Walker 12:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

Firewater

The first three Firewater albums didn’t really do it for me. Oh sure, I loved the concept — Tod A. (ex-Cop Shoot Cop) leads a post-everything indie band (including ex-Soul Coughing drum god Yuval Gabay) that bends boundaries, roping in influences from everything from punk to klezmer to show tunes, but the idea always seemed to beat the execution. I’m happy to say that their fourth album, the Man on the Burning Tightrope, finally lives up to the initial interest I had when I first heard of the band. I haven’t looked at the lyrics enough to know whether or not it’s a concept album per se, but theres a sonic unity to it that suggests it might be.

:: Dave Walker 10:06 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

• Flash mobs (no, you don’t get any links)
• Internet Explorer
• Governing California
• The Department of Homeland Security (sic)
• The SCO Group

:: Dave Walker 19:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Jon Alan Falkenburg

Congratulations are in order for Dave and Michele Falkenburg, who became parents today at 1:44 PM Pacific Time. Welcome to the world, Jon.

:: Dave Walker 21:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/friends]
:: tags: friends

:: Comments (0)

Hydra 1.1.1

I don’t know how I missed this, but the Coding Monkeys apparently shipped Hydra 1.1.1 about two weeks ago. This is a huge deal for me, because Hydra’s my current favorite text editor, and I live in my text editor. The big new feature is an option which uses Webkit to give you the option of seeing a live HTML preview (145kb PNG). I love this feature — it’s especially useful for these blog posts (Blosxom doesn’t have a draft-mode) — it should save me a lot of after-post typo repairs and formatting tweaks, and should entirely spare me (and you) the bane of every hand-coder’s existence — unclosed tags.

Of course, all the other wonderful stuff that makes Hydra such a joy is still there:

• Collabrorative editing (on the local network via Rendezvous and on the Internet and intranet via the “Join via Internet…” command): just a few weeks ago, I helped a friend get his mail server configuration files sorted, using this feature and iChat AV, and it’s wonderful.
• Though it doesn’t have BBEdit’s plugins, I’ve found the combination of the OS X Services menu, in conjunction with Mike Ferris’ TextExtras, and Riccardo Ettore’s TypeIt4Me give me something that’s at least as powerful, and much more flexible. (As an example, TextExtras powerful pipe command means that you can process text in Hydra’s editing window with any command or script installed on your system, including traditional Unix tools like sed, awk, etc., plus any script you might care to write [or download ;)] in Perl, Ruby, Java, Python, C, sh, or AppleScript. It’s like having a small, friendly Emacs, without the evil.
• the little stuff — flexible syntax coloring, fast startup, and did I mention the retail price? Free. I realize (and respect) that a lot of folks are married to BBEdit ($179) for various reasons, but if you’re paying for TextWrangler ($49) without at least checking into Hydra, I think you’re nuts.

Anyway, with the new preview feature, what was already a really good app becomes a killer app. Kudos.

(thanks to Kimbro Staken for the pointer)

:: Dave Walker 14:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (4)

Atom 0.2 Flavour Revised

Sam Ruby contributed a wonderful bit of automagic that “does the right thing” in your Atom feed, based on whether a given entry is well-formed or not. You can verify this by viewing-source in my feed. This actually shows off a capability of Atom that doesn’t (to my knowledge) exist in RSS — namely, that encoding can vary entry by entry within a given feed. (If I’ve missed something obvious and this isn’t true, feel free to correct me in the comments.)

I’ve included Sam’s plugin in a revised flavour pack. Another improvement — it doesn’t assume US English anymore (duh, sorry about that) — it now uses blog_language like it should have in the first place.

:: Dave Walker 12:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (0)

Atom 0.2 feed

It took just a few minutes of work to revise my Necho 0.1 feed to work with the new Atom 0.2 snapshot (it validates, too.) I guess that makes me a BigCo. ;)

Implementation notes:

As written, this flavour requires the rss10, foreshortened, and lastmodified (with a small patch, included) plugins. If you’re running Blosxom 2.0, you can grab my Atom 0.2 flavour files here. It uses a CDATA encoded version of the individual posts. If you’re enough of a stud so that your blog’s totally valid XHTML you might want to modify story.atom to serve the non-encoded representation instead. I wasn’t going there with my own stuff— some of these entries get written after midnight, but hey, knock yourself out.

:: Dave Walker 17:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (3)

One Liners

• Little Miss Sunshine, Little Miss Rain (Lee Hazlewood, 1971)
• John Gruber hands Andrew Stone’s ass to him.
• Mark Pilgrim reinstalls Windows XP on his notebook.
• In the interests of equal time, this Mac guy scares the shit out of me. (via inluminent/weblog)
• Atom 0.2 snapshot spec is out.
• NameFinalVote. If it ends up FeedCast (currently in the lead), then the terrorists have already won.
• More mad love for Hydra.
• Television Without Pity scores another interview with the wonderfully talented Penny Johnson Jerald (24’s Sherry Palmer.)
• The Palm Graveyard (via Steven Frank)

:: Dave Walker 18:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Bump.

cue Limahl.

:: Dave Walker 09:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (2)

When airwaves swing, distant voices sing

several threads, helpfully consolidated

Adam Curry:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of “Radio” and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports “RSS” xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license.
…
I will again invest $10k in aggregator default placements this year, but I will spread it around, to all developers who adhere to RSS2.0. Include (N)echo and you’re out of luck.[+]

fishy:

You know, this is just bullshit interpersonal politics. Does the term “market of ideas” mean anything to you? [+]

Mike:

Wow, that’s short-sighted. “I bought me a bunch of ads on an AM radio syndicate, and a big ol’ console AM radio, but now there’s this FM radio thing and I think it stinks! At least they’ll never figure out how to get moving pictures inside one of these boxes. That’s just crazy talk.” [+]

M.Kelley:

Wouldn’t this be considered Payola in the radio world? [+]

Heiko Hebig:

Or just invest those 10 grands you want to waste on bribing aggregator developers (their software will support Echo anyway) into a good counselling on the state of things and how to make the most of it. [+]

Dave Walker:

Heh, I’m even cheaper. $24.99 gets you a mention in a weblog entry, $49.99 gets you in my blogroll, and $149.99 gets you a dream date with me. I’ll wear whatever you want. Hey, I smell a new business model!

Mark Pilgrim:

I think we’re missing the forest for the trees here. The big news here is not that Adam is an idiot, but that *UserLand accepts payola for undisclosed sponsored links in their products*. Since when was *that* acceptable?

Anu:

In the spirit of Adam Curry’s empty threat generous inducement, I too would like to offer the aggregator development community something - a lucky dip UK lottery ticket [value one british pound] to the first 10 aggregator developers who pledge to support RSS 0.91 and 2.0, RSS1.0 and nEcho [when final]. Given that this is pretty much everyone, I may be out 10 pounds. What will save me from potential destitution is the fact that I only have about 3 readers, although I am beginning to think of the googlebot as a friend. [+]

Dave Winer:

An independent advisory board has been formed to promote the wider use of RSS, to maintain the spec according to the roadmap, and to remove one of the major objections, that only UserLand could answer questions about RSS. The three-member board votes, the majority rules. The three board members are Brent Simmons, Jon Udell and Dave Winer. [+]

Chris Heilman:

Echo is being pushed as a replacemant for RSS. But I worry that Echo may already be owned by some big company, or at least tied up in their litigatory legalities. Listen Echo guys, RSS (mostly) works. I’m not sure that I want IBM or whoever deciding how my content is represented, anyway. [+]

Tomas:

I don’t see how “some big company” can claim the rights of what I’ve written on the Wiki, or what anyone else has written. How do you reach that conclusion, did Copyright law fundamentally change today?

Anode:

Tomas, I believe the conspiracy theory goes:

1. Sam Ruby started the whole Pie/Echo/Atom whatever thing
2. Sam works for IBM
3. Sam has mentioned that IBM is letting him work on this on their time or some statement to that effect.
4. Therefore, it’s a huge conspiracy backed by IBM to steal weblogs/syndication/life as we know it.

Dave Walker:

Maybe if we all wear tinfoil hats we can stop IBM from tuning into our brainwaves and stealing all our clever weblogging ideas.

Mark Pilgrim:

Joe (primary author of the Atom API spec, good friend of mine, sitter of my dog, etc.) has just started his own business doing custom system development. So the next time someone tries to feed you a line like “Atom is run by BigCos”, send ‘em to Joe. [+]

John Robb:

RSS 2.0 is now the #1 return on Google again for the keyterm “RSS”.   Two weeks ago it wasn’t even in the system.  What happened? [+]

Sam Ruby:

In short, I truly believe that the wiki was necessary for this project.  Necessary, but not sufficient. [+]

Dave Winer:

An article in News.Com, while extremely incendiary, may be seen as the last gasp in the Great RSS War of 2003. [+]

Dave Walker:

I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.

ed: I will add further quotes and links as I find them.

:: Dave Walker 09:36 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (1)

Drive By #15

• England braces for rubber duck invasion

  An armada of small, faded yellow toy ducks is expected to make landfall in Britain within weeks at the end of an epic 11-year voyage from the Pacific Ocean.

  [Reuters, via CNN]

• These aren’t my pants: A clubgoer’s guide to getting frisked, tweaking in public, and being your bouncer’s best friend.

  One busy Friday night, I encountered a diminutive young lad who will forever be known as Chicken Boy. He had ingested enough speed to keep a platoon of Marines awake and killing for a month. He’d lost the ability to blink and kept bumblefucking out into traffic, his head pecking back and forth. I was about to handcuff him to a tree to keep him from dancing in front of a bus. Most troubling, however, were the beeping and clucking noises emitting from his closed mouth, like the sound effects of an android chicken: Brrdt. Coo. Coo. Brrdt. Chp. Chp. Coo. He locked himself in one of the Porta-Pottis outside the club. Five minutes passed, filled with steady mechanical poultry chirps emanating from the vents in the green plastic shithouse, before his friend asked, “Hey, are you OK in there?”

  [The San Francisco Bay Guardian]

• Stereo images “Time for Space Jiggle”
  (ed: link contains tasteful nudity)

  Experimenting here with a way to present stereo images on the screen by simply putting the right and left images in an animated .gif.

  [Jim Gasperini]

• Woman gives birth on Boston mass-transit

  A 42-year-old Braintree woman gave birth to a baby boy while standing on an inbound Red Line train yesterday morning, refusing help from stunned passengers who heard her moan and seconds later looked down to find her baby on the floor.
  …
  With the JFK-UMass stop still three minutes away, passengers, some of whom vomited in the wake of the bloody birth, inundated State Police with cell phone calls.
  …
  At one point, Judge took some nearby newspapers and placed them on the floor to soak up the blood. Some witnesses heard Judge apologize for the mess.

  [Boston Globe]

• Charlatans Guy Snags J-Lo, Snoop, Beck for Solo LP

  Charlatans UK frontman Tim Burgess is presently laboring on his first solo album and has announced some very diverse and commercially appealing artists to assist him, perhaps revealing an inner urge to fulfill his lifelong dream of appearing on TRL. According to New Musical Express, Burgess has hired out no less than P. Diddy, Li’l Kim, J-Lo, Snoop Dogg, and Beck for the effort. What, no Matrix? What’s the dilly-o?

  [Pitchfork Media]

:: Dave Walker 11:10 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/drive-by]
:: tags: drive-by

:: Comments (0)

The War Against Novice Users

…and the techies that try to rescue them.

I had an interesting experience helping my cousin with his computer a few hours ago. I’ve done this plenty of times before, and I’m sure every computer professional has served as volunteer tech support for family members at least occasionally. The difference this time is, instead of simply doing a few quick fixes for the things that were broken/nonfunctional (which is what I usually do, in the interests of time), I actually thought long and hard about what was broken, and more importantly, how and why it got that way.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 19:12 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (3)

A Perfect Union of Song and Song Title…

“Until Your Temples Are Pounding” by Macha.

:: Dave Walker 18:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Sony PSP Lust

I enjoy playing games, though I’m hardly obsessive about it. I do most of my gaming on a Sony Playstation 2, and while it’s not a perfect device, I have quite a bit of fun with it. The platform is strong in my favorite genre, RPGs, and I got literally months of gameplay out of the Grand Theft Auto games. I’m pretty interested in Sony’s PSP (warning: glacially slow link), or Playstation Portable. They seem to have packed something with the basic horsepower of a PS2 into a portable package, with storage based son something that looks like a massively updated minidisc. (I was a big fan of minidiscs in the 90s). Depending on the pricing, they may do well against Nintendo’s GBA, which is basically a miniaturization of the Super Nintendo (decade old gaming tech.) It would certainly be a beefy enough device, hardware wise, to be a killer PDA, too.

:: Dave Walker 18:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/gadgets]
:: tags: gadgets

:: Comments (3)

Joan Rivers

Lots of folks (myself included) have ridiculed Michael Jackson because all the plastic surgery he’s had has left him looking inhuman, but post-surgical rictus Joan Rivers sports is every bit as creepy and unnerving. She’s got this super-stretched perma-grin that I am certain scares the bejeezus out of small children. Celebrities: aging gracefully is an option (check out Isabella Rossellini — wow.) Give it a try.

:: Dave Walker 10:27 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/celebs]
:: tags: celebs

:: Comments (0)

I’m the king of, duh, world

I shuffled some of the deck chairs on this particular Titanic. I decided that the steenking badges had to go (80 x 15 overload, I reckon), finished moving December 2002’s entries into Blosxom (the big benefit is that they become searchable), and reordered some of the sidebar content, though I’m still not happy with it. Onward, outward, innies, outies…

:: Dave Walker 09:28 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

Lateral Thinking

It has become increasingly obvious that the people in charge of safeguarding what is perhaps mankind’s most basic, enduring artform are utterly unsuited to the job. The humor’s a bit heavy handed, but these days the parodies can barely keep up with the reality. When even Michael Jackson starts to make sense, you know things have gone loony.

“Freed from plastic, music forms its own scale.”

Glenn McDonald nails it again:

The virtualization of music opens the way for the resurgence of single songs, obviously, but this is only the most straightforward commercial implication of deposing the album as a format of necessity. If you can sell three minutes, instead of forty, then you call probably sell twenty-five minutes, too. This is an artistic opportunity, not just a logistical convenience, as the EP is an underexploited medium with its own formal characteristics.

:: Dave Walker 23:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Simple Summer Evening Pleasures

I’m sitting on my screened front porch as a cool breeze blows through, listening to a baseball game on the radio, while my dog sits next to me, staring out at the cars and people as they pass by. I’m munching popcorn, she has a well-chewed sock.

:: Dave Walker 21:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/pets]
:: tags: pets

:: Comments (0)

Carpet Musics - “Weekday” [✯✯✯✯]

I don’t talk enough about music here anymore, so I’m always happy when a new album inspires me to share. It seems to split the difference almost perfectly between systems music and out-and-out tunefulness. They’re not afraid to bang out a totally obvious and endearing calliope melody, but at the same time they’re cheese-resistant enough to know how to undermine it a bit. I’m not hearing enough music like this these days — the head/heart balance is notoriously hard to manage, I suppose.

There’s a mini-video for one of the songs here.

:: Dave Walker 12:39 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (2)

This-Or-That Tuesday, July 22

Audience Potpourri Participation!

1. DVD or VHS?
   DVD
2. Best Literary/Movie Villan: Voldemort (Harry Potter) or Sauron (LoTR)?
   Sauron
3. Meat: rare or well-done?
   Rare (ish)
4. High Speed Internet-Cable or DSL?
   Cable
5. Women: 1-piece bathing suit or Bikini?
   1-piece
6. To be fair—Men: Boxers or briefs?
   Boxers
7. Beer or Liquor/Wine?
   Liquor
8. Coke or Mountain Dew?
   Water
9. In honor of my 10/18/03 nuptials: Morning or Afternoon/Night Wedding?
   Morning
10. Carpet or Hardwood Floors
    Carpet
11. American cars or foreign?
    American (duh, I live in Detroit)
12. Cutest TV Twin: Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen?
    Sharp stick in the eye.
13. Coffee: Caffeinated or Decaf?
    Caffeinated
14. Thought-Provoking Question of the Week: Computers: Do they make life better or worse? Why?
    In general? Better. Biggest Library Yet.

:: Dave Walker 21:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/this-or-that]
:: tags: this-or-that

:: Comments (0)

Great Lakes Steel

For decades, mostly during the heyday of the U.S. automotive industry, the huge Great Lakes Steel plant on the Detroit River was Ecorse’s primary employer, and provided most of the city’s tax base. As the American steel industry has contracted over the past few decades, the plant’s primacy in the city has decreased as well. The plant is currently owned by U.S. Steel, and this article talks about the plant’s current problems.

:: Dave Walker 21:10 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/local]
:: tags: local

:: Comments (0)

John Robb No Longer An Official Nonperson

After being wiped from the face of the net by Minitruth, John Robb has brought his weblog back. He’s asked for inbound links to help mitigate the mass 404-age, so here ya go.

:: Dave Walker 12:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

Blosxom 2.0

Rael Dornfest released Blosxom 2.0 today, and also launched a renewed website for it. As per just about every other Blosxom upgrade I’ve ever done, this one literally took 5 minutes — open the CGI script and change a handful of variables, change my Apache ScriptAlias directive to point to the new script, gracefully restart Apache. “There is no step three!”

:: Dave Walker 19:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (0)

Congratulations, Taylor!

Taylor Johnson, my niece, and her softball team, the Shaker Heights (Ohio) Red Devils, won the Willoughby League Girls (12 and under) championship Thursday night. They were undefeated throughout the regular season. They played the 2nd place team for the League Championship in a best 2 of 3 games. They won the 1st game, lost the 2nd and they won in a nailbiter Thursday night, 10-7. They were down 5-0 at the top of the 4th and then in the bottom of the 4th and 5th innings, they came back to tie it up. The other team, The Closet of Willoughby, scored in the top of the 6th to make it 7-5 and our girls came back in the bottom of the 6th to score 5 more runs and make it 10-7. They retired The Closet in the top of the 7th, 1,2,3 and won thus won the game. Taylor is a rightfielder.

There’s a small gallery here.

:: Dave Walker 13:21 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/family]
:: tags: family

:: Comments (0)

A bassdrum and a cloud of dust

I added some more words to the Neverending Story.

:: Dave Walker 12:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

That would be a cool trick

:: Dave Walker 18:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/humor/linkfarming]
:: tags: linkfarming

:: Comments (0)

Shlinks

• Tim Bray:

  I think that if we are so foolish as to sit here for the next three to five years waiting for the Longhorn Browsing Experience, we’ll really regret it; but we’ll deserve what we get.

  …

  People, on average and in the long term, aren’t stupid and aren’t patient and aren’t cowards. When there’s an obviously better way to get the job done, they go out and get it, and management can’t stop them, and Forrester and Gartner can’t stop them, and Accenture and EDS can’t stop them, and not even Microsoft can stop them.

• Bill Kearney:

  Does your community have a mailing list? If not, how about starting one? It might seem sort of hokey but hey, maybe your neighbor down the street can fix something for you as well.

  ed: Not a bad idea at all. I think I’ll put something like this in motion in my local area. No idea about how to publicize it, though…
• Edd Dumbill:”Furthermore, since when is 4% an ignorable minority in a customer base of 13 million? That’s 520,000 customers potentially disadvantaged.”
• Another cute experimental Google feature. Practical? Probably not. Fun? Yes.

:: Dave Walker 14:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (1)

Nothing To Hide

I’m chiming in with a “heya, me too” here, agreeing with Sven’s post about what it means to post in a continually crawled, frequently cached and archived online world. My personal editing policy is pretty simple. If I said it, I meant to say it and I’ll stand behind it. If I call you a bad name, I’m not going to go and erase all reference to it later on to make me look saintly and make you look like a nutcase later on, because you called me on it and the text isn’t there any more. I may add to a post to clarify something that is unclear, and I will certainly correct factual, spelling, and grammar mistakes when I find them. Any edit more substantial than a spelling/grammar fix will be noted.

Don’t be a wuss. Stand behind your words.

:: Dave Walker 20:36 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

John Conyers, Howard Berman Considered Harmful

Upload a File, Go to Prison

John Conyers is not my representative in Congress, though he does claim to represent part of the Detroit area. Indeed, it’s clear from this bill that he doesn’t represent anyone in Michigan, just these lobbies. Howard Berman is already well known in tech circles for introducing this wacky crap.

:: Dave Walker 12:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/politics/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

How The Brain Perceives Music

Here’s a fascinating article about research into the way the brain handles music.

Recently, Zatorre and his colleague, Anne Blood, showed that when people experience the “chills-up-the-spine” sensation that some music elicits, it fires up the same brain circuits as those associated with the intense pleasure of sex, chocolate or even opium. Yet the reasons why humans love music are unknown.

:: Dave Walker 10:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Wheee!

Kraftwerk releasing new music, My Bloody Valentine in the studio recording new music, the Pixies apparently on good terms and getting together for ocassional jams… and somehow I’m supposed to give a crap about a bunch of boring old millionaires who can’t evolve? KW, MBV, & the Pixies may be old themselves now, but they were never less than fascinating.

:: Dave Walker 19:06 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

Mozilla’s Continued Existence Assured

Looks like a number of corporations have chipped in to ensure a secure base of funding for projects under the Mozilla banner, under the leadership of Mitch Kapor. This is great news, since there has been plenty of doubt about AOL’s commitment to Mozilla ever since they crawled under the desk.

edit: I wrote the above paragraph before I read that “AOL has cut or will cut the remaining team working on Mozilla in a mass firing and are dismantling what was left of Netscape”. Ugh. My heart goes out to those folks, who worked their butts off for the usual corporate reward.

Mike Pinkerton: “Tonight I pour one for myself, and one for my homies.”

:: Dave Walker 13:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

Meet The Residents

• Pie, Echo, Necho, Atom: It looks like momentum has finally coalesced around naming the new syndication format/weblog API. I had a bit of an attachment to Necho, but Atom certainly beats out the other top contenders: Spark (way too generic), Lokahi (to quote Cartman, “Shut up, hippie!”), and MetaPub (ugh, poopy poopy poopy, InterCaps, just reeks with dead dotcom-ness— didn’t I already lose mad cash on MetaPub.com’s IPO? ;))
• I’ve become quite fond of VoodooPad, which lets you keep notes in a notepad environment that works a lot like a wiki (CamelCasing creates new links, etc.) In practice, it starts to feel like a cross between Stickies and HyperCard, which isn’t a bad place for a low-end note taking facility to be. It supports lots of export formats, too, and you can even run scripts inside of it. Add outlining and you’ve got a worldbeater. I’m going to send in my $10.
• Glenn McDonald, of the War Against Silence, from a review of the latest Liz Phair album:

  I’m starting to remember why I thought Liz was special. She wrote about the way people really are, but rarely admit, and it’s just as illuminating when the secrets are ordinary and minutely observed as it was on Exile in Guyville when they were sexual and shocking. This, in turn, makes me even less inclined to tolerate the other pandering crap on the album, and whoever decided to leave this song off should be permantently relieved of any control over Liz’s music, except that I suspect it was Liz herself, and I don’t know that would work.

• Have fun with magazine style pull-quotes using CSS. Nice.
• Starting to get referrer spam. Deleting it, clockin’ muhfuggas, etc., you know the routine.

:: Dave Walker 13:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (1)

Smart feed fetching

Chuq Von Rospach has an excellent suggestion for aggregator developers here. A couple of aggregator developers applaud the suggestion in his comments, so maybe we’ll start to see these sorts of smarts in a software generation or so.

:: Dave Walker 11:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/all/applications]
:: tags: applications

:: Comments (0)

Give Me An Effin’ Break

if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a sharecropper. - The Web’s the Place

Sharecroppers performed backbreaking physical labor for almost no money, and existed in an environment where a bad harvest or a duplicitous landowner could spell the difference between a survivable (but meager) winter and near-starvation.

Software engineers work in air conditioned offices, usually for at least decent pay, and have freedom of movement, self-determination, and the opportunity for professional advancement.

My aunt tells a great story of the night her grandmother (my great-grandmother) and her family headed north out of Mississippi ahead of a lynch mob, having completely torched a crop of cotton in the fields because the landowner tried to cheat them out of the proceeds they’d earned that year. She’d have kicked your pansy coding ass. Mine too.

:: Dave Walker 17:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (1)

I (heart) my blogroll

Distant noises of other voices

• Clear Channel really stepped in it when they swatted the Dixie Chicks (via Citizen Keith)
• “Mr Barlow eventually appeared. He was old and consumptive and just after whatever gleanings he could get. He settled for £100 a year, and by the look of him it’s not going to go on for ever.” (link) ( link)
• “blech: Daring Fireball looks wonderful. Onlineblog looks shit. Next!” (link) (link) (link)
• Pretty pictures here. (courtesy of Mike Brown)

:: Dave Walker 11:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

The Syndication Format Not Known As Echo

Following the news of Sam Ruby’s snapshot spec, here’s my first pass at a newsfeed in the format that will not be known as Echo. This is, of course, a largely theoretical exercise, because, to my knowledge, there are no aggregators yet capable of reading the feed, but it was a nice excuse to get more up-close-and-personal with writing Blosxom flavours and to take a closer look at the spec.

If I can do it, then the fears that the format would be too complicated for vendors to support are pretty much shown to be unfounded, since I’m a freakin’ lightweight. It took me about an hour looking at the spec and some sample feeds other people were generating to slap this together. No warranties express or implied, blah blah blah. Known bugs: I’m probably doing the wrong thing with the “modified” field for the entries.

The flavour files I came up with are here (zip file), and are released to the public domain. If you fix any bugs or make any improvements, let me know in the writebacks for this entry. Requires: Blosxom 2.0rc5 (might work with earlier versions, but it’s untested), RSS10 plugin (yeah, you read that right — I avoid reinventing many wheels by using this plugin), foreshortened plugin, lastmodified plugin.

edit: I checked the notEcho feed with a patched version of nntp/rss, and it works! Hooray for interop.

edit: The feed now validates. The updated flavour files require a small patch to the lastmodified plugin, I’m afraid. (included)

:: Dave Walker 10:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/blosxom]
:: tags: blosxom

:: Comments (4)

More Local News

This comes from River Rouge, our next-door-neighbor city.

RIVER ROUGE — Four firefighters have been suspended without pay for allowing three women — one who was partially naked — into the firehouse to take pictures of themselves on top of a fire engine.

Says Fire Chief David Chirillo, “One of the women had revealed her naked breasts to the men before she was allowed into the building, yet she was still allowed in. This is quite disturbing.” (ed.: for certain less common definitions of disturbing)

:: Dave Walker 12:09 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/weird]
:: tags: weird

:: Comments (0)

Ecorse In The News

Detectives at the 6th Precinct in Detroit are working with police in Ecorse to find a man described as a transvestite con artist who’s been stealing people’s money in exchange for the false promise of a job, Local 4 reported. (link)

You can stay abreast of the fascinating goings-on in my tiny, funny little city by subscribing to this feed in your aggregator.

:: Dave Walker 10:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/weird]
:: tags: weird

:: Comments (0)

Things As They Pertain To Stuff

varied links and the content therein…

• How to Make a Sonic Purée From Pop Snippets

  A new interactive program retrieves internet song files, slices off audio snippets and blends them into sonic collages.

  (Sounds cool. Can’t wait to try it.
• AOL blogs
  • I remember Usenet
    • The September That Never Ended
  • “That said, Usenet != Blogistan. I don’t think the impact will be nearly as severe, or in fact, negative at all.” (ed: +1, very thoughtful post)
• Dean Allen has updated his wonderful Textile formatting engine. New features include table support and sensible inline styling.
• via BBC:
  • Candlelit vigil for soul star White

    Friends and fans of the late soul singer Barry White have gathered in a Los Angeles park for a candlelit vigil.
    White died on Friday after losing a battle with a kidney disease.
    About 100 people assembled in Leimert Park on Monday to celebrate the life of the star.

  • Singer White’s album sales soar

    Sales of late soul star Barry White’s greatest hits have shot up ten-fold in the UK, according to figures released on Tuesday.
    Early chart positions show The Barry White Collection is at number 69 and is expected to rise even further by the weekend when final places are announced.

• LFO (the legendary techno outfit, not the silly boy band) announce the impending release of their first new album since 1996, and only their third in their thirteen years of existence. There’s a short interview with Mark Bell at Warp Records’site.
• via BBC: A tooth reportedly belonging to Elvis Presley is to be auctioned online, with a starting price of $100,000 (£60,000.)

  It is the tooth that bit into 1,000 burgers - a molar said to belong to rock’n’roll legend Elvis Presley is to go up for sale on Tuesday.

:: Dave Walker 14:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

The Promise of Webkit

Over the past few days, I’ve been playing with some of the early fruit of the delivery of Apple’s Webkit (which shipped along with Safari (or Ghetto Safari, as Kent prefers.) I’m sure there are others, but the first couple of WebKit-enabled apps I’ve played with are Steven Frank’s WebDesktop 2.0 and YetAnotherAggregator, Shrook.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 13:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags: apple

:: Comments (0)

New Kraftwerk

I guess I’ve been under a rock, because I hadn’t heard anything about this: a new Tour de France-related set of Kraftwerk releases. There’s a video for one of the new mixes at their site, and, though I can’t wait to hear a higher-bitrate version, I really like what I hear. It’s very lush and stringy, as opposed to the more skeletal “Expo 2000”.

:: Dave Walker 09:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/music]
:: tags: music

:: Comments (0)

“Multipass!”

OK, it’s barely worth mentioning, but I’ve added RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds (just me being Switzerland again.) This will mainly be of benefit to anyone using an aggregator that’s smart enough to deal with dates. The RSS 0.91 feed still exists, and the theoretical Necho feed is still there, too. Check the links in the left sidebar.

:: Dave Walker 11:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/weblog]
:: tags: weblog

:: Comments (0)

Top Ten Problems With Safari’s Web Page Display

Dave Hyatt asked for our Top 10 Non-UI Safari Issues as trackbacks. The good news is that I only came up with 7 things to whine about. I hope this is helpful.

See more …

:: Dave Walker 23:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/applications/safari]
:: tags: safari

:: Comments (2)

Links for a very hot day

• Happy Independence Day, my fellow ‘Merkins…
• A couple of links courtesy of one of my favorite weblogs, Jeremy Hedley’s Antipixel. Looking over to my right, I find that for some reason, I’ve never listed him in my link sidebar. Corrected.
  • A truly fascinating screensaver for OS X, called 20th Century Voyage (English, Japanese) 20th century events, quotations, and milestones float serenely past and through each other, as if painted on pale gray-green sheets of translucent glass, while a globe slowly rotates beneath them. This description hardly does it justice, though. It’s a great example of someone taking advantage of the power of Quartz and using it to so something aesthetically breathtaking and intellectually worthwhile.
  • The Quiet American presents:

    One-minute vacations are unedited recordings of somewhere, somewhen. Sixty seconds of something else. Sixty seconds to be someone else.

    The sounds are beguiling, and descriptions are just as wonderful.
• More proof that, when it comes to their vehicles, a lot of folks are just stone cold freaks.
• via the BBC

  The Pakistani city of Lahore has banned kite flying for three months after a number of people were killed by sharpened strings.

  …

  At least a dozen people have had their throats cut over the past year by strings that are either metallic or coated with abrasive materials.

  (link)

• 

  via MSNBC

  Look, sea monster!

  SANTIAGO, Chile, July 2 —  A huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on Chile’s coast has stumped scientists, who have sent samples to a specialist in France for help in identifying the mystery specimen. The blob was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported last week, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long mass of decomposing lumpy gray flesh apparently was an invertebrate.

  (link)

• The press is catching onto the huge racket being run by inkjet printer manufacturers.

  Consumers are getting a raw deal when it comes to the ink used in printers, according to research by Which? magazine.

  With the top brand names costing more than vintage champagne, it is an unnecessary waste that people can ill afford, said the campaigning magazine.

:: Dave Walker 18:28 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/links]
:: tags: links

:: Comments (0)

An Experiment — OmniOutliner and Blosxom

• Why?
  • Prompted by the experimental application of Radio Userland as an outline posting tool for Movable Type, I decided to see if it were possible to do something similar using OmniOutliner and Blosxom. I would think that an outliner would be really useful for the long, omnibus-type posts (like the Drive-Bys) that I do sometimes.
  • Outliners are, so I’ve been told, excellent tools for organizing your thoughts, assuming you have thoughts to organize.
• How?
  • Create the entry in OmniOutliner
  • Export as HTML
  • Clean up any garbage <FONT> tags, etc., if necessary added by the export process in Hydra.
  • Publish.

Postmortem: Well, it was a bit more work than that. First, OmniOutliner creates a complete HTML document upon export, which means I have to get rid of extraneous <BODY> tags and stuff as well as a bunch of other <HEAD> type stuff. Nothing too difficult, but as it’s a manual process there’s the potential for error. The other, more serious issue is that it also “helpfully” entity-escaped every single HTML tag I included in my post. This seemed like the more insurmountable issue, until I remembered that, since I was using a Cocoa editor, I could take advantage of Unicode Checker’s “HTML Entities -> Unicode” service to reverse that damage. Cool. I’d call it a success.

:: Dave Walker 12:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/administrivia/general]
:: tags: general

:: Comments (4)