freeform goodness

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:

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

Monday, December 29, 2003

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

Sunday, December 28, 2003

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

Thursday, December 25, 2003

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

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

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

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

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

Monday, December 22, 2003

6th of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“May we dance with yo’ dates?”

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

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

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

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) [+]

Sunday, December 21, 2003

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

Saturday, December 20, 2003

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

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

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

Friday, December 19, 2003

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

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

Thursday, December 18, 2003

2nd of 7: Inspirational Party Phrases

“Everybody on the dance floor!”

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

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

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) [+]

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

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

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

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Tentative Favorite Singles of 2003

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

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

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

Saturday, December 13, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, December 12, 2003

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) [+]

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) [+]

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) [+]

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) [+]

Monday, December 08, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, December 05, 2003

Bush Backdrop Generator

mission undefined

(link)

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

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) [+]

Thursday, December 04, 2003

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) [+]

Wednesday, December 03, 2003

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) [+]

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

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

Sunday, November 30, 2003

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

Thursday, November 27, 2003

The Sun Isn’t Up Yet

todo list

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

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

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) [+]

Monday, November 24, 2003

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) [+]

Thursday, November 20, 2003

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

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

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) [+]

Monday, November 17, 2003

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

Saturday, November 15, 2003

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) [+]

Wednesday, November 12, 2003

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) [+]

Monday, November 10, 2003

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) [+]

Sunday, November 09, 2003

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) [+]

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) [+]

:: 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

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

the instrument of my damnation Make your own church sign.

Saturday, November 08, 2003

Express Train To Hell

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

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

Pieces of Flair

Office Space -- Tchotchkies 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) [+]

Friday, November 07, 2003

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

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) [+]

Sunday, November 02, 2003

Does My Members Only Jacket Have Enough Zippers?

Gawd, I watched too much MTV.

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

Saturday, November 01, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, October 31, 2003

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) [+]

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

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) [+]

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

Monday, October 27, 2003

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

Friday, October 24, 2003

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

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) [+]

Thursday, October 23, 2003

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

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

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) [+]

Monday, October 20, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, October 17, 2003

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) [+]

Thursday, October 16, 2003

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

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

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

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

Monday, October 13, 2003

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) [+]

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) [+]

Friday, October 10, 2003

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

OneOfUs, OneOfUs, OneOfUs…

Thinking, um, different.

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

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

Thursday, October 09, 2003

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) [+]

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

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

Saturday, October 04, 2003

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

Friday, October 03, 2003

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

Saturday, September 27, 2003

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

Thursday, September 25, 2003

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.

screenshot

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

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

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.

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

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

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

OutKast cover 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) [+]

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

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

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

Sunday, September 21, 2003

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:

Jacking a graphic from somewhere. If I can grab it using curl rather than some wimpy old web browser, all the better.
Running file and/or jpeginfo or tiffinfo to get the file’s dimensions, color depth, etc.
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.
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) [+]

Saturday, September 20, 2003

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

Friday, September 19, 2003

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

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

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Space Station Crew Photographs of Hurricane Isabel

Hurricane Isabel from the ISS 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

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

F**kin’ Internet

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

Two things:

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.
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) [+]

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

Monday, September 15, 2003

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) [+]

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

Saturday, September 13, 2003

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.

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

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

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

Thursday, September 11, 2003

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03-039

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

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

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

Sunday, September 07, 2003

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

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

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

Friday, September 05, 2003

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

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

Thursday, September 04, 2003

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) [+]

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

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

Tuesday, September 02, 2003

More Fun Than A Barrel of Monkeys

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 01, 2003

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

Sunday, August 31, 2003

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

Saturday, August 30, 2003

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)

Thursday, August 28, 2003

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)

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

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

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

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

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

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, August 25, 2003

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

Sunday, August 24, 2003

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

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

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

Saturday, August 23, 2003

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

Friday, August 22, 2003

Lyrical Backdrops

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

To enjoy a really well-written pop song, you needn’t know every detail behind it
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) [+]

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

Master Blaster

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

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

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

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

wesley 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

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

Wednesday, August 20, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, August 15, 2003

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

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) [+]

Lit

Our power was restored at about 1:25.

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

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) [+]

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) [+]

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Blackout

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

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

Monday, August 11, 2003

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

Sunday, August 10, 2003

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) [+]

Saturday, August 09, 2003

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) [+]

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) [+]

Friday, August 08, 2003

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

Thursday, August 07, 2003

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

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

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) [+]

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

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) [+]

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

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

Monday, August 04, 2003

Bump.

cue Limahl.

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

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:

Sam Ruby started the whole Pie/Echo/Atom whatever thing

Sam works for IBM

Sam has mentioned that IBM is letting him work on this on their time or some statement to that effect.

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) [+]

Saturday, August 02, 2003

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) [+]

Thursday, July 31, 2003

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.

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

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

A Perfect Union of Song and Song Title…

“Until Your Temples Are Pounding” by Macha.

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

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

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

Monday, July 28, 2003

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

Saturday, July 26, 2003

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) [+]

Friday, July 25, 2003

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) [+]

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

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Carpet Musics - “Weekday” [✯✯✯✯]

CD cover art 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) [+]

Audience Potpourri Participation!

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

This-Or-That Tuesday, July 22

DVD or VHS?
DVD
Best Literary/Movie Villan: Voldemort (Harry Potter) or Sauron (LoTR)?
Sauron
Meat: rare or well-done?
Rare (ish)
High Speed Internet-Cable or DSL?
Cable
Women: 1-piece bathing suit or Bikini?
1-piece
To be fair—Men: Boxers or briefs?
Boxers
Beer or Liquor/Wine?
Liquor
Coke or Mountain Dew?
Water
In honor of my 10/18/03 nuptials: Morning or Afternoon/Night Wedding?
Morning
Carpet or Hardwood Floors
Carpet
American cars or foreign?
American (duh, I live in Detroit)
Cutest TV Twin: Mary-Kate or Ashley Olsen?
Sharp stick in the eye.
Coffee: Caffeinated or Decaf?
Caffeinated
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) [+]

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) [+]

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

Monday, July 21, 2003

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) [+]

Sunday, July 20, 2003

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) [+]

A bassdrum and a cloud of dust

Falkor, the Luck Dragon

I added some more words to the Neverending Story.

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

Friday, July 18, 2003

That would be a cool trick

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

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

Thursday, July 17, 2003

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) [+]

Upload a File, Go to Prison

John Conyers, Howard Berman Considered Harmful

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

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) [+]

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

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) [+]

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

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

Monday, July 14, 2003

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

Sunday, July 13, 2003

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) [+]

Distant noises of other voices

I (heart) my blogroll

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

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) [+]

Saturday, July 12, 2003

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) [+]

Thursday, July 10, 2003

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) [+]

Tuesday, July 08, 2003

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

Monday, July 07, 2003

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.

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

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) [+]

Sunday, July 06, 2003

“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) [+]

Friday, July 04, 2003

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.

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

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

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

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

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) [+]

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

A few random links

Deconstructing the Black Turtleneck
link courtesy of Rael Dornfest

Despite sitting atop an empire that surely affords all Armani, all the time, with a different P. Diddy-sized diamond accessory for each day of the week, these are the duds he chooses.
(link)
An interesting use of nntp/rss
from Dan Dickinson
nntprss has an option for treating RSS feeds as “historical” - thus saving posts if the related item is removed from the RSS feed. It also leaves the original post alone if an item has been edited. So how is this useful?
A great argument for keeping multiple email addresses

PENELOPE FINNIE had to give up something precious recently: her work e-mail address.

…

Yet with the convenience comes risk. Although many people are aware that they may be sacrificing privacy by using workplace e-mail, they are sometimes indiscreet in what they write. And for those like Ms. Finnie who spend years in a single job, the e-mail address becomes part of their identity. Leaving a job and its e-mail address can cause practical and emotional upheaval.

(link)
A Danny Boyle Interview

:: Dave Walker 15:49 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, June 30, 2003

One more note on the Echo/RSS mess

I don’t have a horse in this race (I’m not a coder, nor a bidnethman), I’m just an interested observer. At this point, assuming the Echo folks wind up with an implementable spec (something I entirely expect to happen, given the technical caliber of the people involved), the outcome, to me is clear. The installed base insures that all current weblog and aggregator vendors will continue to support RSS (most likely the 0.91/2.0[x] strain) for the forseeable future. Every developer of note in this field has already pledged support for Echo, and (paranoid conspiracy theories aside, and we know who’s spreading that FUD), an open format hashed out via a transparent process is going to appeal to a lot of people. I’m going to provide feeds in both formats once this is all settled, and I imagine a lot of pragmatic folks will do the same thing. No big deal.

:: Dave Walker 07:36 (EST/EDT) [+]

That Thing

Belle and Sebastian, on the video
Playing songs for children…

Ever find yourself with a microscopic fragment of a song running through your head, over and over and over again? Usually the only way around this is to haul out the song in question and dislodge it by listening to it and getting on with your life. In this case, it was more difficult because, though I knew which band had recorded the snippet that was driving me nuts, I couldn’t remember which song contained the couplet — I knew that it was a hidden bonus cut (uh-oh, danger danger) on one of the early Belle & Sebastian EPs. I thought it might have been on Dog On Wheels (it wasn’t), so I tried 3.. 6.. 9 Seconds of Light — bingo, it follows the last proper song on that EP, “Put The Book Back On The Shelf”. Fired up iTunes and healed myself. Glad that’s all cleared up.

:: Dave Walker 07:16 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Mr. Dangerous

Dave:
‘sup, Mr. Dangerous?

Mr. Dangerous:
Oh, the usual. Drinking grain alcohol, snorting my body weight in coke, having unprotected sex with heroin-addicted civet cats, oh yeah, and deploying RSS in my company.

Dave:
Mr. Dangerous, you do live on the edge, don’t you. That RSS thing scares the hell out of me. Why not take up something safer, like bullfighting?

Mr. Dangerous:
You know me, if it’s not potentially lethal, I don’t want anything to do with it.

Dave:
But Mr. Dangerous, you don’t know the havoc you can bring about by publishing an RSS feed? You could end wind up funky, locked in a trunk, or trapped in a maze of twisty namespaces, all alike!

Mr. Dangerous:
Is there an echo in here? I told you, I live for the risk. Compared to some of the crazy shit I do, this RSS thing is as easy as pie.

Dave:
Be careful out there. The aggregated firepower being tossed around out there could bury a lesser man alive.

Mr. Dangerous:
It’s all good. Time for my date with Ann Coulter. Peace.

references (…and a torture test for the character set capabilities of your browser and aggregator)

:: Dave Walker 16:00 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Iraqi Information Minister Alive And Well

MSS BBC has the story.

Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf - dubbed “Comical Ali” during the Iraq war - handed himself in to US forces but was released after questioning, an Arab TV station says.

:: Dave Walker 14:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/currentevents/war-HUH-good-god-yall]
:: tags: war-HUH-good-god-yall

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Fixing Safari’s Minimum Font Size

Yuck. Aha! Dave Hyatt explained the Safari 1.0 font situation the other day. Basically, two major things changed between the betas and 1.0. First, the default font was set to be 16-point Times. This matches the default for Internet Explorer for Windows, which is presumably the browser most sites are tested against. Unfortunately, in my opinion (and I’m not alone), 16-point type looks freaking huge on a small monitor. After setting my default font setting to something sane (in my case, Lucida Grande at 14 points), I found that CSS specified xx-small type (found, for example, in my Shoutbox), became an unreadable pile of poo. The enforcement of a minimum font size (9 points) specified in the prerelease versions of Safari was removed in 1.0 final. The reason for this is revealed in the Dave Hyatt’s blog entry — that many sites use small font size spans as spacers. That sounds like a really unreliable way to position layout elements, but I’m no professional designer. Ah.

The Safari dev team threw us a bone, however. Mr. Hyatt mentioned that it was still possible to set a minimum font size via a hidden pref. Hidden pref, your ass is mine.

defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitMinimumFontSize 9 defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitMinimumFixedFontSize 9

(you need to enter those two lines in the Terminal.)

:: Dave Walker 22:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Black Music Month, June 2003

via Todd Larason, amplified by Curt

African-American music continues to influence the American music scene today with styles such as rap and hip-hop. As we celebrate the many creative and inspiring African-American artists whose efforts have enhanced our Nation, we recognize their enduring legacy and look to a future of continued musical achievement.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2003 as Black Music Month. I encourage Americans of all backgrounds to learn more about the heritage of black musicians, and to celebrate the remarkable role they have played in our history and culture.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-fourth day of June, in the year of our Lord two thousand three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-seventh.

Look at that date again. I could say something catty here, but there’s really no need, is there?

:: Dave Walker 19:36 (EST/EDT) [+]

Goo Goo Clusters! (spot the reference)

Here’s a fascinating (for certain, functionally pathetic definitions of fascination common to geeks like me) look inside Google’s query serving architecture. It takes a look at how they take advantage of parallelism (at the network, hardware, and processor levels) inherent in serving search engine queries and explain their practical choices based on hardware costs, power consumption, and the savings possible when using cheap hardware with fault-tolerant software. (via Aaron Swartz’s Google weblog)

:: Dave Walker 12:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Science!

I love anecdotes like this one, which tells the story of recording Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science.”

Every time he went to the U.S. afterwards people would come up behind him and yell, ‘Science!’ And it drove him absolutely bonkers. — Thomas Dolby Robertson

:: Dave Walker 14:08 (EST/EDT) [+]

This-or-That, June 24: Everybody’s Gone Surfin’!

via this-or-that

Surf sites at random, or have a set list of regular reads?
I have a core set of bookmarks and RSS feeds that lead me madly off in all directions.
Do you visit mostly blogs, or news or other sites?
It’s probably about 50-50 now. I primarily read blogs in my aggregator(s), so most of the time I’m looking at something in a web browser it’s a non-blog.
Do you go online every day, or just a couple of days a week?
Do people ask drug addicts if they take days off? Let’s be serious here.:)
Do you allow comments on your blog, or not?
Yes. I think it’s pretty much an essential part of a real weblog, though some disagree.
Do you shop online at all, or at regular stores?
Both.
Have you ever done online bill-paying/banking, or not?
I check my account activity online, to make sure no one’s robbing me blind.
Which news site do you prefer… MSNBC.com or CNN.com? Or do you prefer some other one?
I’m not terribly enamoured of either, but I guess CNN sucks slightly less. RSS feeds from places like the NYT and the BBC are preferable.
Live chat rooms, or message boards?
Gawd, I hate chat rooms. I don’t really like message boards much, either. You get involved in a thread and forget to check back on the progress, and the email notifications are a nasty hack. Call me old school, but I’m still a fan of a good mailing list.
Instant messaging or e-mail?
Two different things. I like the asynchronous nature of email. IM replicates the interruption-based telephone culture, which I was never a big fan of, but at least you can turn off your IM client.
Yes or no: have you ever met, or at least talked on the phone with, another blogger? If not, would you want to? Why or why not?
Well, many of the blogs I read are written by people who I knew in “real life” before weblogs ever happened. That said, there are folks I correspond with regularly, who I met via blogging, who I would probably enjoy sharing a beer or a plate of cheesy poofs with.

:: Dave Walker 10:05 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, June 23, 2003

WWDC 2003

The new Apple announcements. (341 words)

:: Dave Walker 20:41 (EST/EDT) [+]

Layout tweaks

I made some changes to the way that my comment pages work, and I also made my permalink format a little less unwieldy (old permalinks should still work, though.) I think I got all the trackback autodiscovery mumbo jumbo figured out, but it’s really hard to test so let me know if things don’t work.

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

Speed

My niece, flying, pics courtesy of Meaghan’s dad.

:: Dave Walker 12:14 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, June 22, 2003

An Ode To The Single

lost to time there’s only one peach with the hole in the middle…

I discovered my love of music at a fairly young age. I don’t know if my family was any more musical than any other typical family of non-musicians living in the Detroit area in the late 60s/early 70s, but many of my earliest memories are of songs we’d hear on the radio while on weekend trips, shopping excursions and camping outings. I have vague memories of being in love with songs like “Tears Of A Clown” and “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” and “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Silly Love Songs”, though at that early date (around 5-7 years old) I couldn’t have told you who performed them or even have done much more than hum the chorus for you. I can remember the very first single I ever purchased, though. I liked a song by Joe Tex called I Gotcha, which research shows was a hit in 1972, which means I was about 5 years old, and that sounds about right. I can’t remember whether Mom gave me money to buy it or whether she just asked me to pick out a 45 while we were at the store. In any even, I know for sure that it was the first non-“kids record” I ever owned myself. I have vague memories of playing my older sister’s records, but nothing really specific from that early on.

45 adapter My first “real” album purchase didn’t happen until years later: Parliament’s Mothership Connection. Even after I bought my first albums, though, for years my musical purchases overwhelmingly came in the form of 45 RPM, 7-inch singles. American singles of the time were very distinctive looking. Unlike European singles, which replicated the small center holes of 12-inch albums, U.S. singles sported a large center hole. This meant that you usually needed some sort of adapter to play them on a standard turntable. The little plastic adapters were somewhat fragile and impractical, but they sure are a wonderfully iconic element of a bygone age, aren’t they?

The prevalence of singles among my early purchases was largely practical. I got a small allowance, which if I remember started out at 25 cents a week, then escalated through 50 cents a week, a dollar a week, and finally $5 a week by the time I entered middle school. When I first started buying singles regularly, they went for about 99 cents to $1.25 apiece. That got you a (usually edited) single mix and a b-side, some of which were purest filler and some of which were fascinating. It would probably seem alien to a music buyer younger than, oh 25 or so, but up until the mid 1980s or so record stores would stock hundreds or even thousands of 7-inch singles, with the top sellers proudly displayed on the walls. Singles were a huge part of the music business, and a lot of record stores devoted just as much space to singles as they did to albums.

My music buying took off in earnest when I turned 12 and got my first paper route. I discovered many artists via 45s during this period, many of which I would come to love and by many many albums by in subsequent years. Some early 45’s I bought were by Kraftwerk, XTC, the Police, the B-52s, Devo, Gary Numan, and Yellow Magic Orchestra. I mention this not to try to buld up any cred points, but to point out that the easy, cheap availability of music by these artists made it possible for me to try new things musically without a lot of risk. Albums were a formidable $5-$7 apiece, and $7 bought a lot of M&Ms and Hot Wheels. A kid with a paper route just didn’t have a lot of dosh to blow on any full-length album that wasn’t a sure thing. For a while, the record industry was fine with this. They’d made a mint on bands like the Beach Boys in the 1960s, who were practically hit single machines, releasing multimillion selling single after single, which would eventually get compiled onto albums almost as an afterthought. Of course, as bands like the Beatles (and eventually the Beach Boys themselves) gained more artistic control they began to deliver albums that stood as coherent statements, but for a long time (from the mid 60s until the early/mid 80s) these two different music markets existed symbiotically.

At some point, some goddamn MBA bastid who I’m sure hated music and only ended up running a record company because his brokerage job fell through, decided that selling cheap singles was bad for the industry. Never mind that the continually renewing lifeblood of the record-buying audience was the enthusiastic adolescent/teenager of limited means but wide-open ears. Instead music was going to be a baby-boomer lifestyle product. The then-new compact disc format was a windfall for the record industry. Consumers spent billions “upgrading” their worn-but-cherished vinyl albums (unfortunately the first-generation remasters of a lot of these classics were often horribly botched.) 45 RPM vinyl singles disappeared from store shelves practically overnight. The odious “replacement”, the cassingle, was a cruel joke. They were usually priced twice as high as the 45s had been, sounded like shit, and were utterly devoid of character. They lacked the tactile immediacy of the 45 and the random-access of the CD. Record execs used the utterly lackluster demand for the cassingle as an excuse to shut down the single market entirely. “People aren’t buying these things, therefore it’s obvious that consumers don’t want singles at all.”

I’ve been known to argue that the P2P filesharing boom was karma visited large upon the record industry for killing the single. Since the industry gave consumers no way to buy small numbers of tracks, the street found its own use for things and created its own singles market, and, out of spite, made sure it was a a really, really cheap one. In retrospect, the big news about the iTunes Music Store was that, for the first time since the 80s, someone was trying to do something to recreate a legitimate singles market.

Well, you can’t please everyone.

:: Dave Walker 12:50 (EST/EDT) [+]

Neat Pics

I’m really enjoying Adam Curry’s “Scanlog”. It’s a cool idea. A couple of favorites.

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

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

Saturday, June 21, 2003

Best Porn Name Evar

I got a spam today from someone calling herself “Sharon Bootie.”

:: Dave Walker 11:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Drive-By #14

History of RSS date formats
(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, trust me, you don’t want to know. Stop reading right now before you get sucked into this world.)
[dive into mark]
It’s the M6 doll road!
A burning cargo of sex toys closed one of the country’s busiest sections of motorway and brought the Midlands to a standstill today.
Paraphernalia including whips, plastic breasts and dolls spilled from the wagon and onto the road as fire crews sought to make the lorry safe.
[ic Birmingham]
Packaging groups coordinate efforts to deliver software for Mac OS X
The Fink, Gentoo,and DarwinPorts projects are pleased to announce the formation of a cooperative development alliance forged to facilitate delivery of freely available software to Mac OS X. Under this new alliance, the projects will share information and coordinate efforts for porting software to Apple’s Mac OS X and Darwin operating systems. Members of the alliance will share information using the www.metapkg.org Web site, which will provide a home for this cooperative effort.
[Metapkg]
Paroled rapper races to finish song before curfew
A new compilation from super producers the Neptunes features “Operator,” the first song Ol’ Dirty Bastard recorded after his release from prison. The rapper — now calling himself Dirt McGirt — laid down the track with Pharrell Williams in ninety-eight minutes, rushing to beat a midnight parole curfew.
[Rolling Stone]
William Marshall, Actor in Movies and on Broadway, Dies at 78
William Marshall, a serious actor who played Shakespearean roles including Othello, was best known as Blacula, an African prince bitten by Dracula.
[New York Times]
Panoramas.dk
Panoramas.dk features Full Screen Quicktime VR Panoramas from VR Photographers all over the world.
…you will find more than 80 fullscreen QTVR movies from more than 25 different countries made by more than 50 photographers.

:: Dave Walker 10:24 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, June 20, 2003

World Peace, Defined

booming sound Lock all of the usual suspects in a darkened club with Scion’s Arrange and Process Basic Channel Tracks booming over a huge system. That’s all it would take.

:: Dave Walker 16:54 (EST/EDT) [+]

I Live Here, But I Don’t Make Any of the Rules

Leader of the Free World The SFG (try to pronounce that as if it were a word, as the clued-in among you pronounce the GZA or the RZA) notes a TV program he recently saw, called “What the World Thinks of America”, broadcast on CBC, the national network of our neighbors to the south. I often find myself wincing because I suspect I know how the buffoonery of our higher-ups must be perceived abroad.

Really, though, this whole entry is mainly an excuse to quote the SFG’s wonderful last sentence:

By the way, a note to any international visitors: Coca Cola and McDonald’s are not coming to your country for political reasons. They just want your money.

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

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

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

This or That, June 17: Reading

via this-or-that

Newspapers or magazines?
Magazines — depth over timeliness
Books-on-tape or regular books?
Regular books, though books-on-tape are good for long commutes
Paperback or hardcover?
Paperbacks are a better for for my budget, but a nicely bound hardcover book can be a thing of beauty.
Fiction or non-fiction?
These days, nonfiction. That can change (and has changed, several times, in the past.)
Sci-Fi/Fantasy or romance novels?
I have never, consciously, read a romance novel.
Borrow from library or buy books (either new or used)?
I’m a big fan of used books.
Subscribe to magazines or buy on newsstand?
Subscriptions are just wasted money, as I find I almost never get around to reading the magazines I subscribe to.
Current best-sellers or classic literature?
The “classics” I guess — this goes back to the used book question.
Read books once, or re-read favorites every so often?
There are certain books I try to re-read every 10 or so years.
Here in the U.S., we have two hot best-sellers…former First Lady Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, and the new Harry Potter book (coming out June 21). If you had to read one, which one…Hillary or Harry? Why?
Hillary’s — she is our future president, y’know. ;)

:: Dave Walker 20:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

Quick Hits

I’m just quickly breaking radio silence to link to this very funny History of the Internet.

I think everyone piling on poor Martha is pretty overdone (folks at Enron, Worldcom/MCI, and Adelphia, to name but a few, stole far more money, with a much greater effect on the economy, but they’re not rich and prissy and blonde, so they get to slide), but this Photoshop contest is kinda funny. This is less funny, but the first paragraph works.

Also, the decidedly not funny deeper story of a “news of the weird” type story from a few years back: “Japanese Tourist Dies Hunting for ‘Fargo’ Millions.” The real story is a lot more human and touching than that.

:: Dave Walker 19:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Intermittent connectivity — fixed (I hope)

My apologies for the intermittent connectivity (web and mail) over the weekend. I’ve been away for a few days and, ond of course Murphy’s Law kicked in. I think everything’s sorted now.

:: Dave Walker 13:29 (EST/EDT) [+]

Microsoft drops development of Internet Explorer for Mac

Friday, June 13, 2003

Punch My Card

Back when I was in high school (and no, right now I don’t particularly feel like admitting how long ago that was :-) ), there was a popular saying amongst my circle of friends. It was “punch my give-a-shit card,” often simply abbreviated to “punch my card” or a vague hand-wave while holding your fingers in a card-grasping position (especially when teachers and/or parents were around), when something happened that you were theoretically supposed to care about but that, in reality, you just didn’t.

/me waves hand vaguely

Punch my card.

:: Dave Walker 17:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Tools for the sake of tools

I collect RSS aggregators like some folks collect stamps. I (obviously) don’t do this for practical reasons. Realistically, no one really needs an aggregator (though if you’re an avid reader of weblogs they’re pretty much essential for keeping things manageable.) Anyway, I’ve got a ton of them.

An extended ramble on tools, aggregation, and people who you should probably be tired of by now.

:: Dave Walker 12:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Satan Grabs His Parka

Rivers flow uphill, and watch out for flying pigs! Quark Xpress 6 is available to order for OS X.

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

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

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Fox News

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders… All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal

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

:: [/currentevents/war-HUH-good-god-yall]
:: tags: war-HUH-good-god-yall

This-or-That Tuesday: June 10: TV Shows/Movies

I can’t promise I’ll do this every week (I’m bad with schedules), but I thought I’d try out This-or-That Tuesday, just for giggles.

I wonder why they don’t use an ordered list (<ol>) for the list of questions? That is, after all, what it was designed for.

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

Monday, June 09, 2003

MonoMonoMono

Via Todd Larason, here’s an exhaustively (maybe obsessively, but in a good way) complete resource for finding good monospaced typefaces.

:: Dave Walker 21:42 (EST/EDT) [+]

Aaaargh!

I know I shouldn’t complain. Sourceforge provides valuable services to the geek public, for free, but their infrastructure is so broken! Their public CVS servers are almost impossible to access — sometimes it seems like it’s a contest to see how many times you can see the “cvs [login aborted]: recv() from server cvs.sourceforge.net: Connection reset by peer” message in a single day. I use a number of very actively updated programs, so I like to stay in sync with the development (CVS) versions of quite a few of them, and, for any Sourceforge hosted project, this above error message (or something very much like it) is a (painfully) regular sight.

If the instability of SF’s infrastructure only affected the 0.01% of people who “need” to keep source trees in sync, that would be one thing. I’d still whine about it, but it certainly isn’t something that would affect a measurable portion of even the general computing public. The problem is that, increasingly, even ordinary software projects with a general end-user audience are hosted with Sourceforge, and their file mirroring system is very, very broken. Sourceforge mirrors their content with several organizations, geographically spread around the computing world. This is good, because it distributes the bandwidth load across several large “pipes”, rather than requiring Sourceforge to bear the expense of many ungodly huge net connections on its own. For this reason, they don’t provide direct links to binaries for hosted projects. Instead, files are distributed via HTTP redirect links to the various mirror sites. Unfortunately, their mirroring process is unreliable and it will often serve up redirect links to mirror sites that have not received the files yet. Many times you’ll find yourself presented with a list of 10 mirrors for a new file release, only to get 404 link errors on the first 6 or 7 or 8 links you click. What is the logical end-user response to this? “These open-source projects are always so unpolished. They can’t even provide working download links for their software.”

But, I know, it’s free, and if I can’t provide something better I should just shut up. But damn.

:: Dave Walker 21:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, June 08, 2003

More Hotmail Spam

Apparently the amount of spam pouring out of leaky sieve Hotmail has increased by 2200% since people started exercising this ‘sploit. If your mailer gives you the option (or you want to add a SpamAssassin rule), the words to key on are “hotmail.com with DAV” in the “Received:” field. Or you could crapcan everything not explicitly whitelisted coming out of Hotmail, Yahoo, et. al., which is what a lot of folks do, and I doubt you’ll miss anything important.

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

Yay, Meaghan!

Congratulations to my niece, Meaghan Johnson. Her high school track team finshed second overall in the Ohio Division III (Girls) state track championships, and her relay squad won the 4x200 relays. Though only a freshman, Meaghan competed on the varsity squad this year.

:: Dave Walker 11:38 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, June 07, 2003

Dulcet 3 Playlist

Thanks for tuning and saying hi. As always it was a lot of fun.

Tiddler – Nobukazu Takemura
Private Number – Judy Clay and William Bell
Bye Bye Love – The Cars
30 Gallon Tank – Spoon
Nefarious – Spoon
Air Is Static – Polar
Sharp Shooting On Saturn – The Black Dog
Organic Storm – Motion Control
Soft ‘n’ Easy – Japancakes
Soft – Lemon Jelly
Eyes Are Mosaics – Harold Budd, Simon Raymonde, Robin Guthrie, Elizabeth Fraser
Mark The Day – the Delgados
In All The Wrong Place – Ulrich Schnauss
Hang-Up – Klute
Badtimes (Peel Session) – Laika
S4 – Jonny L
Miss Teen Wordpower – New Pornographers
Identity #2 – Sybarite
Rocks In Your Head – Sybarite
I’ve Been Lonely For So Long – Frederick Knight
Sugar Hiccup – Cocteau Twins
Strode Rode – Sonny Rollins
Flying High (Chateau Flight Remix) – P‘Taah
The Host of Seraphim – Dead Can Dance
Papua New Guinea (12” Original Mix) – the Future Sound of London
Radio Babylon – Meat Beat Manifesto
Nuclear War – Sun Ra
Autumn Sweater (µ-ziq Mix) – Yo La Tengo
Green Eyes – Vitesse
Carolyn’s Song – Rain Parade
Caroline No – the Beach Boys
Carolyn’s Song – This Mortal Coil
Autumn Sweater – Yo La Tengo
Nuclear War (Version 1) – Yo La Tengo
Take Care – Big Star
Fell From The Sun – Pale Saints
Take Care – Ken Stringfellow
Green Eyes – Hüsker Du
Fell From The Sun – Vinyl Devotion
Jaguar (Dance Of The Cat) (Remix by: Jeff Mills) – DJ Rolando
Take Care – Yo La Tengo
Papua New Guinea Translation 5: The Great Marmalade Mama In The Sky – the Future Sound of London
Capitol Beat Sticky – Capitol K
Good Life (Edit) – Inner City
You Work All Weekend – Saturday Looks Good To Me
Danseparc (Every Day It’s Tomorrow) – Martha And The Muffins
Harvest – Opeth
Bim Bom – Astrud Gilberto
The Camera Eye – Rush
In The Flat Field – Bauhaus
Unified Field Theory – The Scientist and Culture
Mind Over Matter – Ice-T
Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare (Live Mix) – 4 Hero
E-Vapor-8 – Altern-8
Norman Bates – Landscape
Yenilik (Part 7) – Pete Namlook and Burhan Öçal
Metamorphosis I – Philip Glass and Uakti
Lightning – Ultra Vivid Scene

:: Dave Walker 17:25 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Dulcet 3: featuring “Excursions on the Version”

Today at 12:00 Eastern Time, @708 Swatch Time, 16:00 UTC/GMT, Freeform Goodness will be presenting the third installment of Dulcet, this time featuring “excursions on the version”.

There will be rarities, cheeky pomo juxtaposition, and a live human at the other end of an instant messenger connection: AIM - dw808303. Hope to see you there.

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

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Friday, June 06, 2003

Corny cope with ya

On the iTunes/iTMS front: Derek Sivers, president of CD Baby, an indie-focused online CD retailer, posted some fascinating notes from a meeting Apple hosted with several independent label representatives. It looks like the iTMS’ breadth of selection is about to improve dramatically, with help from the little guys.

If you write about BitTorrent a couple of times, you’ll soon find that over half of your incoming search hits are coming from people trying to find torrent links for various stuff. If you mention popular yet vapid stuff in a joke entry, you’ll get even more hits. Funny, that.

On the positive side, you’ll also see a surprisingly large number of hits coming from people looking for the good stuff, which encourages writing even more about good music. As Sven mentioned in his recent metablogging entry, contributing positive “Google juice” to a deserving site is a small but worthwhile reason for blogging.

— — — —

If you own stock in an ILEC, there’s still time to get out before you lose your shirt. I recently told SBC/Ameritech exactly where to insert their overpriced, underfeatured land-line service and I couldn’t be happier with the alternatives.

:: Dave Walker 13:42 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Time to crowd-surf

Elixir of Life (Pt. 7) - Anthony Rother
Enso Online - Ken Ishii
On My Own - Ulrich Schnauss
Towner - Spoon

:: Dave Walker 13:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

Consciousness, late lunchez…

Why bad filmmakers should never mess with professional writers

It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of “The Brown Bunny.”

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times
Go go gadget gimme gimme
Finally…I have some official news for you all…coming this Friday, June 6, 2003 …, T-Mobile and Danger will introduce the T-Mobile color Sidekick, or as the hiptop.com faithful have dubbed…the CSK.
…
Highlighting the price plans is the much requested Data Only plan for $29.99 with $0.20 per minute pay as you go voice. Or…you can choose any T-Mobile rate plan to meet your voice needs and add the unlimited Sidekick data for $20!

CSK! the “official” word….
Chicken bites back
A batch of chicken embryos raised at a French laboratory have been coaxed into growing rudimentary teeth, after researchers managed to re-awaken a gene that has lain dormant in birds for at least 70 million years.

Birds with teeth turn the clock back 70m years

:: Dave Walker 11:34 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

Wouldn’t It Be Cool…

I’m waiting for UPS or FedEx to supply online package tracking info in an RSS feed. Both already offer detailed online ship records, where you can watch, via a webpage, your packages wend their way through the shipping process. They also allow you to track packages by email, but RSS seems like a perfect fit, too. It would be really nice to track your packages in your aggregator.

:: Dave Walker 23:26 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, June 02, 2003

Tinkering

I’m trying to be a good citizen by removing absolute font sizes from my “blue” layout (I already have them mostly sorted with the “gray” one) but it’s not as smooth of a process as I’d like. Things probably look a little too dinky in most Mac browsers, but probably look better now with the huge font-size defaults on Windows. Expect continual tweaking over the next few days. If things get really broken, contact me.

this is one of the best, most succinct explanations as to why relative font sizes are a good idea, courtesy of Aaron Swartz:

The frustration with specifying a font-size is this:

a) If you specify no font size, it will look just right to people who know how to tell their browsr what their favorite font size is. And to people who don’t it will be rather large, like every web page they visit.

b) If you specify a font size, it will look smaller for those people who don’t know how to tell their browser what font size to use and it will look wrong to those who do.

I think the a is a much better choice, especially since most of your readers probably know how to tell their browser what font size to use.

:: Dave Walker 10:54 (EST/EDT) [+]

Don’t Let The Live365 FUD Scare You

Live365 are running ads during the static broadcasts that say something to the effect of “if you want to be able to listen to all broadcasts without restriction you need to be a preferred (i.e. paid) listener.” It is true that broadcasts are capped at 100 non-preferred listeners, but, um, let’s just say that exceeding that number of simultaneous listeners is not a problem I’ve ever had with FFG. This primarily impacts a small set of semi-pro broadcasters doing popular streams with large audiences. Once again, not a problem for the masses ;-) over here at FFG. We’re still free (as in beer and BSD.)

nb: I have no control over the placement, frequency, or content of the ads they run.

:: Dave Walker 09:18 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/announcements]
:: tags: announcements

Bread And Circuses

“You can walk the streets of the United States and you will never find a single person who’s in favor of more consolidated media, unless by chance you happened to bump into one of Rupert Murdoch’s children.” - Reed Hundt, former U.S. FCC Chairman, in Salon

:: Dave Walker 00:34 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, May 31, 2003

Minor RSS tweak

This really shouldn’t break things for anyone, but please drop me an email or comment here if it does. I now explicitly set UTF-8 encoding for my RSS feed (I always did for the HTML pages, I just plain forgot to do it for the feed.) If the preceding couple of sentences were just pure gibberish () to you, don’t worry about it.

edit: it stops the feed from validating, so, to quote Emily Litella, “Nevermind!”

:: Dave Walker 18:47 (EST/EDT) [+]

Yes. Apparently Proper PNG Support Requires Longhorn

If this were a slapstick film, this little snatch of BecauseWeSaySo™ would get a spit-take.

Host: Brian (Microsoft)
Q: when / will there be the next version of IE?

A: As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

…

Host: Brian (Microsoft)
Q: Why is this? the anti-trust? (no further standalone)

A: Although this is off topic, I will answer briefly: Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1. Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.

Keep in mind that Longhorn doesn’t ship until 2005 (maybe). If you figure on the usual adoption curve for new operating systems, that means that web designers will have to put up with IE’s current flaws until, oh, say 2008 or so. Raise your hand if this makes you feel, y’know, warm inside.

:: Dave Walker 07:09 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, May 30, 2003

Important Security Note

If you’re running Shoutbox on your site, install the patch here. Since this vulnerability was posted to Bugtraq, at least half a dozen skr1pt k1dd33z have attacked my server.

Yeah, I saw you, needledick:

discovery.cs.hope.edu
p213.54.36.10.tisdip.tiscali.de
cmb5-198.dial-up.arnes.si
cpe-144-132-214-143.nsw.bigpond.net.au
68-173-153-233.nyc.rr.com
ncroes02.telenet-ops.be
cfaw0105.macs.net
customer165-105.iplannetworks.net
202.155.70.242

I’m settling for public shame this time, but next time I see one freaking packet from any of you, your ISP’s abuse department is getting a copy of my logs.

:: Dave Walker 12:21 (EST/EDT) [+]

The Silence of the Lambs

Most of he various Mozilla bloggers are curiously silent about the Microsoft/AOL deal… well, I guess its not that curious — the ones who actually work for AOL have to be circumspect out of sheerest self-preservation. The funniest summary comes from Hixie, who (I’m guessing) doesn’t depend on a paycheck from Netscape.

The best thing to say, I guess, is that the code is already out there, living on thousands of hard drives, so that even if AOL shutters Netscape tomorrow, derivative works will be around forever. Mozilla (well, mostly Mozilla Firebird and Camino) are dramatically far ahead of the ever-stagnant Internet Explorer in providing a pleasant browsing experience, and frankly I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

:: Dave Walker 07:58 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, May 29, 2003

The Common Cold Is Not My Friend Playlist Update

I think that last sneeze may have knocked the ISS out of orbit.

All You Need Is Hate - The Delgados
Blind Dumb Deaf - Cocteau Twins
Harvest - Opeth
Invisible Magnetic Missive - Sybarite

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

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

iTunes Neutered

The iTunes remote library sharing feature was far too fun and useful in its initial incarnation. So they killed it.

Bah.

:: Dave Walker 18:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, May 26, 2003

Didn’t We All Know This Was Going To Happen?

Ron Green:

We are currently seeing all kinds of supposedly leaked information and screenshots of MS’s next operating system, Longhorn. This is not due out till the end of 2004 or the beginning of 2005. A full 1 1/2 to 2 years away. Where are all the leaked screenshots and Information on the next version of Internet Explorer? Is there a next version?

Internet Explorer won’t get touched again until/unless Microsoft feels some competitive threat in the browser space, which won’t happen until/unless something far less than the current ~90% of client desktops ship with anything else enabled as a default browser. Faster browsers with fewer security holes and with user-focused features such as popup blocking already exist, but since they’re not bundled and enabled by default, they’ll never be a factor for the huge proportion of end-users (it’s got to be over 75%) who never install any software (besides a game or two and a tax program or maybe that stupid shit spyware Weatherbug thing) that wasn’t included in the box. Simply being better isn’t enough, and if that isn’t sad as hell, I don’t know what is.

:: Dave Walker 12:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, May 25, 2003

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Here is a page to bookmark—The Center for Public Integrity has assembled a database that tracks the ownership of media outlets, as well as industry-sponsored junkets taken by FCC officials between May 1995 and March 2003.

Curious about who owns your local media, telephone and cable company? This searchable database contains basic information on every radio and television station in America as well as every cable television system and telephone company. You may search by company, by call sign or by area. Searchers will find basic information on some of the most important telecommunication companies, including a brief corporate profile and basic financial information.

:: Dave Walker 15:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

Good Net Citizen

Thanks to a small change in the latest Blosxom release (and Bob Schumaker’s plugin) I now support ETag headers for both the blog pages and the RSS pages. I’m sure this lets you sleep easier at night.

:: Dave Walker 01:35 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, May 24, 2003

Drum Solo

It’s not finished yet, but the first half of ToastyFrog’s “DRUM SOLO: Prog Rock’s Most Embarrassing Moments” gives me hope for the future:

If the pretentious excess of prog rock were a rubber sheet, “Tales from Topographic Oceans” would be a heavy weight in the middle of the sheet that bends the very fabric of self-indulgence toward itself.

I actually own a copy of the aforementioned musical catastrophe, and that’s pretty much a pretty spot-on description. Anyway, the whole feature is a hoot. It’s an affectionate poke at prog’s excesses from a fan, rather than an attack from an outsider.

Enough of that, though, I’m off to Movement 2003.

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

Friday, May 23, 2003

New Static Playlist Adds

Brittle - Stereolab
Finisterre - Saint Etienne
Nice Weather For Ducks - Lemon Jelly
Philip Glass - Colourbox
Short Mile - Japancakes
Sugar Daddy - Laika
You Tear the World in Two - Pale Saints

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

Nice Scott Miller Interview

I know that some people really hate these super-short, single-item pointer type weblog entries, but sometimes it feels artificial to me to hold back a bunch of intersting links for a big omnibus, Drive-By type posting. So here’s an interview with Game Theory / Loud Family founder Scott Miller, a few scant minutes after my last music article pointer. So sue me.

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

Brian Wilson to Perform ‘Smile’ Live

When Brian Wilson went on an extensive tour a couple of years ago, performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, I think a lot of folks hoped this might happen but were afraid to say so out loud. I hope he brings the show home to the USA, too.

:: Dave Walker 14:08 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, May 22, 2003

Musical Miscellanea

Yay, a victory for fat black guys everywhere! :)
Here’s the best Derrick May interview I’ve ever read, courtesy of John Osselaer at TechnoTourist. I’m looking forward to seeing John and Hans and Otto and Klass-Jan and the rest of the Technotourists at the Movement 2003 festival this weekend. Also, here’s hoping the promised sponshorship money comes through so that Derrick doesn’t take a personal financial bath on the festival.
Mitch Easter has a new band and website, and some great old Let’s Active material is being reissued after being out-of-print for most of the last decade.

:: Dave Walker 12:05 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, May 19, 2003

E before I

Well, Emusic has signed up the Beggars Banquet group, which is a pretty freaking big deal for my eighties loving, indie-loving self. I know, I’m hardly a typical music consumer, but from where I sit now Emusic now definitely has a more interesting catalog, at a far lower cost (for all but the lightest shoppers), and with less-restricted files, than the iTunes music store. Let’s see if anyone notices.

Musical taste is a funny thing, but I think a random sampling of my friends and acquaintances would be more interested in Matador, 4AD, Too Pure, Fax, Moving Shadow, Mo’ Wax, Stax, Fantasy’s jazz catalog, Kindercore, Parasol, Ariwa, and the like than whatever the majors are pimping this week.

:: Dave Walker 23:57 (EST/EDT) [+]

Dulcet 2 Playlist

Thanks to everyone who tuned into the live show yesterday. We went for about 4 hours, but problems with bandwidth and with my streaming app brought things to a slightly premature end.


#	*Name*	*Artist*
1.	Moonlight (Claire De Lune) From ‘Suite Bergamasque’	Claude Debussy
2.	Funkt	Jetty
3.	Smile	Sonna
4.	Vocode-Inn	Japancakes
5.	Sabine’s Song	Peter Benisch
6.	Brighter Than The Sky	Vitesse
7.	In Time	Vitesse
8.	Ultimate Stars	Saturday Looks Good To Me
9.	Way To Breathe, No Breath	Paul Newman
10.	Pent-up House	Sonny Rollins
11.	Swingin With The Big Band	Kaay Alexi Shelby And Brazil 94
12.	Pra Iluminar	Leila Pinheiro
13.	More, More, More	Andrea True
14.	Galaxy	Psyche / BFC
15.	Elephant Talk	King Crimson
16.	Tiny Spark	Brendan Benson
17.	Engaged	Sybarite
18.	C*nt	Astrobotnia
19.	(Shakedown) The Whole Thing	Cabaret Voltaire
20.	Kincajou	Banco De Gaia
21.	Zag	Sean Deason
22.	Airbag	The Section
23.	Airbag	Radiohead
24.	Off Your Face	My Bloody Valentine
25.	Genetic Engineering	Optiganally Yours
26.	Crowd Of One	Papa M
27.	Hope For Winter	Club 8
28.	Windy	Astrud Gilberto
29.	I Don’t Mind The Rain	The Orange Peels
30.	Fine And Powdery	Casiocore
31.	Nice to Meet You	Mathias Schaffhauser
32.	Work That Motherfucker	Steve Poindexter
33.	Pipeline	Challengers
34.	Cosmic Cars	Cybotron
35.	The Invisible Dog	Electrelane
36.	Deeper Into Movies	Yo La Tengo
37.	Rock n’ Roll McDonald’s	Wesley Willis
38.	Theme From ‘Shaft’ (Live)	Isaac Hayes
38.	Fuck the Pain Away (Live)	Peaches
39.	Emerge	Fischerspooner
40.	Polynomial-C	Aphex Twin
41.	Breaking Thru	Polar
42.	You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go	Ben Watt
43.	History of Brokeback	Eleventh Dream Day
44.	Papercuts	Broadcast

:: Dave Walker 13:36 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Sunday, May 18, 2003

Dulcet 2

I’ll be broadcasting live today at 12:00 Eastern, 16:00 UTC, for about 4 hours, give or take. Visit Live365 to launch the broadcast (you can’t plug that URL directly into your audio player, you have to launch the stream from that page — sorry, it’s the damnable DMCA) to listen, chat via AOL IM, my id is dw808303.

:: Dave Walker 10:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Saturday, May 17, 2003

Can we trade the U.S. Congress for the U.K. Parliament (and a player to be named later?)

I’m probably a little late on this one, but this is one of the funnier things I’ve read lately — a transcript of a discussion in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords about the unsolicited commercial email problem.

:: Dave Walker 13:37 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Drive-By #13

Congratulations
Mark Pilgrim is getting married today.
Open CD-ROM Drive with VBScript
Another stupid Internet Explorer trick… This webpage actually opens your CD-ROM drive without prompting, using VBScript to access the Windows Media Player API.
iSync Bookmarks
Why has iSync got its fingers in Safari’s bookmarks? Don’t see any evidence of them on my iDisk, iPod, or in iCal. Theories?
…
lookie here: http://www.thinksecret.com/news/isync11.html
[Scot Hacker’s Foobar Blog]
I’ll bring the beer, marshmallows, and hot dogs. You bring your topless, drunken wife.
via Erosblog (nsfw)
how to make an omelet. that’s all
it took me forever to learn how to make them. all the cookbooks seemed to have instructions like “allow the egg mixture to fluff and turn rapidly will adding the ingredients in an aesthetic manner” and mentioned that omelets are a bit difficult to make. all i managed to make were scrambled eggs of hot death. oh, they tasted ok, but they weren’t omelets. [ambiguous]
Klingon Interpreter Sought
“We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak,” said Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]
MP3.com: DOKAKA
Hello,I’m DOKAKA.
Funny,Strange,ACAPELLA stuff!!
All songs,All parts,MOUTH WORKING ONLY.

:: Dave Walker 10:19 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, May 16, 2003

FTC LARTing Open Relay Operators

The U.S. FTC is sending a letter (168 kb PDF), co-signed by several state attorneys general and consumer protection officials from Australia, Canada, Japan, and Mexico, to operators of open-relays, urging them to Do The Right Thing and secure their mail servers. Cool. One nice thing is that the “how to secure your server” message (74 kb PDF) appears to have been translated into a dozen languages. Cool.

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

Thursday, May 15, 2003

Booze

Erik Barzeski’s Question of the Day yesterday was:
“What is your favorite alcoholic beverage?”

I posted a little one line answer in the comments for the entry, but I might as well elaborate here.

I’m not really much of a drinker. I don’t have any philosophical or medical objections to consenting adults drinking, and as a matter of fact when I’m out socially I enjoy having a cocktail, and a cold beer goes great with pizza or an outdoor barbecue. It never really occurs to me to drink heavily, though. I’m perfectly content to order a good, well-mixed drink and nurse it for hours. In college, I would drink whatever cheap, nasty crap was available, because I was, well, young. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a taste for a more minimal, “purist” approach to beverages. Because I find that beer tends to give me an unpleasantly full feeling, I prefer mixed drinks. I find I prefer those with a minimum of extra mixers and sweeteneners, so something like a Manhattan works much better for me than a Piña Colada.

My favorite drink, however, is the classic dry gin martini, as immortalized in countless 50’s & 60’s “swingin’” films and TV shows. The funny thing is that I really don’t like olives, but in this context they rock. Like most drinks, it’s at its best when served almost shockingly cold.

:: Dave Walker 14:39 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

While You Were Out…

The American Civil Liberties Union has posted a pretty eye-opening poster (153 kb PDF file) that works as a fairly succinct description of what the existing USA Patriot Act means to your privacy rights, and why you should be really worried about Patriot II.

:: Dave Walker 03:01 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, May 13, 2003

A May 2 April Fool’s Joke?

Heh heh, we were just, y’know, joking about that iLoo thing. Really. Honest.

:: Dave Walker 11:09 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, May 12, 2003

Temporary Residence Limited Has A Pretty Spiffy Catalogue

Here are the latest updates to the static playlist, all courtesy of a pretty cool independent label from Baltimore.

Die - Explosions in the Sky
Earth-Shaking Event - Cex
Real Quiet - Sonna
Way To Breathe, No Breath - Paul Newman

:: Dave Walker 14:04 (EST/EDT) [+]

The Tools That Make This Weblog Possible

I’ve arrived at a stable equilibrium as far as the tools that I use to prepare weblog entries and to work with the radio station. I want to mention them explicitly (for the search engines and my own historical purposes.)

Site editing/maintenance

Blosxom — content management
Hydra — template editing, content editing
Unicode Checker — HTML entity encoding, character set conversions
HumaneText Service — simplified markup for entries
WordService — text formatting shortcuts
Stickies — note-taking, temporary URL storage
AwkiAwki — FAQ maintenance
mp3info
NetPBM — image manipulation and conversions
TypeIt4Me — HTML tag macros

Radio station content preparation

Emusic — affordable supply of new independent label content
Lame — encoding CDs to MP3
Studio365 — uploading music for FFG static stream
Studio365Live — live broadcast tool for Dulcet
iTunes — playlist planning, MP3 tagging and file management
id3x — MP3 tagging and file management

last edit Wed Jul 2 11:16:13 EDT 2003

:: Dave Walker 14:03 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, May 11, 2003

Panoply

Today’s Dictionary.com Word of The Day is panoply, another of my favorite words. Did you know that the original name of the band Pixies was Pixies In Panoply, but was shortened because, well, because that was just silly?

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

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

Saturday, May 10, 2003

Dulcet 1 Playlist

Whee! It was a lot of fun. I’ll certainly be doing this again. Big ups to Aran & Jen, Karen & Mark, Tiffy, and anyone else who tuned in.

Intro: Star Trek (Original Series) Transporter Sequence, Mustard Yellow – Death By Chocolate
The Rainbow Fucking Connection – Tycho Brahe
All of You – The Bill Evans Trio
Icefall – Nobukazu Takemura
And You And I – Yes
Birthday – Sugarcubes
Cascading Celestial Giants – Drexciya
Green Eyes – Hüsker Du
All Of Me – Billie Holiday
Re-Hab – Stew
Last Night I Fell Again – Moose
Untitled – Interpol
The Man In The Dark Sedan – Snakefinger
What’s New, Pussycat? – Tom Jones
Oj Vilket Liv! – Komeda
Slack Mothefucker – Superchunk
Bitch Betta Have My Money – Ja Rule
Ni – Ten – Ichi – Ryu (Two Swords Technique) – Photek
Airwaves – Kraftwerk
‘Round Midnight – Thelonious Monk
Thoughts of Phutura: Axis Mix (pts. 1 & 2) – Claude Young
Eviscerate (Version) – Squarepusher
Interlaken – Alpinestars
Linus – Birdie
Summer – Mogwai
Gocard – Mouse On Mars
The Kind of Girl – The Zombies
Seeing Other People – Belle And Sebastian
New York Telephone Conversation – Lou Reed
I Wupped Batman’s Ass – Wesley Willis
Point Of View Point – Cornelius
Cross Bones Style – Cat Power
Big Day Coming – Yo La Tengo
Wolves, Lower – R.E.M.
A Blind Man’s Penis – John Trubee and the Ugly Janitors
You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends – The Wedding Present
Hypnotise (Autechre’s Slow Mix) – Lexis
No Way Back – Adonis
The Classical – the Fall
Pan – Hab
Old Man – Love

:: Dave Walker 16:59 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Dulcet 1

Tune in today, May 10, at 1PM EDT (17:00 GMT) for the first installment of Dulcet, a live broadcast from the Freeform Goodness Orbital Platform (via Live365.) There’ll be some rare material — it won’t suck much. I’ll be on AIM, dw808303.

bump: Dulcet starts in 1 hour.

:: Dave Walker 12:02 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Friday, May 09, 2003

WOTD

The Dictionary.com word of the day is lexicon. You’ve gotta love it when shit like that happens.

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

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

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

I Guess We’re On Their “Enemies List?”

Chris Gulker has discovered some interesting (and somewhat scary) spidering activity from the netblock of Cyveillance. I’ve certainly seen these guys a lot in my logs, and their visits certainly seem to increase in frequency when I stray towards certain hot-button topics: copyright, P2P, DRM, etc.

I guess it would be easy enough to block these guys on my firewall or .htaccess file, but I want to see how it all plays out.

:: Dave Walker 12:36 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, May 05, 2003

Matthew, I Just Don’t See It

Matthew Thomas’ post about the ideal weblogging system last week (justifiably) generated a fair amount of commentary. One of the points that seems to have generated the most dissent is the idea that the “ideal system” has to be database driven. As you might expect from a Blosxom proponent like myself, I don’t agree. He argues in a followup post today that this is a matter of data preservation:

Sure, it makes the system more brittle (and more difficult to install) in the short term, but it also makes it much less brittle in the long term. In the long term, you must be able to generate the presentation format dynamically.

But, as Sven-S. Porst writes:

I still don’t see the difference in functionality of abusing files as the database really. If in doubt, it will always be easier to recover your data from a bunch of text files than from a database.

About a month ago, I fell victim to a nasty bit of disk corruption where a number of files were being physically allocated to the same disk blocks. A number of binary files were completely trashed. It took me a while to figure out this was happening. They symptoms were that recently installed binaries would crash instantaneously on launch, or segfault, etc. The clue that finally tipped me off was when I opened a few text files and found their content intermixed, which is the sort of thing that becomes quickly obvious when comparing text files. I was up and running completely within a few hours of diagnosing the problem because I had no database to restore, no indexes to rebuild, and I could quickly tell, with an unaided eye, whether my weblog data was intact or not. I can back up my entire weblog now in about 90 seconds on a CDR, and, assuming I pick my media stock wisely, I’m pretty sure that I could read this data back 25 years from now and have something I can integrate into whatever personal publishing systems are then current, probably with a trivial bit of scripting and a search-and-replace to whack deprecated tags. The biggest problem will likely be linkrot.

Matthew asks: “if you’re going to make the files static, what format are you going to use?” He then mentions various flavors of HTML, XHTML, SGML, and even Troff as formats of the past and perhaps future. The beauty of text is that these formats, though semantically different, are all, at their base level of existence, the same darned thing: text files with tags. A bold new world of formats is never more than grep and a pipe away.

DBMSs are transient, tagged text is forever.

:: Dave Walker 17:35 (EST/EDT) [+]

Pretty Serifs Make Graves

Here are the latest updates to the static playlist. Next live show TBA.

Alcohol - Saturday Looks Good To Me
Alice in My Fantasies / Cosmic Slop - Spaceways Incorporated
She’s Really Daddy Feelgood - Stew
Storytelling - Belle And Sebastian
Three Hundred - Pilote
Tyger Tyger - Jah Wobble
Mary Mary - Brave Captain

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

Saturday, May 03, 2003

Synchronicity

First Item.
Second Item:

:: Dave Walker 14:51 (EST/EDT) [+]

Drive-By #12

Pompom.org.uk
Mutant Storm is inspired by Williams classic RoboTron, Smash TV and Jeff Minter’s fantastic Llamatron.

To those unacquainted, this means one hand controlling fire direction, and the other controlling movement. Sounds confusing? …don’t worry, just grab your trusty dual stick joypad and give it a go. Its very simple once you try, and very effective when you’re used to it.
Rude Food
As a subject, rude food can be roughly divided into three main areas: natural rude food, eg. mishapen carrots and bulbous courgettes, intentional rude food, eg. pasta pubes and Fat Bastard chardonnay, and the area that concerns us here, unintentional rude food, the product either of language differences or gross naivety.
Style.com: ITEM OF THE WEEK
When an accessory lets you flaunt your style, musical taste and tech skills and carry everything you need for the day, you know that form and function have finally fallen in love.
MITCH ALBOM: It’s back to the Palace!
ORLANDO — Ben Wallace leapt for a rolling rebound and rammed it through the rim. A minute later, he whacked a Gordan Giricek shot halfway to the Magic Kingdom. Two minutes later, Chauncey Billups, finishing the night of his NBA playoff life, banged home a three-pointer that silenced the crowd. And before you knew it, the Pistons were on their jet, waving good-bye to the city of Mickey and Minnie, with one question on their minds:

What are you doing Sunday?
[The Detroit Free Press]
AOL Kills Puppies [via Erosblog (nsfw)]
AOL has a rule in the fine print that says that we must NOT put a web link into any email!! Yep - it’s there in the fine print. Take a look.
Well I had our website ( www.amrt.net ) on the bottom of my email and someone ratted me out - saying they found the amrt.net website “offensive” - this is the site for dogs and cats in animal shelters - not a porn site.
So AOL went in and changed my password. Oh yes they sent me an email explaining why they had changed my password. But I never got that email - because they had changed my password. And I never got the email that told me a litter of puppies needed out of the Downey shelter NOW. And thanks to AOL those puppies died that night. And I was on the phone for over an hour trying to get my email back.

:: Dave Walker 10:55 (EST/EDT) [+]

Competition Is A Wonderful, Wonderful Thing

I’ve been an Emusic subscriber since 2000, shortly after they switched to their “all you can eat” pricing model. Despite some occasional problems (namely with their screwy search engine, which, in its own way, is more endearing than annoying), I think their monthly service, at $9.99 (US) has been (and remains) one of the best deals in existence for the music fan who wants access to music by a huge quantity of good (if not necessarily well-known) artists. Frankly, without Emusic, it would be almost impossible for me to host Freeform Goodness, since the steady flow of new music I get from the service is one of my secret weapons as far as keeping the stream fresh. That the music is supplied as completely unencumbered MP3 files is a wonderful bonus. It means that I can stream them without awkward runarounds, burn them onto CD even with my jury-rigged setup (my only CD-burner is strapped onto a Mac OS 9 machine for reasons too convoluted and boring to go into), and share the occasional (emphasis added) sample track with a friend without busting out the heavy warez artillery. The relative obscurity of the service’s catalog has always been more feature than bug to me, though I recognize that I’m in a serious minority on that score. The other substantive problem with Emusic was the sonic quality of the files. 128K CBR files (some apparently even encoded with the [gak] Xing encoder) are never going to be anyone’s definition of CD-quality, and occasionally you’d download a real stinker.

Frankly, before this week, no other legal online music service was even in the ballpark. Pressplay and MusicNet are a joke — the terms of use are so restrictive as to render them very nearly useless. The new iTunes Music Store is the first service outside of Emusic’s that’s had any real appeal to me at all. The 128K AAC files are audibly superior to Emusic’s old 128K MP3s, and the DRM is measurably less draconian than the Pressplay/Musicnet approaches.

Emusic responded to the competitive threat by switching to the wonderful LAME MP3 encoder and 192K VBR encoding as their default. Woohoo! LAME’s 192kbps VBR encoding is what I’ve been using for the past year as my default. I don’t claim to be an audiophile (I’ve been to far too many loud shows and raves to ever be able to claim perfect hearing again) but I do know that LAME’s 192k VBRs are indistinguishable from the source CDs to my ears in almost all circumstances. For as long as I’ve been a member (nearly 3 years), Emusic’s been talking about doing this, but in the end I suspect competitive pressures are what led them to pull the trigger on higher bitrates.

:: Dave Walker 01:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, May 02, 2003

Versionbastard

What the hell happened to Versiontracker? The new design is awful. It’s clearly designed to force searchers into more pageviews (and hence, more adviews) at the expense of usability. All the more reason to use Ben Moore’s MacUpdate Sherlock channel.

:: Dave Walker 10:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Shoutbox Spam

This ought to be self-evident, but I’ll make it explicit, Shoutbox spam will be deleted on sight. The Shoutbox is here for friends, old and new, not the bottom feeders that have ruined email, USENET, and everything else.

:: Dave Walker 14:20 (EST/EDT) [+]

Desafinado

I’m late to the party when it comes to talking about Apple’s new music initiatives, I suppose. I’ll try to avoid well-trod ground and add a few fresh (hah) observations.

New iPods: everyone knew these were coming, of course. They seem like an (incremental) improvement — even slimmer form-factor, higher capacities, etc. I would probably stand pat, but my little 5-gigger is looking long in the tooth compared to these 15 and 30-gig monsters so maybe now is the time to move. The docking station is an obvious win, and the USB2 support should make PC folk happy.
iTunes 4: the already superb app improves in a lot of small ways and a few big ones. Most heartening is that, for all the smoke some vendors blow about web services, Apple has been at the top of the heap as far as making them work in very real ways in their mainline applications. The completely fluid integration of Apple’s music store into iTunes is a perfect example. There are the usual interface niggles, but there are people far more qualified than me to take those on.
- Library sharing: initially, many expected the library sharing features would apply to LANs only, but clearly, they work across teh Intarweb as well.
- Digital “Rights” Management: I really hate DRM. My previous experiences with it, pertaining to music, have been pretty horrible. The DRM Apple has implemented seems to be fairly unobtrusive, but time will tell.
- MPEG4 AAC: Big ups. I generally encdode everything w/ LAME using alt-preset standard (~192kbps VBR), which is perfectly spiffy to my concert and club-wounded hearing. I’ve tried 128k and 160k AAC files, and the 160’s sound at least as good and encode in about a third of the time on my box. Win win. That said, MP3 will remain my primary format, at least for awhile, because of the massive amount of tools available for working with MP3 files, and the fact that Live365 compatability is ultimately the dealmaker/dealbreaker with me with any new format. If Live365 can deliver versions of its “Studio” apps that work with AAC, I’ll be all over them.
- Artwork/album covers: It seems like the actual picture data is embedded into the MP3/AAC files. Yes, this is probably wasteful of a few kilobytes per file, but it also is probably pretty bulletproof. Most of the other options (e.g. embedding references to external image files, etc.) are potentially more trouble than they’re worth (what happens when relative references break or cross filesystem lines, etc.) Hard drive space is cheap these days, right?
The Store: Undoubtedly the biggest news of the day was the new music store. I’d heard all sorts of rumors — some early reports were talking about songs at 25 cents per track, which would have obviously been stupendous. 99 cents is something I can work with. I do have some concerns, though.
1. Selection: I’m not going to be too critical here, as they’ve stated up front that they are still adding music to the service. I can only expect that the available catalogue will both broaden and deepen as time goes on. Still there are some things that definitely need attention:
  1. More labels: The “Big Five” labels were obviously the most important to sign for mass appeal to the service, but a beefy selection of indie labels will be crucially important when it comes to attracting serious record buyers (kooks like me who buy hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of music per year). Minimally, the “major indies” like Matador, Warp, Caroline Distribution, etc. need to be included, not to mention pacesetters like Thrill Jockey, Sympathy For The Record Industry, Morr Music, etc.
  2. Catalog ‘Breadth’: Many artists with major label affiliations are not present in the store at all. I went searching for old Human League and Midnight Oil records, for example, and found nothing, and these are bands that had #1 singles on majors! I imagine this will only get better, though.
  3. Catalog ‘Depth’: Many artists with large catalogs (e.g. Kraftwerk, OMD) are represented by skinny greatest hits compilations or sketchy “partial albums”. One of the great promises of electronic distribution was that it would allow consumers access to out-of-print recordings and scarce recordings, since no physical stock would have to be maintained in inventory by retailers. Please open the vaults!
2. Focus: I suppose they were responding to the oft-heard (but to my mind disingenuous) call of the file-sharer: “How many times have you bought an album only to find there was only one good song” (presumably the radio-saturated “hit single” - ugh, but that’s another rant…), but the initial iteration of the store seems to be unnaturally tilted towards the person who wants to cherry-pick songs from album and much less so towards the more sophisticated [ OK, it’s a presumptuous value judgement, but this is my blog and I can make them here :-P ] consumer of albums as complete artistic statements. There are far too many “partial albums” and greatest hits comps, and not enough complete artist catalogs for my taste. Hopefully this tilt will equalize somewhat as time goes on. Along these lines, it might be cool for Apple to partner with the All-Music Guide (and Downbeat and Trouser Press and Urb, Pitchfork Media etc.) to present artist profiles, etc., in the context of the store.

:: Dave Walker 01:37 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, April 28, 2003

Live Broadcasts

I’m going to be broadcasting live for the next couple of hours. IM me (AIM) at dw808303 if you have any comments, questions, requests, etc. If it goes well I’ll be doing this more often (and with more warning.)

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

:: [/station/live]
:: tags: live

Saturday, April 26, 2003

Ghosts of Net Past

I enjoyed Maciej Stachowiak’s post about finding really old Usenet posts by yourself (and others). The earliest post of mine I could find in the Google Groups archive dates back to 1990, though I know for certain that I was reading and posting on Usenet as far back as 1989. Even at that early date, my knack for providing partially yet essentially inaccurate information of dubious use is apparent.

It’s hard to stress how very different a place the internet was in 1990. There was almost no commercial traffic on the internet. As a matter of fact, one of the very first commerical enterprises, Brad Templeton’s Clarinet, didn’t start delivering newsfeeds (in many ways, the great great great grandparents of today’s RSS feeds) until well into 1989. Just about everyone with internet access had net access via a university or a governmental agency or their scientific contractors. The ISP, as conceived today, didn’t exist. The total number of people with regular internet access, globally, was probably in the tens (or low hundreds) of thousands. There was no spam. There were weenies, though. There will always be weenies.

Looking at the stuff with the benefit of hindsight is fun, though. I found a post where I mentioned some “cheap” hardware available at the time — a 13-inch color monitor and 1MB video card for the lowlow price of $800, in the context of a thread discussing whether the then brand-new JPEG compression format had a future.

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

Back on the air…

This week’s Drive-By will be up tomorrow morning. Thanks for hanging in there while I did some low level work around the house.

:: Dave Walker 13:57 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, April 24, 2003

“Waiting for the next, big thing…”

I Don’t Want To Know - The Zombies
Invisible Things - The Black Dog With Black Sifichi
The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This - Love
This Boy Can Wait - The Wedding Present

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

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

G’head, keep voting for these jokers

(via Kent Williams)

I just love living in a theocracy, don’t you? (link). I’m getting “Handmaid’s Tale” flashbacks.

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

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Where Your Spam Comes From

The Center for Democracy and Technology published a fascinating study of incoming spam they received at addresses that they’d made publically accessible in various ways. It’s a really cool article, well worth reading. It confirms some things that I think savvy surfers have suspected for a while. For example, the overwhelming majority of the spam was received by addresses that were posted bare (i.e. not obscured by Javascript or entity-encoding tricks) on web pages. Addresses posted to USENET got grabbed too, but to a far lesser extent. The article also provides some common sense advice for protecting your email address. One trick I’ve been using for a while is to produce one-time email addresses when I sign up for things. It’s trivial if you have control of your own email server. Here’s how it works in OS X’s NetInfoManager.

:: Dave Walker 11:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, April 21, 2003

Amble-By #1

Nice PA today. Hee.
Neat article on how 24’s on-set dresser/consistency expert uses a digital camera and laptop to avoid continuity glitches.
Madonna’s anti-P2P stunt apparently gets her 0wn3d.
The world’s foremost bitmap goddess now has typefaces for sale.

:: Dave Walker 17:58 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, April 20, 2003

Metametadiscussion?

The recent Scheißstürm (is that a real German slang word or am I just fronting? no idea…) illustrates that, for purposes of establishing identity in a long and contentious thread, trackbacks are more useful than comment entries. And don’t get me started on those plaintext excerpts again. I suppose trackbacking preëmptively is a good habit to get into, because if one manually sends a ping, at least you get to control what gets excerpted.

:: Dave Walker 18:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

Memo to “J.T.”

Hey guy, decaf next time.

I bet you think this song is about you
Don’t you
Don’t you?

Ease up, you’re going to strain a muscle or something.

I’d still like to know who took it upon themselves to “excerpt” that silly little entry, with important context links (namely, this one) stripped, when I made a point not to send a ping. I always thought those silly licenses people attach to their weblogs were bogus and unnecessary, but if people are going to be dumbasses I can see the reasons, at least from a CYA point-of-view.

edit: Why operating a keyboard after a night of drinking is usually a bad idea. If you’ve got anything to say about this, post it as a comment here, and leave poor Sam and his readers out of it.

edit: apparently it’s an automated referrer-chasing script. That restores my faith in humanity a bit — it’s good to know that no live human was involved in that appalling bit of context-free quoting. Excuse the “license” bit above as the rantings of someone operating under the influence of too little sleep and too much JT.

JT — no hard feelings. Peace.

:: Dave Walker 04:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

:: Comments (6)

Saturday, April 19, 2003

My, but wasn’t Ian Curtis an amazing vocalist?

I’m busting out the Joy Division for the first time in a while, and it’s reminding me how powerful a vocalist Ian Curtis was. It’s not that he was a “great singer” by current standards, but then, that hardly matters, does it, when you’re writing songs that great, and so perfectly suited to you?

I don’t want to sound like the sort of whiny old fuddy-duddy rocker guy I used to make fun of back when I had more hair, but I’d really like to see the pendulum swing away from oh-so-pretty-vacant and back towards records that stand as coherent statements. These things usually run in cycles, of course — remember, the Beatles and Stones drove out nonsense like Fabian, and the punks in ‘76-‘77 showed up in time to kick snoozy SoCal pop-rock and fatuous prog down the stairs, and Nirvana killed off hair metal… so who’s going to put an end to committee-written fluffy “Now That’s What I Call Music 48”?

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

Unhappy in teh trunk? We understand yoo!

“This is the way, step inside”

Okay, so Dave Winer ranted, and Mark Pilgrim parodied it, and then Dave Winer, um, exploded, spewing Manila-fragments all over poor Sam Ruby’s weblog.

:: Dave Walker 20:31 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Hey, Where’s the ‘B’ Word?

Gateway first quarter loss widens to $197.7 million; sales drop
Whenever newspapers used to run stories about Apple like this one about Gateway, they’d make sure they called the company beleaguered somewhere in the body.

:: Dave Walker 16:18 (EST/EDT) [+]

Drive-By #11

Slashdot Review: QCast Tuner for PS2
QCast Tuner is software that plays audio, video, and image files from your computer to your network adapter-equipped PS2. There are two pieces to the software, the PS2 DVD and the computer software (on a separate CD), for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. I used the Mac OS X version, of course. There’s a configuration utility to set up what you will share, and to what users/IP addresses. Then a separate program launches the server, which serves up the files and playlists. It’s all written in Java, which means the UI stinks, but it seems to work well. [Slashdot]

Ars Technica: QCast Tuner Review (4/2003)
By utilizing the networking kit available for the PlayStation 2, BroadQ’s QCast Tuner PS2 software can deliver digital media over a LAN from a PC to a networked Playstation2. This would allow any room with a ~$200 PS2 and networking connectivity (wireless or wired) to enjoy the kind of multimedia content that’s traditionally tied to a single PC. [Ars Technica]

Cloak of Anarchy
On this hot blue summer afternoon, King’s Free Park was as crowded as it ever gets.
Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the usual number of copseyes floated overhead, waiting. Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each with a television eye and a sonic stunner, each a hookup to police headquarters, they were there to enforce the law of the park.
[Known Space: The Unofficial Larry Niven Home Page]

Hedy Lamarr: From Celluloid to the Cellphone
She was considered one of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, but Hedy Lamarr never wanted to be known as just a pretty face. The same woman who said, “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid” was actually quite smart, some would say brilliant. In fact, she is credited for patenting a technology that is used every day. Hers is a story that is something right out of… well… Hollywood. [TechTV]

RSS via NNTP?
It’s 2003 — are we really building RSS aggregators that pull a feed a thousand times to feed a thousand customers? USENET and RSS have a common transmission pattern where small messages from diverse sites are often redistributed to locally clustered users, so why are we pulling so much XML when we already know how to fix it?

…
a poster responded:

Well, just to get the flamewar started: NNTP is the most horrendously evil pathetic rotten useless crappy protocol that ever there was. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, because all the NNTP *software* was much worse. (I say “was”, not because it got better, but because nobody cares anymore.)
[Advogato]

Bitstream/Gnome Release Vera Font Family
Gnome and Bitstream have released the final version of the Vera font family. Go get it, install them, and enjoy! They work for Windows and Mac users too!
Our earlier story. [Slashdot]

Can’t I trust anyone these days to tell me if an album is any good?
I know it’s late, and I’m probably flogging a dead horse, but when it comes to pop punditry I just don’t know who to trust any more.
…
What strikes me about pop criticism of late - and this afflicts the broadsheets as well - is the tyranny of received opinion. I have yet to meet anyone, obsessive fan or otherwise, who thinks the last two Nick Cave albums come close to 1997’s The Boatman’s Call in terms of emotional depth and songwriting skill, but both releases were greeted with an across-the-board acclaim that bordered on instilled reverence, and an attendant lack of critical rigour. Likewise Beck’s last few album releases since the ground-breaking Odelay. I mean, do you really reach for Sea Change or Midnite Vultures when you need a fix of Beck?
[The Observer]

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

Friday, April 18, 2003

Boobie Chorus Line, plus plus

I suppose this might be unsafe for work, if I could figure out what the hell it is. More über-weirdness from Japan.

:: Dave Walker 18:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, April 17, 2003

I Wonder What Natalie Portman Would Do To Them?

Memo to myself:
Feeding puppies warm grits is an extremely simple way to render them unconscious. The little guys ate their fill, then promptly fell asleep where they were standing. This is pretty much the only peace I’ve had all day . Pictures coming if I can unbreak my camera. There are three boys left, the two little girls found homes a little over a week ago.

:: Dave Walker 19:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Stop the humanoid — STOP THE INTRUDER

:: Dave Walker 10:26 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

Everyone Knows It’s Win-dy

I’m self-indulgently listening to my own stream today, and Windy by the Association just came on. If there was ever a more mindlessly lightweight yet catchy pop song, I don’t know what it could be. Anyone who’s ever suffered in my presence can tell you that I have a real weak spot for musical cheeze-wiz. There’s something about the crassly commercial music of the 1960s and early 1970s, in particular that just sends me into paroxysms of giggling… and, I might add, barely suppressed admiration. So if you were wondering why sometimes the stream goes from, say, Panacea to Paul Mauriat, that’s the explanation.

:: Dave Walker 12:37 (EST/EDT) [+]

Boomboxical Delights

…it’s a stream of conch iz elliot ness

Figure Skating Soiree - Md
If I Were Brave - Wendy & Lisa
The Things Love Makes You Do - Metropolis
Winter A-Go-Go - Yo La Tengo

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

Tuesday, April 15, 2003

Quick links

(I’m playing around with Bookmark Blogger, which seems to be a pretty nice tool for mindless link propagation for those of us using Safari and Blosxom)

:: Dave Walker 00:37 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, April 14, 2003

v73

There’s a new legal Safari beta. I haven’t really banged on it yet, but there seem to be improvements (over the ancient v60) everywhere.

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

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

Textile Service

I always liked the idea of Dean Allen’s Textile, but it didn’t really fit into my workflow. Someone was clever enough to package it up as a Mac OS X service, which allows me to use it as a filter, inline in my text editor. Dammit, that’s just clever.

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

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

Saturday, April 12, 2003

Drive-By #10

Got $21,000? I’ve got a TV for you
Mitsubishi Digital Electronics America Inc. today announced the “largest-ever” HDTV, the new 82-inch Mitsubishi Alpha Widescreen HDTV.

The new television features 1,080 by 1,920 resolution, Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LcoS) reflective LCD technology, super-high precision optics and “the highest performance digital receiver and processing circuits ever created by Mitsubishi Electric,” the company said in a press release. Mitsubishi said the TV would cost about $20,999. [Network World Fusion]

TV’s boldest news show
It helps (comedy, at least) to have plutocratic religious fanatics with imperialist ambitions occupying the White House, and “The Daily Show” has been at the forefront in finding a new way to make political humor in the age of Dubya. [Salon]

Identifont - identify fonts and typefaces
Welcome to Identifont®, the unique font identifier that enables you to identify a font from a sample by answering a series of simple questions. It is ideal if you want to match an existing typeface, or identify a typeface you have seen in a publication.

Sex in the Stacks - Librarian Porn Novel Reviews
Anyone who has ever checked out a book knows the stereotype about librarians: Thick glasses. Hair pinned up in a bun.

Nymphomaniacs. [ChipRowe.com]

Korea’s ‘lucky’ triplets seized
ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.
The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime. [Victoria Herald Sun]

Need a Way to Use 225m of Blue Duct Tape?
In Canada, when engineers finish their undergraduate degree, they attend a ceremony referred to as Kipling. Alongside the formal ceremony are the kipling pranks. This year, the Software Engineers at McMaster University designed a life sized Pac-Man board, thus answering the question of whether or not software engineering is in fact engineering. [/.]

:: Dave Walker 11:15 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, April 11, 2003

First of a few more

Updating the playlist.

Cresta La Wave - Alpinestars
Fighting The Monster - Martha And The Muffins
LEO9 - Klute
Vanessa From Queens - Stephen Malkmus
You Got A Problem With Me - Push Button Objects

:: Dave Walker 11:00 (EST/EDT) [+]

www . welovethe iraqiinformation minister . com

“This site is a coalition effort of bloodthirsty hawks and ineffectual doves united in admiration for Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information (currently on administrative leave).”

:: Dave Walker 07:39 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/currentevents/war-HUH-good-god-yall]
:: tags: war-HUH-good-god-yall

Monday, April 07, 2003

Stump

One of my more treasured records is the album A Fierce Pancake by the band Stump. It’s a really cool record, sonically inventive and whimsical, and entirely unlike anything else I was hearing at the time (circa 1988.) I believe I first came across the band when MTV’s old “120 Minutes” video program (back in its 1980s, pre-suck incarnation) played the video for “Chaos,” which was riveting both sonically and visually. On the strength of that single and an extremely positive review I read somewhere (memory fails me), I picked up their one and only US album. I didn’t know that bassist/arranger/etc. Kev Hopper had a website until today. It’s fascinating, and shows what he’s been up to musically since Stump dissolved.

If you ever happen to run across a copy of the album in a used bin, tackle it on sight. It was only in print for a millisecond, it seems, and is quite sought after among collectors. It would seem to be a natural subject for a reissue, but what do I know?

:: Dave Walker 17:34 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, April 06, 2003

Ugh.

Apparently, at some point a few days ago, my server’s primary partition developed some sort of subtle directory corruption which allowed pieces of files to randomly overwrite each other. As you might imagine, this is not a good thing. I’m still not entirely sure exactly when/why this happened, but it’s made the last few days rather entirely unpleasant. I’m limping along now, but it definitely reminds me that it’s time to stand up a separate box so that my primary workstation and my web/mail server aren’t one and the same, and to invest in some sort of budget RAID solution. I am now going to get several, blissful hours of uninterrupted sleep.

Oh yeah, obviously, this nonsense is the reason I wasn’t able to do a Drive-By yesterday (breaking my string of Saturdays.) This feature will return next week.

:: Dave Walker 07:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, April 05, 2003

My server crashed

Um… my server’s a mess. This page is a mess because I’m running on an old version of Blosxom with no plugin support. Damn. I have a lot of work to do…

:: Dave Walker 00:34 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, April 04, 2003

Javascript Stylesheet Toggler

I added a javascript stylesheet toggler, which might be useful to those who have problems with the serifed font or light text on a dark background. The “readable” style is exceptionally ugly, I know, but I’ll work on it. As always, feedback (positive or negative or otherwise) is appreciated.

:: Dave Walker 11:23 (EST/EDT) [+]

Wednesday, April 02, 2003

New Mozilla Roadmap

The Mozilla Project has unveiled their latest development roadmap, and there are two really big bits of news to be found there:

The large, integrated Navigator browser project, which integrates a web browsing front-end with a mail/news client, HTML composer, etc., is being replaced with smaller, more focused subprojects, based on Phoenix and Thunderbird (neé Minotaur.)
They’re tightening up module ownership, which should (theoretically) result in higher quality code and more strongly focused project management.

There are other significant changes (e.g. moving to Mozilla 1.4 as the recommended stable baseline branchm etc.), but the two changes above are the ones that are probably the biggest deals. Best of luck to them.

:: Dave Walker 18:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Kim Jong Il has a LiveJournal

Heh. This is pretty good.

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

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

Tuesday, April 01, 2003

Freeform Goodness, Clear Channel Announce Merger

ECORSE, Michigan—April 1, 2003—Freeform Goodness™, the internet radio arm of the vast Freeke™ empire, today announced its merger with Clear Channel™ Worldwide, one of “America’s Most Admired Companies”, according to Fortune magazine. Freeform Goodness™ CEO David Walker released a statement from his chalet in Davos, Switzerland:

It was obvious from the very beginning that our philosophy of musical programming was completely in sync with that of Clear Channel. Clear Channel’s respect for musical diversity, artistic integrity, local station autonomy, and fair competition is a perfect match to our core values.

Freeform Goodness is happy to announce its latest playlist additions, the first product of Clear Channel’s award winning musical market research.

In Da Club - 50 Cent
I’m With You - Avril Lavigne
Cry Me A River - Justin Timberlake
Beautiful - Christina Aguilera
Bump, Bump, Bump - B2K & P. Diddy
I Drove All Night - Celine Dion
Misunderstood - Bon Jovi
Somewhere I Belong - Linkin Park

:: Dave Walker 00:02 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/station/announcements]
:: tags: announcements

Monday, March 31, 2003

The Java Mistake

“The street finds its own uses for things”
—William Gibson

Microsoft acted decisively to squash Java on the desktop, viewing it as a threat to their desktop hegemony. In a sense, it worked. Desktop Java isn’t really something that an ISV can depend on, since approximately 90% of the world’s desktop computers will have either a substandard JVM or no JVM at all.

A funny thing happened on the way to world domination, though. I don’t know whether to credit Sun with a coherent strategy (I suspect not), or whether it was the unified resourcefulness of all of the thousands of Java developers who collectively figured out a way around the 800-pound gorilla. Rather than beating their heads against the MS (desktop) brick wall, Java developers (assisted by the not-inconsequential muscle of large players like IBM, Oracle, etc.), transformed Java into a formidable player in the server rooms and corporate in-house application development. Java morphed into the “COBOL of the 00’s”, ensuring that programmers who put the effort into learning the language back in the “applet days” of the 1990’s would be able to earn a livelihood for the forseeable future. Additionally, hobbyist/enthusiast developers are doing all sorts of cool middleware/web services development using Java as a platform. Projects like nntp//rss and Zoë are cool and inherently cross-platform.

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

Sunday, March 30, 2003

WTF? Michigan boldly enters the technological future, ass first!

Sometimes I wonder why I still live here.

:: Dave Walker 13:41 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, March 29, 2003

Drive-By #9

DMCA critics decry state-level proposals
WASHINGTON—Critics of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act said Friday that they were disturbed by proposals for similar laws at the state level.
Quietly, opponents said, with few people paying close attention, state legislators are considering bills that would be even broader than the controversial DMCA, which restricts bypassing copy-protection measures.[CNet News.com]

50 Best Pocket-sized Gadgets for 2003
A pen that receives FM radio; a talking keyring; a lighter that will also open bottles: they’ll all fit into your pocket, so in terms of consumption, these gadgets are less than conspicuous [The Independent]

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™
The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) is a club for scientists who have, or believe they have, luxuriant flowing hair. [The Annals of Improbable Research]

Gratuitously Gratuitous
A World of Girls Kissing. (probably only SFW if your boss is really cool.)

BitTorrent 3.2
- Better network utilization
- More even and consistent download rates
- Read-only files now supported for seeding
- The Windows build now takes command line arguments
- Several bug fixes

:: Dave Walker 11:01 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, March 28, 2003

New Layout

Okay, be honest — Does it suck? I can take it. Oh yeah, I know It’s probably really, really broken in 4.x browsers (and OmniWeb), but then, if you surf with one of those then you’re used to everything on teh Intarweb looking messed up, anyway. It works better in Lynx (and Links), though, because all the nav links are at the end in those browsers.

:: Dave Walker 12:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: Comments (9)

Addendum to nntp/rss post

BTW, nntp//rss gives you the option of serving the entries as text, html, or multipart-alternative. Historically, HTML in newsgroup posts has been the work of Satan, but since you’re not posting anything, it’s actually a pretty nice way to read feeds. Mozilla’s much-maligned Mail/News client does an excellent job with this stuff, really.

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

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

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Using a newsreader as a… newsreader

I mean, using a Usenet newsreader as an RSS feed reader. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard about someone playing with the idea of integrating RSS feeds into a Usenet framework, but this is the easiest to use implementation I’ve seen so far. nntp//rss (version 0.3) is a java application, so it runs on pretty much everything. It presents a standard-looking NNTP interface on port 119, so (theoretically) you should be able to read your favorite RSS feeds in any minimally compliant Usenet newsreader. This is the sort of thing that really appeals to fossils like me who’ve been reading Usenet forever. Though there are lots of specialty features a good dedicated RSS reader can offer that some of these old fossil apps aren’t going to support, but the sort of people who have been reading Usenet for years have their own workflows that something like this can integrate with.

:: Dave Walker 10:57 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

24…Kim

I still love 24 — I think it’s every bit as good as it was last season, except for one thing: I am so sick of the Kim Bauer “Perils of Pauline” subplot. Even worse, I think the actress is sick of it, and it’s dragging the show down unnecessarily.

:: Dave Walker 22:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, March 24, 2003

The left side’s shock, the right side’s awe

:: Dave Walker 10:49 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/currentevents/war-HUH-good-god-yall]
:: tags: war-HUH-good-god-yall

Sunday, March 23, 2003

Sneak peek at the new layout

It’s still a little (lotta) rough, but if you’d like a sneek peek at the new layout (no tables [almost — it won’t have any when I’m finished]), it’s here. I don’t particularly like the colors (expect them to change), and the font sizes need to be adjusted, I think. It’s based on the 3-column layout from here.

:: Dave Walker 22:53 (EST/EDT) [+]

Just this once, I promise

I’d made a conscious and deliberate decision to stop (or more accurately, not start) making war posts, because anyone who wants to soak up the Shock-n’-Awe™ has more than enough media outlets catering to that whim. The following quote was too funny to let pass by, though (via CNN):

Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Sahef said the real situation in Umm Qasr is different from its portrayal in the media.

“Those Iraqi fighters, those heroes at Umm Qasr, are teaching the American and British invaders a lesson,” he said. “Those Iraqi fighters are slapping those gangsters on the face, and then when they flee, they will kick their backsides.”

He then added: “Beeyotch!”

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

:: [/currentevents/war-HUH-good-god-yall]
:: tags: war-HUH-good-god-yall

Saturday, March 22, 2003

Drive-By #8

Danger Hiptop SDK contains an example SSH client
This was the absolute MOST!

Here are some screenshots of me logging in via SSH, doing a ‘top’ command, screen, BitchX, pine, and links….

I want this on my SK now!!

=D [bANANACHUNKS]

Um, OK.
The Women in Waders™ calendar makes a great gift for your buddy, your relative and yourself. Let the 12 beautiful Women in Waders™ take you on a year long trip to some of the best fishing locations. Go to the ocean for perch, to lakes for bass, to trout filled streams, or to rivers full of salmon and steelhead.[Women In Waders]

American Criminals Take “Mafia Lessons” in Italy
Members of the Mafia in America were sent across the pond to perfect the criminal trade from pros in Sicily, according to a turncoat don. Antonino Giuffrè, arrested in 2002, confirmed FBI reports that members of the Bonanno crime family in the US were sent to the province of Trapani for training.
…
One of the hardest lessons of an effective criminal organization to teach the Americans? To shut up. Giuffé said the code of silence, or omertà, was alien to the garrulous Americans: "They just couldn't stay quiet, they always talk too much." The improvised professors of crime were Cosa Nostra dons who agreed to take in the Americans on a learning-by-doing tour of how things are done in the old continent. [Zoomata]

Um, you had your hand in a shark tank, dumbass
Menke said she and her daughter had their hands in the water, hoping to pet a small approaching shark that a woman monitoring the tank said was friendly. That’s when another passing shark whipped around and bit her hand, she said.
…
“If that thing had bitten my baby, I’d still be taking that place apart,” Menke said.[WOKR-TV 13 Rochester]

Fun with Chemistry
Why I became a chemist, lesson 1: explosions, pretty colors, and dry ice. This page lists some interesting chemical reactions, captured in moderately sized QuickTime movies. Well worth a few minutes of your time if you care at all to see chemistry in action. [NSLog();]

Men attempting (unsuccessfully) to conceal the fact that they’re going bald.[combovers.co.uk]

:: Dave Walker 12:02 (EST/EDT) [+]

Ooo, the Rain Playlist Update

Catalyst - Isis
Maxi On! - Takako Minekawa
Special Delivery - MC Frontalot
US Forces - Midnight Oil

:: Dave Walker 10:39 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, March 21, 2003

American Ideal

I didn’t watch American Idol at all last season. Being my usually snobby self, I figured that a competition that was very deliberately aimed at selecting the most commercially viable and mainstream acceptible STAR would have very little entertainment value for a smug, insufferable indie snob like myself. Though it’s not “must see” or anything (like 24 or the Dead Zone), I have caught more than one episode of the current season. It’s usually entertaining, though I find the host unbearable. Though I can admire the effort the candidates are putting forth, it does seem a shame that only conventionally attractive people with voices suited for singing mainstream pop and R&B are realistically eligible for the competition. I think about the fact that many of my favorite “singers” (vocalists, really, because I’m sure many of them wouldn’t call what they do singing, necessarily) would never even get past the first cut of such a competitition. There’s no room for someone who sounds like Björk or Sam Prekop or Colin Newman or Stephin Merritt (let alone the real oddballs like Stan Ridgway or Mark E. Smith…)

:: Dave Walker 23:53 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

10, 9 , 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Current events had me thinking about one of my very favorite 80’s records, Midnight Oil’s 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1. The sound on this record is really weird — it’s got a strange, maximally processed drum sound (all the more prominent because Rob Hirst is such a f’ing amazing drummer) and all sorts of odd, delicate synth flourishes, all with Peter Garrett alternately ranting and lamenting. The songs are incredible — what the anthems lack in subtlety they make up for in singalong catchiness (“US Forces”), reckless abandon (“Only The Strong”, “Power and the Passion” [which features one of the few musically useful drum solos in the history of recorded rock music], “Read About It”), and texture (“Outside World”, “Tin Legs and Tin Mines”.)

The following album, Red Sails In The Sunset, was almost, but not quite as good, but the succeeding ones went way over the line into preachy for me.

:: Dave Walker 22:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, March 20, 2003

Optimus Prime heading to the Middle East

Thanks to Mike Brown for pointing this out:

CUYAHOGA FALLS — A member of Ohio’s 5694th National Guard Unit in Mansfield legally changed his name to a Transformers toy.

:: Dave Walker 00:29 (EST/EDT) [+]

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

419 from far, far away

FROM: GRIMHELM WORMTONGUE

DUNLAND

Dear
sir and/or madame,

Salutations, I am GRIMHELM WORMTONGUE, The son of late Counsellor Grima Wormtongue of the Kingdom of Rohan.

My father was Chief Counsellor [equivalent to Prime Minister] to late lamented king Theoden of Rohan. In his position my father altogether legally and correctly acquired significant assets throughout Rohan in order to protect the Kingdom from enemy forces within and without.

In the course of lamentable events succeeding, my father was illegally deprived of office and expelled from the Kingdom. Before this he had with foresight already entirely legally deposited the sum of M.500,000,000,000 in gold with the Bank of Gondor (Minas Tirith). While in exile in the north he was assaulted and murdered by a band of northern pigmies. His family was obliged to seek refuge in northern Dunland among some of our sympathisers.

My father left to me all documents necessary to retrieve the sum of gold aforesaid from the Bank of Gondor (Minas Tirith). However, in the current political circumstances my solicitor believes it unwise for me to attempt to make the trip from Dunland to Minas Tirith, and has recommended that I seek a trustworthy foreign business partner into whose account this money could be tranferred. This appears to be the best option as we are unable to open an account in Dunland. Therefore we are seeking your trustworthy assistance and cooperation.

You will provide information about your account that will enable a deposit to be made in your name. I will contact the Bank of Gondor (Minas Tirith) and inform them that the money is to be placed into your account. Upon completion of the transaction your share of the proceeds will be 15% net following deduction of all transfer fees, that is M. 75,000,000,000. If the transaction goes well we also look forward to maintaining you as a profitable business partner for future ventures.

It goes without saying that I can expect your complete confidence and secrecy in keeping this matter under wraps prefatory to completion.

Please reach me at my email address: mbrandybuck@buckland.net

Thank you and ERU bless.
MR. GRIMHELM WORMTONGUE.

this came across a mailing list I’m a member of…

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

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

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Undeciding

I see Dave Hyatt’s weblog has developed DID and split into fractions. He decided that all of the Safari-related stuff was overwhelming his personal content. I hope the new setup goes well for him, though I find that some of my favorite weblogs are the ones that freely mingle the techy/professional with the whimsical/personal.

When I first started playing with the idea of doing a weblog, I was simply going to make a little occasional news page for the station to replace the old, anemic one. Yeah, I guess I could have done that, but the whole Freeform Goodness ethos is driven by the idea that there aren’t neat little dividers between things, between the personal and the professional, between the technical and the squishy, between the math rock and the one-note sambas. I decided that if I was going to do a page I’d actually keep updating, the only “true” thing to do was to make the log as self-indulgent, incoherent, and idiosyncratic as the station. It works for me, but then I’m one of those low-traffic guys who doesn’t exactly burn up the charts on Technorati.

:: Dave Walker 19:01 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, March 16, 2003

AOL is silently dropping your mail

Note to those of you using AOL as your ISP (I’m especially directing this to some members of my family) — AOL has implemented an anti-spam strategy that relies on brute-force rather than intelligence. They are now dropping inbound mail based on the MAPS DUL, which is practically guaranteed to throw the baby out with the bath water. Because my IP address is in a DHCP range, AOL treats me as though I were Alan Ralsky or something, rather than a responsible admin who has never sent a single spam or allowed a spammer to relay using his resources.

At times like this, I really do wonder why the heck AOL bought Netscape. After all, the Mozilla project, the basis of the Netscape browser, has actually implemented intelligent spam filtering, and Apple has very successfully implemented latent semantic analysis in a widely deployed, real world mail client, so we’re definitely outside the realm of theory here. Instead of putting these sorts of smarts to work in their client, AOL puts out press releases.

My recommendation to end-users is to go with an ISP who lets you decide what’s spam and what isn’t, and provides you with intelligent tools that help you block the mail that you want to. And if I owe you email and you haven’t gotten it, maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t my fault. ;-)

:: Dave Walker 17:04 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/administrivia/contact]
:: tags: contact

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Drive-By #7

More Drivel From News.Com
His article starts by asking the question “What if Netscape had Won?” Well, first off, that’s a pointless question, because it was absolutely impossible for Netscape to “win” against Microsoft once Microsoft bundled their browser with the operating system. Sure, technically Internet Explorer 4 was superior to Netscape 4, but even if Netscape 4 hadn’t been inferior, would it have mattered? No, of course not. Just look at how far beyond Internet Explorer other browsers have gone, and do they have any substantial market share? No. [Surfin’ Safari]

Chinese try mobile death vans
Hmm… let’s not give Texas any ideas…
China is equipping its courts with mobile execution vans as it shifts away from the communist system’s traditional bullet in the head, towards a more “civilised” use of lethal injection. [The Age]

Bush The Articulate - Hearing Voices
As I watched Bush give his recent speech I realized that his eyes wandered from right to left and from left to right. It was obvious that he was not reading from a TelePrompTer. Also I noticed that there were long pauses between his sentences. On queue he would look left and then right before beginning his next sentence. It soon became apparent to me what was going on and why President Bush had suddenly become erudite.
…
Using a small earpiece a FM signal is broadcast into the ear of the narrator. Another voice reads the dialogue and the signal is sent to the earpiece. The narrator hears the words in his ear and uses this as his prompt.
[rense.com]

Flying sheep’s head fractures fan’s skull at Norwegian death metal concert
Norwegian death metal band MAYHEM were involved in one of the most bizarre rock accidents last night (March 9) when a flying sheep’s head fractured a fan’s skull.
Lead singer Maniac was carving up a dead sheep as part of the stage act in Bergen when the animal’s head flew off, striking Per Kristian Hagen, 25.
According to Metro, Hagen was recovering in hospital last night and said: “My relationship with sheep is a bit ambivalent now. I like them, but not when they come flying through the air. I have a headache now.”
[New Musical Express]

Prisoners sew mouths shut to protest against conditions
Brazilian prisoners have sewn their mouths shut and tied themselves to crosses to protest against their conditions in a Bolivian jail.
…
They told Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that conditions in the jail are terrible and many of them are in constant fear of being murdered.
[Ananova]

:: Dave Walker 12:06 (EST/EDT) [+]

Third verse, same as the first

More “American Idol” past winners:

Catherine Says - The Aislers Set
Fern - Norken
Isolation - Joy Division
Severed Finger Samba - Akufen

:: Dave Walker 09:35 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, March 14, 2003

When you download MP3s, you’re financing TERROR!

I just keep waiting for the moment when someone nudges me in the ribs and says “just kidding,” but it never comes.

I think Tycho puts it best here:

John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, did say there seems to be some connection between illegal copying and organized crime, in that many of the groups profiting from illegal copies are highly organized and can have international distribution networks. Organized crime often supports terrorism, he suggested.

“These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations,” Malcolm said.

This is the first statement I have ever read where Manga speechlessness - “…” - is the only valid response.

:: Dave Walker 13:16 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

I am 2 of 3

I am playlist, hear me roar.

Aphasia - Bardo Pond
I’m A Ghost - Ted Leo And The Pharmacists
Kites Are Fun - Tomorrow’s World
Le Roi Soleil - Kahimi Karie
We Can Fly - Loveletter

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

Thursday, March 13, 2003

There’s a new “Get Your War On”

Devastating freedom smackdown. I can’t credibly talk about a government that parodies itself. Memo to the rest of the world — Americans aren’t really all this freaking stupid.

:: Dave Walker 16:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

First of three quick playlist updates

Ain’t That Funny - Missy Elliott
Arrival - Florence
The Drinking Eye - Arab Strap
In A World Gone Mad… - Beastie Boys
Sonic Sunset .Calm Mix - Model 500

:: Dave Walker 08:13 (EST/EDT) [+]

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Really good Mitch Easter interview

North Carolina newspaper the News and Observer ran a really good interview with legendary indie-rock producer Mitch Easter. I thought the following paragraph was really poignant:

“As a joke, I was recently telling some of my more philosophical rock-recording buddies, ‘You’ve become Delta bluesmen,’” Easter says. “It’s true. Playing rock, you’re in a historical niche now.”

:: Dave Walker 13:20 (EST/EDT) [+]

Cue Jan Hammer…

Why the hell would Don Johnson have $8 Billion (US) in his suitcase? Talk about weird… I have a feeling this will turn out to be every bit as strange as the DeLorean case back in the 80’s.

:: Dave Walker 12:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Reason #65535 why the DMCA sucks ass

Overzealous reactions to takedown notifications can and do severely damage real people and organizations. The “guilty until proven innocent” provisions mean that complaints that used to be handled via a single email between interested parties very quickly devolve into a real denial of service for people that aren’t even necessarily related to the “infringer.” In this case, an upstream provider actually deleted a customer’s SQL database, which had to be restored from backup. How crazy is that?

:: Dave Walker 10:37 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, March 09, 2003

New (local) comments, other cool staffs

Comments and trackbacks are now handled locally via Rael Dornfest’s new “Writebacks” commenting engine. Benefits include faster page loading (eliminated a dependency on an external site and script) and increased customization. Expect the look of the comments page to evolve. Also, I juggled the sidebar a bit. As usual, if I broke shit, let me know.

:: Dave Walker 15:14 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, March 08, 2003

$2 at Taco Bell

Security Guard:: “Yeah, Mike, what’s up?”
Manager:: “This guy is trying to give me some [pause] funny money.”
Guard:: “Really? What?”
Manager:: “Get this, a two dollar bill.”
Guard:: “Why would a guy fake a $2 bill?” [incredulous]
Manager:: “I don’t know? He’s kinda weird. Says the only other thing he has is a fifty.”
Guard:: “So, the fifty’s fake?”
Manager:: “No, the $2 is.”
Guard:: “Why would he fake a $2 bill?”
Manager:: “I don’t know. Can you talk to him, and get him out of here?”
Guard:: “Yeah…”

[via Electric Escape]

:: Dave Walker 18:09 (EST/EDT) [+]

Drive-By #6

No, I don’t want to “feel your Flying V”
Is the iconography intentional, or is this guy just clueless? Er, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The BALANCE Act of 2003
For over one hundred years, copyright law has aspired to strike a fair balance between the interests of copyright holders in the control and exploitation of their works with the interests of society in the free flow of ideas, information and commerce. The great challenge today is to maintain that balance in the digital age by finding ways to prevent and punish digital pirates without treating every consumer as one. The Benefit Authors without Limiting Advancement or Net Consumer Expectations (BALANCE) Act of 2003 achieves this, and does so without utilizing government mandates or other prescriptive measures that ultimately only serve to stifle innovation. [Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, California, 16th District]

Insert your own “Dell Dude” joke here
Doughty was jailed Sunday on suspicion of shooting his Dell computer four times with a revolver earlier that day in the middle of the Sportsman’s Inn Bar and Restaurant.

He then allegedly hung the destroyed laptop on the wall “like a hunting trophy,” said Lt. Rick Bashor with the Lafayette Police Department. [The Daily Camera]

RIAA’s ‘Hide The Website’ game moves to Virginia
The RIAA’s travelling “Hide The Website” gameshow rolled into Virginia this week, with a new hosting company given the privilege (or curse) of looking after one of the world’s most reviled web destinations. … This time, it’s an accounting firm in Arlington, VA called Kilday CPA. [The Register]

Movement 2003 — Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival
Fans will find a three-day techno party at Hart Plaza on Memorial Day weekend, but it won’t be the Detroit Electronic Music Festival.

After three years of the DEMF, a different name will grace the riverfront marquee this year: Movement 2003 — Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival. [The Detroit Free Press]

The Terror-o-meter
Someone’s actually gone and built a meter which gauges the world’s level of terror by connecting to the Internet and continually analysing the appearance of certain terror-related keyworks in global news feeds. As if anyone really needs a constant, easy-to-read reminder of the distressing state of the world right in front of them at all times. You could just leave Fox News on all day and achieve the same effect.
Read [Via StreetTech] [Gizmodo]

:: Dave Walker 12:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, March 07, 2003

Choice is good: Just for a day

Because we should never become too reliant on a single tool, and because I think these folks have a few good points, as an experiment I’m going to use search engines other than Google every Friday. The Google of today is a far cry from the one I fell in love with two or three years ago. Their search results and speed are probably still second-to-none, but the accumulation of not-so-cool over the last little while (their lack of detail regarding how much information they retain about individual search histories, the weird Pyra purchase, etc.), and their growing potential as a single “choke point” in the web’s overall ecosystem worry me. The ‘new’ Google is omnipotent enough to spawn its own neologism (‘Googling’) and corporate enough to bitch about it. For today, at least, I’ve added an entry to my /etc/hosts file:

66.77.74.20 	www.google.com

which will direct all my search queries (including those invoked from the built-in search fields of applications like Safari) to AllTheWeb, which has done a potentially lawyer-hardon-engendering job of supporting Google’s search API with a minimal, bannerless UI.

:: Dave Walker 06:18 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/web]
:: tags: web

Thursday, March 06, 2003

Safari “TITLE” attribute support

Dave Hyatt mentions that better support for the TITLE attribute (via tooltips) and for the <ABBR> and <ACRONYM> tags is on the way, which makes me very happy. That makes me happy? Wow, I need a life.

:: Dave Walker 17:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Wednesday, March 05, 2003

Oooo, pretty!

I found this link on Asa Dotzler’s weblog. Wow, these are gorgeous.

:: Dave Walker 13:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

Monday, March 03, 2003

Spammers are fast SOBs

I posted that Jabber entry Saturday night at about 11:30PM. I included my JID, marmoset@jabber.freeke.org, in the message, and I know for certain that was the first time that address ever appeared in any searchable form on the Intarweb. It’s not an email address, it just looks like one. At 2:09 PM today, about 38 hours later, I got a 419 scam email (you know, “I urgently need help moving 5 million dollars out of the country, blah blah blah…”) aimed at that address, but bounced to my postmaster box because it didn’t resolve. I imagine the spammers’ address harvesters are keying on the weblogs.com and/or blo.gs update lists. Evil.

:: Dave Walker 19:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

Further Taiwanese Spam

I love the politely worded unsubscribe link:

對不起！打擾了，如果因此造成您的困擾，請直接刪除本信及點選下方「不想再收信」，我們會將您的資料刪除！

Sorry! Has disturbed, if therefore creates your puzzle underneath, please directly deletes this letter and the spot elects “not to want again to receive a letter”, we can yours information deletion!

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

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

Did I wake you?

Dude, it’s called a comb — look into it.

:: Dave Walker 11:44 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/humor/photoshop]
:: tags: photoshop

Sunday, March 02, 2003

Navigation changes

I’ve made a few site changes that should make the weblog a little easier to navigate. As usual, let me know if things are broken in your browser.

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

Saturday, March 01, 2003

Playing with Jabber

Jabber is really neat technology — calling it “instant messaging” drastically oversimplifies the richness of the protocol, but it’s a nasty nightmare to set up. I have a Jabber identity now, marmoset@jabber.freeke.org. Add me to your “roster.”

:: Dave Walker 23:42 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/administrivia/contact]
:: tags: contact

I don’t know whether to be delighted or terrified

The Sci Fi network is bringing back that cheeseball sci-fi nugget of my youth, Battlestar Galactica. As an uncritical 12-year-old, I eagerly watched every new episode when they first aired. When the original episodes started airing in reruns a few years ago, I marveled at the cheap sets, recycled special effects, costumes, and laugh-out-loud plotlines. I wonder if they’re going to play it straight?

:: Dave Walker 13:23 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Drive-By #5

Stinking Badges Home Page
“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!”—Gold Hat, as played by Alfonso Bedoya “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948)
…
This site aims to be the primary Internet resource for any and all references to the aforementioned quote. But we need your help! [Stinking Badges Home Page]

Meanwhile, back in Japan…
So, apparently, in Japan, the hot new thing is a ”hug pillow” or “daki-makura.” i guess if you are a lonely Japanese man tucked away in a sleeping drawer in some towering high-rise, these might seem like good company. [the reverse cowgirl’s blog]

The Horror of Blimps
On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes, and there it was! A LARGE SILENT MENACING PRESENCE WAS APPROACHING ME OUT OF THE GLOOM, AND IT COULD FLY!!! [Teemings]

The Nike Valdez
Thousands of pairs of Nike basketball shoes are washing up on beaches from Washington state to Alaska after spilling from a container ship in Northern California. [Yahoo News]

The mystery of Stalin’s death
Did he die of natural causes following a brain haemorrhage or was Stalin killed because he was about to plunge the Soviet Union into a war its people were in no position to fight? [BBC NEWS | Europe]

:: Dave Walker 11:44 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, February 28, 2003

This “Semantic Web” Thing Is Hard

My trackbacks were broken, although it took quite a bit of faffing about to figure this out. Not knowing much (read: any) Perl, keeping a “modern” website going requires lots of diffing, cutting, and pasting, and not a little prayer. Sometimes things go a little funny. It ought to be fixed now.

:: Dave Walker 19:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, February 27, 2003

Farewell, Neighbor

Mr. Rogers may well have been the first thing I ever watched on TV. His program is certainly one of the earliest things I have any conscious memories of watching. Goodbye…

addendum: Mr. Rogers helped save the VCR. How cool is that?

:: Dave Walker 19:31 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/obits]
:: tags: obits

“Smart kids overanalyze things”

Potentially NSFW if you’re surrounded by uptight folks. Really, really funny if you’ve been off of a college campus long enough to laugh at the arch seriousness with which every potential item of offense is treated.

:: Dave Walker 13:10 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Weeeeell…

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

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

你想讓家人過更好的生活嗎?

(Taiwanese spam I received earlier… As an experiment in alternate character sets and because I thought it would be fun, I ran it through Systran’s “Simplified Chinese to English” translator. Conclusion: spam just doesn’t translate…)

Late at night 1?
Lies down on bed I not? Thinking…? The law goes to sleep
? Center? Is the parents? Weary? Body? …
I do not rest.. Does not rest…….
Once? .. I? The next seaport wants? He? ? Good day
But meager wage? ? Law? I fulfill receive?
? ? Month ago.. I meet? To a piece of disc…
Short 40? Minute? .. I saw the hope
I gradually in? Place? Family diligently
But my receiving? ? ? ?
If you also thought? Family member? Good life
? Stays behind? Material, I? ? The piece disc sends? You
I guarantee? So long as you have understood, certain? ? You? ? Bright? Life
Name surname? Year? In family? ? Ok? ? ? ? Sends the address? ? ? ? ? Mails

:: Dave Walker 11:21 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, February 24, 2003

Fahrvergnügen

There’s been a minor brouhaha in certain circles over the past week or so about the applicability of good typographical practice on the web. The genesis of the rant seems to be John Gruber’s nifty little plugin SmartyPants (for Movable Type and Blosxom 2.x weblogs), which restores some of the typographical niceties (true quote marks instead of inch and foot marks, em dashes, etc.) to weblog entries. Some have complained that these “special characters” break certain pieces of software. Others (rightly, IMO) argue that the “problem” is easy enough to fix in software, and that we ought not have to “ugly up the world” to work around broken tools. I happen to think it’s great. I annoyed everyone within earshot of me back in the late 90’s, extolling the virtues of QuickDraw GX’s advanced layout capabilities, going nuts with automatic ligatures, properly justified text (including quote marks which hung beautifully outside the margins of text blocks, etc.) I despaired when Apple killed the project (in retrospect, it died from a combination of lack of printer drivers and Adobe’s deliberate sabotage.) The good news is that all that goodness is available in Quartz (at least in the “enhanced” typefaces like Hœfler Text and Zapfino — but it’s still underutilized.) I digress, though…

Sven-S. Porst (beautiful weblog, btw) writes about ‘Special’ characters:

Typography has been around for centuries. A lot of experience went into making things in a way that they’re easy and pleasant to read. That’s why we’ve got elaborate typefaces, special dashes, ligatures etc. Then, a few decades ago, there came computers – Allegedly smart machines that immediately threw typography back into the stone age. Hooray to monospaces fonts and character sets that are suitable for writing C code! I sense irony here – the bitter kind.
…

Not only is suggesting to not use them an insult to both the eye and those billions of people who can express themselves in something more subtle than C++, but it also doesn’t make sense from a technical point of view.
[Quarter Life Crisis]

Visual appeal is truly part of the “Fahrvergnügen” of the web. There’s nothing at all wrong about striving to render readable, beautiful text (I know, I owe a redesign…) that takes advantage of the 400+ years of expertise that professional typographers bring to the table.

:: Dave Walker 10:33 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, February 23, 2003

My Hometown (snif)

From high enough up, even Detroit is gorgeous. The cool-as-heck Earth Observatory Konfabulator widget pulled this image up in its rotation and it took my breath away. The full image is courtesy of NASA and is about 400K.

:: Dave Walker 12:05 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

Two Foot Snowdrift Outside The Doggie Door Playlist Update

Hearts Of Oak - Ted Leo And The Pharmacists
Look Up - Kim & Co.
M.E. - Gary Numan
Pookies Japanese Adventure - Supergroup
The Land Of Chocolate - Death By Chocolate

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

Constructing a Pop Star

In its own way, I suppose this is impressive, but something’s certainly been lost. It was much more fun when the best way to insure success was to sell your soul to Old Scratch at the Crossroads.

:: Dave Walker 00:38 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Schnee, bud.

I happened to be outside a few minutes ago, just as the snow kicked over from “ooh, pretty” to “ohmigod, ice needles are eating through my face.” Predictions as to how much we’ll get are all over the place, though if the current rate of an inch an hour keeps up all night tomorrow morning will be very interesting…

:: Dave Walker 19:35 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

Drive-By #4

Now a Saturday tradition, with bells on…

The final preference
An aged geek lies in bed, dying. From across the country, family members — some of whom he hasn’t seen in years &#8212 come to pay their respects.
As life’s brief candle starts to flicker, the family strain forward to hear the geek’s last words.
“I wish I’d spent more time configuring KDE”, he says. [mpt]

Only use ‘em’ and ‘%’ units!
…those of you using font sizes set in pixels, or points, or millimeters: Your sites are actually unreadable now [Hixie’s Natural Log]

Tired: Breast scarves. Wired: Butt skirts.
No, it’s not a see-through skirt. Rather, it’s a regular skirt with an pretty realistic image of panties and legs silk-screened onto it.

Call me crazy, but this faux-peeping-tommery seems dirtier than actually seeing the woman nude. Maybe that’s the intent. These clothes do come from the land that brought you tentacle porn.[The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century]

The Elements of Style
Three new pairs of headphones from Sony, each one designed to be listened to with a particular style of music: A.I.R. for hip hop and rock (pictured at right), L.Q.D. for jazz, soul, and R&B, and S.L.d for house and trance. Read [Gizmodo]

Captured on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies
From: Image Entertainment - Year: 2000 - Rated: Not Rated - Release Date: December 03, 2002 - Features: Extras! * - Recommended!
For better or for worse, the modern memory of Marion Davies is cemented in the character of Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. The drunken, talentless golddigger character from that classic film has utterly replaced the real-life talented woman Marion Davies was. This documentary takes a stab at righting that wrong, giving us a glimpse of the true Davies. [digitallyOBSESSED.com DVD Reviews]

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

So so good

I’m listening to Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die for the first time in a while and remembering how much I love the album’s lead track, the sublime, riveting, indulgent, beautiful… anyway, how much I love “Djed”, my single favorite piece of music produced in the 1990’s.

It’s funny though, some great songs (like Plone’s “Plock”) are the sort of things you want to hear once or more a week, but others, like “Djed”, are best appreciated if you savor them and only pull them out a few times a year.

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

Friday, February 21, 2003

Under the Hood

I’ve made many many changes under the hood on the weblog here, but most of them should be pretty invisible. I’m running on a new Blosxom beta, which includes supports for plugins. The two visible changes are the calendar on the left (which will probably change in appearance, as I work with the formatting) and the nicer date headers, which are less “computer” looking. I got rid of the hit counter, too — it was a little too “my f1rst h0m3p@ge” and besides, it was too tough to reconcile with with the category links and archive links.

:: Dave Walker 22:33 (EST/EDT) [+]

I love my big sis

I took a quick trip to Cleveland to visit my sister Karen and help her set up her new computer. It’s always great to see her and her two lovely daughters, Meaghan and Taylor.

:: Dave Walker 22:26 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, February 15, 2003

Drive By #3

Citizen Kane Now Citizen ‘Wayne’?
Plastic::FilmTV::Dumb: “”Not content with merely insulting our intelligence, Hollywood is now taking a leaf from the music business’ book, where sampling and remixing songs has been commonplace for a long, long time. ” [Plastic]
High-end DVD format gets green light
“The nine companies promoting Blu-ray Disc technology—a next-generation recordable DVD format using blue-violet lasers—announced Thursday that licensing will begin Feb. 17. Blu-ray Disc technology allows for 27GB storage capacities on a single-sided 12cm disc.” [CNET Asia]
These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed
“The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate.”[http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/]
What Symantec Knew But Didn’t Say
“Security firm Symantec withheld information about at least one big cyberthreat for hours after spotting it, possibly harming millions of Internet users. Symantec claims to have identified the Slammer worm that ravaged the Internet during the last weekend of January hours before anyone else did. Symantec then shared the information only with select customers, leaving the rest of the global community to get slapped around by Slammer. “[Wired News]
Simmons Buys Beverage Co; Pepsi Gives In
“While Pepsi decided to agree to most of the HHSAN (Hip-Hop Summit Action Network) demands, Russell Simmons has other plans to combat the bias the hip-hop community has faced from conservatives like Bill O’Reilly of “The O’Reilly Factor.” Simmons said that he has begun the purchase of an unnamed soft drink company” [AllHipHop]
Hip Hop plushies
“Matt sez, “a hip-hop video for DJ Format’s ‘We Know Something’ featuring plushies breakdancing. It’s the best thing ever.” (Link) [Boing Boing]

:: Dave Walker 13:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

So, has anyone checked… erm, well

Come on, you know what I mean.

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

Friday, February 14, 2003

More people who are too cool to be played on FFG

I just can’t hang with these guys. These guys, either. I’ll have to comfort myself with a small playlist update.

Countchocula - Machine Drum
Electric Circus - Infiniti
Where the Hell Is Bill? - Camper Van Beethoven

:: Dave Walker 18:10 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Pardon me, I’m here to inspect your pants for weapons

Sidesplittingly funny pickup lines for the next war. Not safe for work (or delicate constitutions.)

:: Dave Walker 09:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

Monday, February 10, 2003

Konfabulator

Konfabulator looks like it could be a pretty cool application. The marketing tag for it is “whatever you want it to be”, but perhaps the simplest way to describe it is as a javascript runtime engine with hooks into Quartz. What that means in real terms is that you can write little desktop applets, or rather “widgets” (the developer’s term) that can interact with the local machine, or web services, and they can take advantage of all anti-aliasing, transparency, and all that other cool stuff.

The sample widgets are the sorts of things you might expect — clocks, stock tickers, battery gauges, calendars: sort of a GKrellM on steroids. I can’t wait to see what happens when developers realize that they can plug essentially any webservice into this nice rendering engine — imagine the sorts of things people can do with things like the data sources Watson and Sherlock 3 use?

I’m eager to play around with this stuff and try my hand a making widgets, but their website, as I write this, is pretty hammered and I haven’t been able to get to the devkit.

I think one of Microsoft’s rare big blunders has been the way they’ve marketed .Net. Instead of showing people how cool desktop applications with a webservices backend can be, early on they fumbled the ball and got blindsided by negative public opinion on software subscription fees, product activation, and Passport centralized personal information. They made a crucial error by calling everything they released “.Net”, even when the product in question had nothing to do with web services. On the other hand, small developers have done all kinds of cool things with XML-RPC and related technologies.

:: Dave Walker 12:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, February 09, 2003

It’s a crap little Kensington VGA Webcam

I bought it on closeout over a year ago because it was practically free. One reason it was so cheap is that there were no official drivers for it for anything other than, say, Windows 98 2nd Edition and MacOS 8.6. No later versions, mind you… It’s completely useless in low light (i.e. pretty much all the time, unless I feel like shining a freaking spotlight in my face), but I’ll turn the thing on every now and then, when I think about it.

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

Not cool enough for payola

Playlist additions for Sunday

Center Of Gravity - Yo La Tengo
Dwindle (BK-SO) - Sal Orlando ICS
Windy - the Association
Wishing Well - Semisonic
Your Heart Out - The Fall

:: Dave Walker 12:04 (EST/EDT) [+]

Drive-By #2

A Night Away From the Opera
Did Opera expect some sort of prize just for showing up? Any Mac user could tell you that just showing up is not enough. Nobody wants an afterthought for a browser, or a second-rate knockoff of your shining Windows star.
[Surfin’ Safari]
What Ever Happened To Baby Mike?
Gone the artistry of the airbrush, wizardry of make up artists and the kind, magic lighting of studio crafted reality. You can see the rumored (please note inventive use of word “rumored” to avoid a law suit…) fake-nose-tip-prothesis hanging off as well as the scars.
[The HisTory of Michael Jackson’s face]
Pepsi’s sticky race war
Ozzy Osbourne vs. Ludacris! Bill O’Reilly vs. Russell Simmons! Beneath the goofy grudge match over those Pepsi TV ads lies some real racial hypocrisy.
[Salon]
Browser battle rekindling—Dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer under attack
Software developers have created Web browsers with built-in pop-up-ad blockers, spam filters and code so malleable that the same program can fit on a hand-held as well as a desktop computer. But unless you do more than click the blue “e” icon on your screen, you may never enjoy these features.
[Chicago Tribune]
Power laws and priorities
Now, does that mean that blogging is pointless? Well yes, if what you’re after is fame and fortune. Those 3 hits a day are almost certainly not going to balloon into 3000 or 3 million. And even if you combine all the 3-hit sites together, they won’t ever move markets like The New York Times. On the other hand, those 3 hits are the most important thing in the world, because they’re real people.
[dive into mark]
Ed: Amen.

:: Dave Walker 11:04 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, February 08, 2003

This one hurts

“Midway drops the axe and “Midway Games West” (Formerly Atari Games Corporation) lays off the remaining 30 employee’s working there.” (link)

The last vestige of the original video arcade game developer is gone. I guess I’ll fire up my various “arcade greatest hits” collections and play some of my all-time favorite Atari arcade games in tribute.

Tempest
Asteroids
Star Wars
Missile Command
Stun Runner
Battlezone
Gauntlet
Xevious
Breakout
Dig Dug

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

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

Friday, February 07, 2003

Sit in my tree…

Freeform Goodness, Internet Radio playlist update:

America - Simon & Garfunkel
Homeless - Ian O’Brien
Mashin’ on the Motorway - DJ Shadow
Molded Plastic - Epoxies

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

Egads

Wow, that’s brave. 386 comments, last time I looked. I won’t even hit that comments link, I just know it would be, to borrow someone else’s metaphor, like browsing Slashdot comments at -1.

My only requests are, I suspect, trivial and non-controversial. I’d like to see TITLE attributes and ACRONYM tags fire off tooltips when they are moused over, as happens in Chimera and Mozilla. I’d also like to see some sort of forms autofill implemented, hopefully with a usable UI, as opposed to whatever the hell that thing in Mozilla is. Steven Frank already mentioned the bookmarks toolbar bug in this entry, and that’s something I would have mentioned if he hadn’t already done such a good job of describing the issue. The quickly accessible “Block Pop Up Windows” menu item is nice, and it would be even nicer if it were an optional toolbar button. I like the minimalist UI tack the Safari team has taken so far. I hope they can resist the “implement two hundred prefpanels for every little thing” pressure that seems to overwhelm any other project that requests UI feedback from the kind of people who post UI comments in blogs — remember, we are not typical end users, and we are entirely capable of wrecking usability for the silent 99% (yes, I’m guilty of this myself.) We’ve seen the results of this, and it’s not pretty.

:: Dave Walker 09:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Thursday, February 06, 2003

The Toolset

The two most important tools in my weblogging atmosphere both received updates over the last couple of days. Blosxom moved to version 1.2, featuring some under-the-hood changes and a couple of new features. There’s also now an easy installer for Mac OS X.

Ranchero’s NetNewsWire Pro gets a new beta release, and 1.0 final would seem to be right around the corner. Importantly, super-swell guy Brent Simmons fixed the one remaining big nasty that kept me from leaving the program open all the time. What’s even cooler is that I mailed him about this bug early Sunday afternoon, and included a reproducible testcase, and by that evening he’d tracked down the bug and let me know it would be fixed in the next beta. Lesson here, folks: if you’re going to file bug reports on beta software, be sure that you provide the developer with cogent information he/she can use to fix it. If you’re capable of sending a detailed crash report or a data file, do so (but ask the author first — just don’t go blindly sending multi-megabyte core dumps to people, it’s considered rude.) Above all, don’t be annoying. (“When will 1.0 be out? Will it have tabs?”)

:: Dave Walker 08:44 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Monday, February 03, 2003

Meme of the Moment

The RIAA represents large manufacturers, not musicians. This is self-evident, but the rhetoric coming from the organization itself often obscures this fact. Two new articles released this weekend, one short (Janis Ian) and one much longer (by NARAS board member John Snyder) serve as reminders that those musicians and record companies who can’t afford to pay off Clear Channel for airplay have a different perspective on things than BMG and UMG.

Speaking of radio, it is no surprise that Clear Channel supports Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) Telecommunications Ownership Diversity Act of 2003, which would give them additional tax breaks for selling low grossing stations in small markets, and opposes Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) much more far-reaching (and substantive) Competition in the Radio and Concert Industries Act, “which would address the levels of concentration, curb some of the anti-competitive practices, and end the alleged new payola system.”

:: Dave Walker 09:17 (EST/EDT) [+]

Kingpin

I just watched NBC’s new show, Kingpin. It’s off to a promising start. It’s been compared to the Sopranos, of course, but, from the first episode, at least. it looks like it’s drawing more on the Godfather saga. The male lead, for example, seems like an updated Michael Corleone. It’s also cool to see Sheryl “Laura Palmer” Lee in a meaty role.

Anyway, it’s good to see an interesting drama show up on network TV. If it can avoid the most common pitfalls (a “very special Kingpin” [David Kelley disease], guess-who’s-sleeping-with-who-this-week [E.R. disease], etc.) we might have something good.

:: Dave Walker 00:06 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, February 02, 2003

Norway MP plays PDA game during war debate

CNN - While parliament hotly debated the actions of Norwegians fighting in Afghanistan, one lawmaker passed the time by playing a war-game of his own on his handheld computer.
MP says sorry for war game goof VNUNet
Mobile Commerce Mobile Commerce World
IAfrica South African News - The Learning Channel - Capitol Hill Blue - and 8 related [Google Technology News]

:: Dave Walker 23:52 (EST/EDT) [+]

Saturday, February 01, 2003

A kick in the stomach

I still remember where I was when I heard that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded shortly after liftoff in 1986. I had just walked into my physics lab class, during my freshmen year at the University of Michigan, and people were talking about it. My reaction then was the same as my reaction to today’s loss of the shuttle Columbia today — initial disbelief, followed by crushing sadness.

Whenever someone asked me, when I was 3 or 4 or 5 years old, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always answer “an astronaut.”

:: Dave Walker 12:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Drive-By #1 (via NetNewsWire Pro)

Making a Virtue of Vice City
The Design Museum in London has put Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on its short-list of nominees for the Designer of the Year award. But its sexual and violent content mean organizers won’t show the game at the award’s exhibition. By DaithíÓ hAnluain. [Wired News]
Feral hippos haunt druglord’s estate
The animals of Pablo “drug kingpin” Escobar’s private zoo have gone feral, and ten hippopotami now roam the grounds of his estate north of Bogata.
A dozen refugee children play in the grounds all day, and the hippos watch them from the lake. Only the tops of the hippos’ massive, reddish-brown heads and their constantly twitching ears show above the water. If the children come too close to the shore, the hippos snort and bluster and open their jaws menacingly, or make a rolling dive, to scare them away…
Link Discuss (via MeFi) [Boing Boing]
Tabbed browsing in Safari - What for?
Combining Safari, AppleScript and the nature of the OS X system, a new and more efficient way of browsing can be created that makes the question of tabbed browsing somewhat irrelevant. [Studio Log]
Poor Man’s Theremin
Here’s how you can play music with your wireless network card. [Linux Journal]
Unplugged
I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself. [dive into mark]
Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter
From: Eclectic DVD - Year: 2002 - Rated: Not Rated - Release Date: January 28, 2003 - Features: Extras! * [digitallyOBSESSED.com DVD Reviews]
Yo La Tengo: “Nuclear War”
The versatile New Jersey indie rockers team up with a varied cast for four enchanting remakes of Sun Ra’s antiwar classic. [Salon]

:: Dave Walker 10:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, January 31, 2003

U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections

“Wonka exerts a powerful psychological grip over the world’s children,” said Arthur Slugworth, president of Slugworth Confections. “They are devoted to him with a loyalty that borders on the fanatical, eagerly lapping up Scrumdiddlyumptious Bars by the millions at his command. But when we found evidence that Wonka was developing so-called ‘everlasting gobstopper’ technology—‘the mother of all gobstoppers’—we knew it was time to act.”

:: Dave Walker 11:39 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, January 30, 2003

100 Billion Dollars (in my best Carl Sagan voice)

That’s mindboggling (NYT free blah-de-blah required). The interest on the interest on the interest in that much money would be enough to keep me in hot and cold running sports cars, harems, and mansions.

:: Dave Walker 05:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/opinion/economy]
:: tags: economy

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

BitTorrent

BitTorrent document icon I love BitTorrent. It’s a clever idea, well implemented. It seems like magic — the more “in demand” a large file is, the easier it becomes to download it, since downloaders are uploaders, too. Start hunting for torrents here once you’ve installed the software.

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

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

Monday, January 27, 2003

Your chocolate in my peanut butter

I think if browsers and aggregators are going to converge, the way to do it is for aggregators to embed renderers, rather than for browsers to incorporate more and more functionality (that way lies madness, and [gulp] Seamonkey)… a good, fast, system-wide renderer is a good good thing, as it frees developers to work on interface and ideas rather than dpoimg time in W3C hell. Dave Hyatt explores some of these ideas in depth.

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

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

Sunday, January 26, 2003

A little beauty

As I sit in my chilly little house and dread the coming drums of war, I take a little solace in the fact that we still have artists to comfort us in this scary world. Artist Dante Leonelli says:

By night, the Notting Hill Eco Halos will hover in suspended animation, glowing above the busy intersections. Gradual light transformations will occur almost imperceptibly in response to changing environmental conditions.

:: Dave Walker 16:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

So sorry

I know I owe the world email, mostly family members. I am catching up, right now. It won’t happen again…

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

:: [/personal]
:: tags: personal

Saturday, January 25, 2003

Comments are back…

I think. Enetation seems to be alive again. I still plan to move to a local comment engine, which drastically speeds up page loads.

:: Dave Walker 22:43 (EST/EDT) [+]

Hey, I’m even PDA-ready!

The “flavours” feature of Blosxom means that I can render differently styled content to based on URL. That means that if I ever get a Sidekick or other web-enabled PDA I can check the weblog from this url and get a stripped down, fast rendering version.

:: Dave Walker 20:40 (EST/EDT) [+]

One more cool thing

One nice thing about Blosxom is that all you need to post to your weblog is a text editor. That being said, it’s very cool that the newest Netnewswire Pro betas let you post to Blosxom weblogs, too.

:: Dave Walker 18:55 (EST/EDT) [+]

Now running on Blosxom!

After surprisingly little time (for the bulk of the conversion), modulo lots of tweak time to get things to “look” almost the same, I have migrated this weblog from Blogger to Rael Dornfest’s most wonderful Blosxom.

I didn’t have much trouble with Blogger, except that having my content management system hosted on an external server imposed an additional, unnecessary level of complexity when I had a capable, enterprise-ready server operating system, with tools to match, already sitting on my desk. I looked at Movable Type, but the level of complexity (additional Perl modules, etc.) seemed like overkill compared to Blosxom’s streamlined setup.

The other big benefit is automatic RSS generation. Previously, generating my RSS feed was an arduous, largely manual process. In practice, this meant that my RSS feed always lagged behind the weblog and frequently wasn’t updated at all (when I was in a hurry or otherwise tied up.) The new blog generates valid RSS on the fly, providing a full feed.

Minor issues

Commenting is currently turned off, as Enetation seems to be experiencing an outage (perhaps related to the latest MSTD?), and Blosxom’s native comments plugin isn’t quite available to the public yet. My older archives remain in Blogger format, since it didn’t really make sense to republish them.

I’ve been contemplating a redesign, and indeed it probably won’t be far off, but I figured that one major change at a time was enough. With Blosxom, the mechanics of blogging are now simple enough to give me more time to play with new things, like trying to make this page validate [fat chance ;) ] and to come up with an attractive design of my own, rather than working within someone else’s.

As always, please let me know if something renders really strangely on your system, or if you notice missing contents / broken links, etc.

:: Dave Walker 16:56 (EST/EDT) [+]

“There are exactly… 57… Communists in the House of Representatives”

Numbers are fun. You can make them say whatever you want them to say.

:: Dave Walker 11:26 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, January 24, 2003

I’m officially too old for Slashdot

This is pretty gruesome. Watch Slashdot shoot the messenger.

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

Everybody’s doing it

Lots of people switching to Movable Type lately, but I’ve decided to go a different way. Just a few issues to work out. Watch this space.

:: Dave Walker 05:18 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

World dumbest chain mail warning doohickey

My girlfriend got this from an acquaintance. I haven’t changed it at all, except to mask incriminating headers.

I should mention that I get a dozen or so similar things per week, from well meaning relatives and acquaintances. I usually delete them instantly, or sometimes I’ll Snopes ‘em and help snuff the meme in question, but this one stands as such a beacon of, well, something, that I had to share.

----- Original Message -----

From: Janet Cook
To: Joette Grieco(h) ; Jennifer Carr ; Chuck & Kay ;
Diane Carr ; Gene & Julie ; Jan Schuette ; Jean ; John A ; Kathy Spencer ; Karen Steinbach ;
Michael Puszcz ; Pat & Sam ; Peg
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2002 2:20 PM
Subject: Warning for door to door scam

SEND THIS WARNING TO EVERYONE ON YOUR EMAIL LIST. 
IF A MAN COMES TO YOUR FRONT DOOR AND SAYS HE IS
CONDUCTING A SURVEY AND ASKS YOU TO SHOW HIM YOUR
BOOBS, DO NOT SHOW HIM YOUR BOOBS.
THIS IS A SCAM.�� HE ONLY WANTS TO SEE YOUR BOOBS.
> >>>
> >>>I wish I'd gotten this yesterday. I feel so stupid.
> >>>
> >>>Signed,
> >>>
> >>>The Blonde

:: Dave Walker 22:32 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Wheee…

Blake Ross is back.

:: Dave Walker 22:11 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Sunday, January 19, 2003

I’m torn

Steven Frank makes some good points about competing with Apple on its home turf. On one hand, I’m a registered Audion user, because I really like the product. But I have to admit that I use iTunes far more often, thanks to two features: the Library management (mandatory, really, once you go past a few thousand MP3s), and the superior iPod integration, which, of course, something where the platform vendor will always have an inherent advantage.

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

Carol Marvin: Don’t Go Away Mad, Just Go Away

The City of Detroit finally restored a little sanity to the administration of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival by restoring control of the Memorial Day event to an artist-led group that includes Derrick May, Carl Craig, and Kevin Saunderson.

As one might imagine, this didn’t go over well with �ber control-freak Carol Marvin, who has issued a string of bizarre statements claiming everything from ownership of the festival name to rights to Hart Plaza on Memorial Day weekend, even going so far as to announce an alliance with long-retired boxer (and techno icon, naturally, WTF?) Tommy Hearns. Remember that t-shirt from a couple years back? “I had sex with Carol Marvin, and she ruined that, too.”

Ordinarily I would simply recommend that she quietly withdraw from the fray to preserve a little grace, but she lost all pretense of class the day she fired Carl Craig in 2001, so that’s a little pointless. Please, Ms. Marvin, let the artists and the real fans enjoy something nice, and go find something else to occupy your time.

:: Dave Walker 17:38 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Friday, January 17, 2003

Shoutbox issue(s)

I’m aware that the shoutbox acts a little weird in Safari — it opens in a new window after submitting a form, rather than updating it in place. I’ve submitted a bug to Apple.

:: Dave Walker 13:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

Thursday, January 16, 2003

Creeping featuritis

Try the Shoutbox thing, let me know what you think.

:: Dave Walker 15:47 (EST/EDT) [+]

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

Disney Wins, Eldred (and everyone else) Loses (via /.)

“The upshot is that no works produced in the United States after the 1920’s will ever go out of copyright.” Money gets what money wants. No surprises.

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

Saturday, January 11, 2003

Playlist updated

Nathea - Machine Drum
Powers Of The Deep - Drexciya
Redshift - Peter Benisch
Yalla, Yalla - Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros

:: Dave Walker 12:07 (EST/EDT) [+]

Friday, January 10, 2003

I’m such a ho…

Safari Okay, I went ahead and made Safari my default browser. I guess what’s cool is that every time I look up I’m finding another cool feature I hadn’t noticed, like how pretty links are when you drag them in the page. There’s YASR here that hits on some of the nicer stuff.

(addendum: Looks like (Saturday morning) they just posted a new build. I know there are lots of changes happening in their rendering engine, so I hope they continue with the quick updates. I’m not expecting nightlies, but weeklies would probably be A-OK, at least until it goes final)

:: Dave Walker 22:29 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

The meaning of the word “exercise”

…giving a rambunctious German Shepherd/Rottweiler mix a bath, without anyone else around to help you hold her slippery, soapy self in the tub. We had fun, though, and my “little” angel smells wonderful.

:: Dave Walker 15:26 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Thursday, January 09, 2003

Safari this, Safari that…

I’m starting to not miss tabs. Interesting observation about new window creation speed and and tabbed browsing. [Okay mpt, stop gloating ;) ]
On the other hand, I really do miss the TITLE attribute in link tags opening a tooltip. I seriously hope that was a “we haven’t gotten to it yet” omission and not a design decision.
The Activity window is the shizzle. (I hadn’t even noticed it until reading the fine Safari summary at Codepoetry.)
The rendering quirks are being worked on, says Dave Hyatt, and he oughta know.

:: Dave Walker 12:30 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Steven Seagal’s enemies list keeps growing

Dumbass. In addition to film fans with taste and the Gambino crime syndicate, Seagal can now add “German Mafia and other nefarious underworld figures.”

A-yup.

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

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

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

“But do I want to keep my subscription so that psycho paper girl can make a stop at my house every morning around 5 am, in the dark, while everyone is asleep? I think not.”

Blogneighbor Team Monkey reports this harrowing tale.

:: Dave Walker 20:42 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Bizarro world

WTF is up with an online IT career site, full of postings of UNIX jobs, that requires (read: throws you a big-ass gas face of an alert box telling you you use Internet Explorer for Windows or die) to fill out their online application?

:: Dave Walker 14:53 (EST/EDT) [+]

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Keynote update

A few folks on the Fink mailing list have already installed Apple’s X11. With a few minor tweaks (which the Fink guys will be documenting on their site) it works well. Also, wise Teep points out that the new Powerbook ad is online here (requires Quicktime).

:: Dave Walker 17:04 (EST/EDT) [+]

MacWorld Keynote 1st Impressions

New powerbooks

The 12” is teensy! The question is, how small is too small (i.e. how easy to use are the keyboard and trackpad?) The battery life, is, of course, excellent.
The 17” is droolworthy, of course, but a little rich for my blood. That auto-sensing/self-backliting keyboard is pretty scifi, and I dig the profusion of ports on the thing.
The new ad is hilarious. I don’t think it’s on the site yet. I won’t spoil it for you… you’ll know it when you see it.

The software

I’m posting this entry with Safari right now. It’s blazingly fast, but I’m severly missing tabs. I wonder why they went with KHTML instead of Gecko? All I can figure is that the project must have been well underway before they hired Hyatt.
Don’t have much to say about Keynote, as I’m not the target market, but the Quartz-enhanced effects look nice.
I’m curious about the X11 server — namely, will I have to recompile my Fink-installed stuff for it to work?

Overall not a bad keynote. Faster desktops would have been nice, or course, and we’re still waiting for Apple’s next handheld move, but the new Powerbooks and software seem pretty good.

:: Dave Walker 15:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

Sunday, January 05, 2003

NetNewsWire Pro 1.0b7

You can now edit Blosxom and Blosxom-compatible sites with the Weblog Editor. Another change makes downloading recent posts from Blogger sites (in the Weblog Editor) more reliable. [ranchero.com]

Nice. I’ve been a big fan of NetNewsWire Lite as an aggregator, but up until now I couldn’t get the Pro betas (which combine aggregation with a weblog editor) to work. The new release solves the crashing bugs I was seeing. A tool like this really makes posting easier.

:: Dave Walker 08:22 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Saturday, January 04, 2003

The explanation

Keef

Dear Doctor Science,
Why is musician Keith Richards still alive?

— Wendy Woollett from Missoula, MT

Check your data. The most emaciated of the Rolling Stones died from an overdose sometime in the early seventies, and was replaced by a resentful Chuck Berry, who just couldn’t get past the irony of having to pretend he was a dead white guy in order to get paid well to perform his own music. But Chuck took to his new role with his usual zest and verve, eventually convincing even stadium crowds that he was Mick Jagger’s pimply cohort, even affecting a plausible English accent.

I’ve been on the Dr. Science mailing list since the glaciers melted. The audio version is also available on many NPR affiliates.

:: Dave Walker 06:44 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Friday, January 03, 2003

What if the Lord of the Rings had been written by ______________?

Take a look at these wonderfully funny parodies of the Lord of the Rings, in the styles of various writers. Very entertaining.

:: Dave Walker 10:46 (EST/EDT) [+]

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

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Lesson #1

If you’re an organization on the web with a big-ass bullseye plastered on your forehead, like, say, these guys, it behooves you to run a pretty tight ship security-wise. Otherwise, um, you get 0wn3d. Over and over and over again. And people laugh at you.

:: Dave Walker 19:39 (EST/EDT) [+]