freeform goodness

Paging John Abbe

Are you out there? I don’t know if you’re in California these days or Sri Lanka, but please leave a shout here (infrastructure willing, of course) to let us know you’re OK.

:: Dave Walker 11:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/people]
:: tags: people

:: Comments (1)

Sometimes Even The “Dumb” Playlists Make Themselves

The playlist “Syd”, from right before I left home to run some errands. I trust the connecting thread is self-evident.

1. Bike - Pink Floyd
2. I Love Acid - Luke Vibert
3. Pump Up The LEDs - Aqua Regia
4. Antacid - Link
5. Acperience 1 - Hardfloor
6. Final Frontier - Underground Resistance
7. Plasticity - Plastikman
8. Work Dat - Joey Beltram

:: Dave Walker 22:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Snow Day

My Christmas break started a day earlier than expected. I have a 30-mile commute and decided that the office could survive without me today…

This one goes out to my parents, living in Florida.

Midwestern pre-Christmas snowstorm. I took a few snaps before and after shoveling. I finally put my Flickr account to positive use, too.

:: Dave Walker 14:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Ten Holiday Songs that Don’t Suck At All

1. “The Last Days of December” - Vitesse
2. “Christmas Wrapping” - The Waitresses
3. “Santa Baby” - Eartha Kitt
4. “I Believe In Father Christmas” - Greg Lake
5. “Silent Night” - Can
6. “Skating” - Vince Guaraldi
7. “Frosty The Snowman” - The Cocteau Twins
8. “Christmas Day” - Squeeze
9. “A Fairytale of New York” - The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
10. “Father Christmas” - the Kinks

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

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

:: Comments (1)

It Takes Two To Make A Thing Go Right

Welcome to the world Angus Charles and William Bruce, brand new twin sons of Matt and KC MacQueen.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

World Of Warcraft, For Real

Back a couple of months ago, I took part in the stress-test portion of World of Warcraft’s beta test, and I posted about it a couple of times. The game shipped for real last week, and, though there have been some server capacity problems, I spent a fair amount of the long weekend playing it. It’s a blast. My main character, as before, is a dwarven hunter, but I’m also playing a troll priest (see photo) on a different server as time permits. Dan took his first hit a few weeks ago, during the open beta, and has been chasing the dragon (heh) with me on the same server.

:: Dave Walker 11:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/games]
:: tags: games

:: Comments (2)

Fighting Comment Spam

Captchas help to some extent, as do various regular expression filters, but the real solution to comment spam appears to lie at level 4. 420 in the last 12 hours. Nyaah.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Today’s Best Spammer Name Ever Nominee

Returnee H. Aerodynamics, found in the festering spamheap that is the account attached to my DNS registration. If I concentrate hard enough, I can even picture ol’ Returnee, dressed in a natty seersucker suit, ten-gallon hat, with a finely crafted snakeskin boot planted firmly upon a old hickory stump, He’s got a huge handlebar moustache and owns about 30 acres of land and his own farm equipment dealership.

addendum: other nominees from the same batch of spam: Sculpt V. Steeplejacks and Magnesium G. Unsold.

:: Dave Walker 09:31 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Most Blogs Suck On Cellphones

I’ve actually never surfed the web on a cellphone. I’ve also never driven I-75 on a mountain bike. There’s a lesson there, I think…

Anyway, Robert Scoble stated that, yes, most blogs suck pretty hard on modern smartphones, and I’ll take him at his word. My old layout actually degraded a little better in this respect, as it rendered the center content (i.e. the actual entries) before it got to the left and right sidebars. I still plan to make the current layout do that one of these days, but at this point good intentions are in far better supply than the time to implement them. I’ve got a couple of workarounds that I actually rolled out day and date with my last redesign. First, I implemented a skipnav that doesn’t show in a standard desktop browser but does show up in more limited contexts such as text browsers (e.g. lynx, links, and w3m), screen readers, and, presumably, whatever people are running on that obnoxious thing with the Usher ringtone. I also have a separate Blosxom flavour (1993: one of Rael’s defaults, I believe) that is particularly undemanding, and usable, I expect, in everything from NCSA Mosaic onwards.

So, yeah, if you’re really into giving your mobile vendor $2 a megabyte or whatever ridiculous rate they charge, stuff ought to just work…

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

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

:: Comments (3)

Widdle Bittles

• Steak N’ Shake’s peach milkshakes are… rather good. OK, scratch that… They’re insanely good. Fast food fattening stuff doesn’t get any better.
• Everyone else is linking this, but it’s really worth a read. The True Story of Audion. I was an Audion user for quite a while, and Panic are a really wonderful small development house.
• 200 comment spams yesterday/this morning. I have done something about it. So far, it looks pretty good.
• I am really, really happy that it’s cool to cite the Cars as an influence these days. Sometimes it really pays off.

:: Dave Walker 19:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Not Very Much Ado About Many Nothings

The continuous adjustment of my free/busy cycles leaves me with not as much time to blog on an extended basis as I’d like. More and more, I just dump a quick link into the del.icio.us bin and keep moving. I like linkblogging but I miss pontificating on random nonsense, as if I knew what the heck I was talking about…

Firefox 1.0 shipped this week and it’s very much worth a look from any folks out there who are interested in this internets thing the kids are always going on about. It still does the fast/correct rendering thing that its known for, and it’s also grown a pretty robust extensibility architecture. There’s no reason to ever use anything else on Linux, and it nicely short-circuits the massive volume of evil that gets thrown at you by nefarious operators if you’re taking part, as an inductee or as a volunteer, in Operation Enduring Windows. On the Mac, I’m willing to overlook it’s poor OS integration (no Services support… sigh) thanks to the frankly astounding performance of the G5 optimized build (I have never seen anything render pages faster, on any platform. It’s scary, in a good way) I stumbled upon. It makes me really hope for G5 optimized binaries of things like Safari and Mail in Tiger.

The Syndication Wars seem to be hetting up again, for some reason, which dismays me because I thought we’d reached the sort of live and let live equilibrium that you get when geeks STFU and code. Tim Bray’s succinct statement of the obvious has apparently opened the floodgates again. (overheard: It’s just RSS with different tagnames, users don’t care, RSS has won — ph34r my podcast, beotch, yada yada yada) I still plan on implementing and supporting syndication whenever and wherever it makes sense, and I think competition has helped, rather than hurt, this space.

If my comment spammer is to be believed, we are all fat bastards who play poker all day long and want desparately to mail order our diet pills, while fondling our flaccid male parts.

If I liked first-person shooters I imagine I’d be playing Halo 2 on the Xbox I don’t own, but instead I’m playing the World Of Warcraft open beta and eagerly awaiting the retail launch. I haven’t touched GTA:San Andreas, but I’d really like to remedy that this weekend.

I’ve really been enjoying a Merck release from 2003 that I slept on somehow, Tiki Obmar’s High School Confidential . Apparently there’s another release, Seasons that I imagine I’ll end up ordering. HSC, at least, approaches the man-machine divide by liberally rubbing live playing against the more typical Merck melodic/glitch/8-bit videogame aesthetic, to nice result. There’s a bit of “Lillypads B” that resembles what I hoped Sonic Youth would sound like when they added Jim O’Rourke on laptop.

Oh yeah, and I’m sorry.

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

:: [/misc]
:: tags: misc

:: Comments (0)

I’m HTML

Which File Extension are You?

:: Dave Walker 06:59 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Not A Poker Player

I realize that some of you out there are, but I have to say I have been forever turned off from the game by my friendly neighborhood comment spammer, who thinks that posting goddamned “texas holdem” 200 times in my comments is a good idea.

Me and you in a dark alley someday, beotch.

:: Dave Walker 05:38 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Bread And Wireless

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve found Panera’s free WiFi useful, but after a few weeks more of reflection (and a few more weeks using the service), let me give them another wet sloppy kiss. The big deal here, from my perspective, is that here is basically a coast to coast network of free hotspots, located in prominent locations, with signs visible from the road, where you can count on being able to hop online with minimal hassle. They’re not trying to make it a profit center — they’re not charging you $8 an hour or something crazy like silly Starbucks, they’re just offering it for free as a low-pressure inducement to keep customers in their stores longer, buying coffee and pastries and soup and whatever else. I’ve found myself mentally noting the locations of all the Paneras I pass while I’m in transit from place to place. I don’t know how common they are in other areas of the country, but I’ve pretty much determined that, at least in my area, I’m never farther away than 20 minutes or so from a free hotspot. There’s no need to keep a cumbersome list handy, I just need to look for the the shop logo.

From a marketing perspective, this is a big “well, duh…”, but the number of businesses that haven’t figured out that they stand to make more money from providing net access as a value-add rather than a standalone profit center continues to amaze me.

:: Dave Walker 17:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

WHERE WE LIVE: Ecorse, Wayne County

The Detroit Free Press, 2004-Nov-05

Appeal: This Downriver suburb has a homey feel to it. “There are no strangers here,” says Clara Sifers of Ecorse-based Red Carpet Keim Viking Realtors. “We like the smallness of the place, and the people.”

…and so on.

:: Dave Walker 15:04 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

(S)election Day

Before work, I drove by John F. Kennedy Middle School on Outer Drive and 7th Street in Ecorse and cast my vote. Despite the steady drizzle, turnout was strong, but the nearsighted little old ladies manning the desks were efficient and kept the line moving. I saw what appeared to be a single poll-observer, but no obvious party reps doing the challenge/intimidation thing. I’m happy about that, because I imagine I would have quickly gone AngryNegro had anyone challenged my voting qualifications.

Also, my polling place uses ancient slide-lever machines that I am pretty sure are the same ones I remember my mom using 30 years ago when she took me with her to vote. They’re nothing to look at, but no one’s going to pwn them with a boot floppy.

:: Dave Walker 11:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents]
:: tags: currentevents

:: Comments (0)

Comment Note

Thanks to the dregs of the internets, I’ve been having to get more draconian with my comment spam moderation. I apologize in advance if any of your legitimate comments get mangled or deleted in the crossfire, but there’s no way around it at present.

:: Dave Walker 20:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Come On Into My… BIG TENT

Aw, c’mon, you know it.

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

:: [/humor/politics]
:: tags: politics

:: Comments (0)

Redhat Phish

Looks like phishers are even going after sysadmins. Very interesting… I got the following email last night, sent to my webmaster account:

---

Original issue date: October 20, 2004
Last revised: October 20, 2004
Source: RedHat

A complete revision history is at the end of this file.

Dear RedHat user,

Redhat found a vulnerability in fileutils (ls and mkdir), that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with root privileges. Some of the affected linux distributions include RedHat 7.2, RedHat 7.3, RedHat 8.0, RedHat 9.0, Fedora CORE 1, Fedora CORE 2 and not only. It is known that *BSD and Solaris platforms are NOT affected.

The RedHat Security Team strongly advises you to immediately apply the fileutils-1.0.6 patch. This is a critical-critical update that you must make by following these steps:

• First download the patch from the Stanford RedHat mirror: wget www.stanford.edu/~joeio/fileutils-1.0.6.patch.tar.gz
• Untar the patch:tar zxvf fileutils-1.0.6.patch.tar.gz
• cd fileutils-1.0.6.patch
• make
• ./inst

Again, please apply this patch as soon as possible or you risk your system and others` to be compromised.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this serious matter,

RedHat Security Team.

Copyright © 2004 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved.

---

Very credible looking, except for a few little niggles:

• Note that the “patch” (almost certainly a rootkit) is linked to an individual user’s (“joeio”) account
• I seriously doubt that Redhat would be relaying through a random machine in Taiwan:

  Received: from mail.forcartex.com.tw (unknown [211.22.18.59]) by samantha.freeke.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A355FFC7C39 for daddy@freeke.org; Sat, 23 Oct 2004 03:11:53 -0400 (EDT)

Anyway, I thought this was notable — I’ve seen phishes like this targeted at Windows users, but this is the first I’ve seen specifically targeting ‘nix admins. One would assume that they just collected a bunch of webmaster addresses, figuring (probably correctly) that a fair number of those boxes would be running Redhat. The email shows an attention to detail — the HTML links to Redhat’s real logo, linked from a Redhat server, and they even ran their HTML through Tidy!

Let’s be careful out there!

:: Dave Walker 23:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/tech/computers/security]
:: tags: security

:: Comments (3)

Eating A Bagel, Posting

You wouldn’t believe (OK, actually, you probably would) how much low level BS it took to get the wireless card working in Linux on this silly Dell (short version: Broadcom is the devil), but the payoff is that I’m posting this entry from a nearby Panera (yay for free wireless) while having hot chocolate and a ridiculously tasty cinnamon crunch bagel. I guess that makes this my first ever moblog post… Next step — pictures.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Your Duty As An American

Download a BitTorrent client. I recommend Azureus or the official one. If you’re behind a firewall or NAT, take a look at this.

Next, go here and download the linked video.

That is all.

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

:: [/currentevents/national]
:: tags: national

:: Comments (1)

My Menubar

Gummi started it, Sven piled on, and now I’ll play too:

Left to right:

• iScrobbler, which keeps my AudioScrabbler profile up-to-date.
• Meteorologist, a truly cool little tool that provides me with current weather conditions and forecasts for my own city and several others (friends and relatives).
• Applescript Script Menu, being exactly what it sounds like
• The stock OS X menubar volume control
• iChat presence icon
• Input menu (switch keyboard layouts, open input palettes, that sort of thing)
• Clock
• Fast User Switch Menu with Winswitch: very handy when one of us is already logged in and the other wants to quickly check email or look in his/her addressbook or iCal. The WinSwitch menu saves a lot of space over the standard one

:: Dave Walker 23:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Bits and Bobs

• I’ve been quite busy over the last week or so, and I’ve neglected the blog. I’ve been running silent because I started a new job today. I am now working for Altair Engineering, on a product called PBS Pro. Standard blogging disclaimers apply (i.e. this will probably be the only time I ever mention work, directly.)
• Anyone have any experience with SuSe? I’m a BSD-kinda guy myself, we’ll see how it goes… I’ve not actually used KDE very much.
• If you’re tired of political “commentary” that softpedals… well, everything, take a look at the Rude Pundit — NSFW, for language. Worth a look for this classic entry, if nothing else. spotter: ssp
• I’m really happy with SpamAssassin 3.0. Working in concert with Apple Mail, I’m basically spam-free these days.

:: Dave Walker 20:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (6)

Wholly Unconvinced by Audioblogging

…or, as Mr. Pilgrim wrote, “blogging becoming an inaccessible, google-hostile bandwidth hog”

I can see where being able to take a few blogposts with you on your morning jog or plugged into the car radio during your morning commute might appeal, but I think there are better ways to spend that precious ear-time.

Otherwise, though, I find audioblog posts completely useless and annoying.

They’re attention-greedy

I can skim a written blog post, even a long one, in a few seconds and get a pretty good idea of what it’s on about. If it really tickles my fancy, I can sit down, read it in depth, and maybe even comment on it or link to it in a couple of minutes.

Audio posts are impossible to quickly review. If a person posts a 10 minute audio blog entry, to really get anything from it (meaning: to be able to comment on it meaningfully), you have to listen to the whole thing in sequence. Most people are lousy public speakers (myself included). They repeat themselves, they stumble over words, they clear their throats too much, they cough in your ear, they lose the plot and start to babble, whatever.

Stop it. You’re being greedy with the most precious resource the modern plugged-in person has these days: time.

Search-engine hostile

Not much to explain here. Search engines don’t index the sound of you harumphing and tapping your pen on your keyboard. Next.

Feedback hostile

Admittedly probably not much of an issue for the typical soapboxer, but taking part in conversational blogging (comments, trackbacks, Technorati follow-fu) relies on people having convenient chunks of text to quote, link to, and refute. Exactly how does anyone link to that bit during minute 17 of your audio post (after the donut sprinkles fall on the microphone but before the sound of your cat knocking over your spittoon) where you make some technical point that definitely, positively needs refuting?

I had many more words written for this post, but then I read Maciej Cegłowski’s audioblogging manifesto, which covered most of the salient points, so, unlike a lot of audiobloggers, I’m going to be brief and respect your time.

addendum: Coincidentally, today’s word of the day is “harangue”. Heh.

:: Dave Walker 08:12 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (5)

The Great Nebula in Orion

via apod:

The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, digitally sharpened images like this, however, show the Orion Nebula to be a busy neighborhood of young stars, hot gas, and dark dust. The power behind much of the Orion Nebula (M42) is the Trapezium - four of the brightest stars in the nebula. Many of the filamentary structures visible are actually shock waves - fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.

Image credit: Stefan Seip

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

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Ad Relevance

Disclaimer: I run ads.

Don’t you think this pro-Sun/anti-Red Hat opinion piece in the Register would be a little more credible without the surrounding ad content? (285kb JPEG image)

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Accidentals

In my blog’s right sidebar, there’s a liitle icon that’s set to be a tiny thumbnail of an album I happen to have been listening to at some point recently. It’s just a dumb little applescript that grabs the cover art of the currently playing song in iTunes and scales it, then drops it in my image directory. It’s just a two line script that I run manually when I remember to do it.

The script is dumb… all it does is take the artwork and brute-force crams it into a 72 x 72 square.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that, when the script produced an icon that perfectly matched the Gill Sans heading above it, I thought it was pretty cool.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Enclosures

Don’t fear, I have no plans to start (gack) audioblogging, but I was curious about what kind of effort it would take to add RSS enclosure support to my Blosxom installation. Answer: not much. Mind-numbing detail follows for the Blosxom geeks, everyone else can skip the rest.

See more …

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

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

:: Comments (6)

Canyonero!

I’m just wondering how long it’ll take before I start seeing these (with obligatory spinner wheels, of course) showing up in my neighborhood.

“This truck is for businesses that want to make a bold statement,” Swim said. “It’s for business people that want to promote as much as perform.”

Um, yep. A statement, all right.

Let’s see (multiple choice):

1. “I’m happy that my country that starts pre-emptive wars to ensure a free flow of fuel for my status symbol.”
2. “I’m doing more than my part to deplete fossil fuel reserves to promote faster development of alternative fuel sources.”
3. “Was that a speedbump or a Mini I just ran over?”
4. “F**k clean air.”

:: Dave Walker 17:39 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/currentevents/national]
:: tags: national

:: Comments (3)

Astrud

If you’re going to spend a lazy Saturday early afternoon lazily soaking in a bathtub, there is no better way to do it than with the music of Astrud Gilberto wafting into the bathroom through a cracked doorway.

Astrud’s a fascinating vocalist. She’s a textbook example of taking a technically limited voice and making the most of it. She’s probably got about a half-octave vocal range, if we’re being honest, and minimal “projection”, but with sheer attitude, sypathetic arrangements (via such legends as João Gilberto, Stan Getz, Tom Jobim, and Gil Evans) and perfect, perfect phrasing, she forged a lasting, if modest, career, singing in the desafinado style. She’s the polar opposite of countrywoman Elis Regina, who was a pint-sized force of nature with pipes to match.

Her musical career was a complete accident: when husband João Gilberto and Stan Getz were in the studio producing their landmark Getz/Gilberto LP, the session producer decided to cut a song with English vocals for commercial crossover reasons, and Astrud happened to be the only Brazillian in the room with strong enough English skills to sing a verse. The resulting single, “The Girl From Ipanema”, was a huge worldwide hit.

The album I was listening to is The Silver Collection, which I suppose is as good a place as any to start. It doesn’t have “Ipanema”, but you can probably find that easily enough elsewhere.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Dollar DVD Addendum

If these films are genuinely public domain, it would be cool to start ripping them and uploading them to the Internet Archive’s feature film collection — that’s my prime motivation for wanting to find out more about where they come from.

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

:: [/entertainment/movies]
:: tags: movies

:: Comments (0)

Dollar DVDs

I went a-Googlin’, but I haven’t been able to turn up much information about the $1 DVD’s I’ve been snarfing at dollar stores lately. I’ve bought them at various dollar stores. They’re usually sitting in big plastic tub near the registers. They’re mostly old obscurities I’ve never heard of, but I’ve gotten a surprisingly high number of true classics (e.g. The 39 Steps, His Girl Friday) from these bins as well. They’re all packaged the same way: the discs are contained in cheap cardboard sleeves and shrinkwrapped, with a still from the movie on the cover and a brief blurb on the back. The series is called “Movie Classics” (and boy, does that produce some useless results when you start doing web searches) and the address at the bottom of the sleeve is:

PMB 421
991-C Lomas Santa Fe Drive
Solana Beach, CA, 92075

In addition to the occasional classic, there are episodes of old TV shows, 70’s obscurities, ancient cartoons, and the like. The discs have no extras, most of the time they don’t even have menus. The video and sound quality varies from almost passable to laughable. But hey, they’re a buck, so I’ve been collecting them like bottle caps.

The way I figure it, there are only two possibilities: either these are films which have (luckily) fallen into the public domain, or they’re straight-up bootlegs. I hope it’s the former.

:: Dave Walker 05:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/movies]
:: tags: movies

:: Comments (29)

NewsFire

After a couple of days of use, I’m really liking NewsFire. It’s only at version 0.21, so it has a few rough edges, but it does a whole lot of the little things right.

• Excellent autodiscovery support. You can subscribe to feeds either by:

  1. Entering the feed URL directly.
  2. Entering a web page URL. It will suck down the page, find any feeds that are properly advertised in the <HEAD>, and scrape the HTML looking for feeds in pages that don’t.
  3. Telling it to look at the current displayed page in Safari, and goes through the process in 2.

• Per-feed update intervals. There are still some minor nits, but it’s smart enough to use the information provided in the feed if it’s present.

• Per-feed persistence settings. You can tell it whether or not to store old entries on a per-feed basis. In practice, this works great: I usually want weblog entries to be stored persistently, while things like weather feeds, BBC news feeds, and the like to be transient.

• Humane interface. There’s very little clutter, just a two paned window with a list of feeds on the left and a space to display feed indexes and articles on the right. You can configure it to sort feeds either by newest content or most unread articles. In perhaps the coolest touch, it visually shuffles the feeds as new items comes in, with audible feedback.

• Of course it does the basic things expected of every OS X aggregator: it uses Webkit for display, imports and exports OPML, supports all the extant RSS variants plus Atom, etc.

• At least for now, it’s free.

addendum: I would strongly recommend not setting your refresh to 5 minutes for any site that you don’t personally run and pay the bandwidth bills for.

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

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

:: Comments (4)

Dear Dumb As Dirt Referrer Spammer

You might not have noticed, but I no longer show referrers on this blog. This means you can stop your stupid *%^#ing dDOS/referrer-spam script from hammering my server (20 GETs in 5 seconds — WTF?) any time now, or at least rewrite the piece of @*+% so that it doesn’t crash the servers you’re trying to enslave for your Google juicing.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Amber Renee Sue McIntee

A very, very happy 1st birthday to little Amber, an angel beyond compare.

:: Dave Walker 14:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

On The Back of A Gryphon, At Night

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

:: [/entertainment/games]
:: tags: games

:: Comments (1)

More World of Warcraft

I’m almost kinda glad the stress test beta is over tomorrow, because this game is a serious timesink. I almost hesitate to say it, but, even in beta form, this may be the most purely enjoyable game I’ve ever played. There’s so many things to do, quests to complete, and the game world is huge, huge — there are constantly new things to see. Dangerous.

The linked screenshot to the right (1.1 MB) shows my dwarven hunter and his pet forest spider in the territory of Dun Morogh.

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

:: [/entertainment/games]
:: tags: games

:: Comments (0)

WoW

Anyone else playing the World of Warcraft “Stress Test” beta this week? Fun stuff. This is the first game of this sort (MMORPG) I’ve ever played.

:: Dave Walker 18:41 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/games]
:: tags: games

:: Comments (0)

Cabinet Meeting

via jwz

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

:: [/humor/politics]
:: tags: politics

:: Comments (0)

Various Artists - Decay Product [✯✯✯✯✯]

I recently took the opportunity to re-rip one of my all-time favorite recordings, 1997’s Decay Product by Various Artists (the tongue-in-cheek alias of Berlin producer Thorsten Profrock).

It’s one of the most sonically distinctive recordings I own. It’s very much a part of the so-called “Berlin school” of dub-influenced techno that was so very prominent in the mid-1990’s, but, even among those recordings, it’s distinctive. My friend Matt MacQueen came up with one of my favorite descriptions of the Berlin sound — it’s like techno with a layer of “line-noise” over the top. In Various Artists’ case, the “line-noise” is fully integrated into the very fiber of the music. The distortion isn’t just an effect: it is the music. On tracks like “No. 6 (debit)” and “Erode”, there are melodies, strong melodies, even, that aren’t explicitly contained in the tracks themselves, rather, they’re implied by the shape of the noise around the missing notes. Some tracks, like “No. 3 (credit)”, make the melodies more explicit, but we’re a million miles away from hooks and choruses here.

A once overheard a DJ in RecordTime’s dance room talking about another Berlin-school recording: “you just keep wanting to turn in up louder.” I know this excuse has been used for decades as people who just wanted to blast their stereos, but the details of this music really do emerge when it’s played back at maximal volume. I love to throw it in the car stereo and just let it blow past my face.

I’ve never been really satisfied with the sound of any of MP3 encodings I’ve ever made of it. It always seemed to me that the lossy algorithms developed to deal with things like human voices, guitar chords, french horns, and violins completely fall apart when asked to deal with, say, a delicately modulated sigh of tuned pink noise. This time I decided to encode it losslessly, and it does sound fantastic, with the obvious trade-off of disk space.

:: Dave Walker 10:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (3)

del.icio.us is down

…which has made me realize how quickly I’ve become dependent on it’s being there. I’ve gotten very used to filing quickie links there.

That’s the kind of social networking site I find useful, as opposed to, say, Friendster, which has finally and incontrovertibly proven itself too sucktastic to bother with. It’s easy to cancel, though.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Geekiest Protest Sign Ever?

I don’t know, but I like it. :)

found here.

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

:: [/humor/politics]
:: tags: politics

:: Comments (0)

A Few More Invites

I got a few more Gmail invites today. Regular readers/friends/acquaintances/names I recognize from mailing lists/etc. preferred.

:: Dave Walker 13:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

GMail Invite

Regular readers — I’ve got a spare invite, if anyone wants it. Drop me a line at marmoset (at) gmail dot com if you need one.

It’s taken.

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

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

:: Comments (10)

That’s No Space Station

via Dan Sicko

Soon after orbital insertion, Cassini returned its best look yet at the heavily cratered moon Mimas (398 kilometers, 247 miles across). The enormous crater at the top of this image, named Herschel, is about 130 kilometers (80 miles) wide and 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep. (link)

Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

:: Dave Walker 12:33 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

The Future of Spam?

I just received what is easily the most sophisticated spam I’ve ever gotten. I deleted the URL (a porn link) so as to protect anyone from an inadvertent click, but you can drop me a line if you’d like to see it: it’s an amazingly accurate spoof of a bare Apache index page, with a movable DHTML window floating above it — super slick.

The spam itself completely fooled both SpamAssassin and Apple Mail’s filter. SpamAssassin scored it as a -3.1, even with all the custom rulesets I’m running. It’s a thing of beauty, in it’s own way, though it’s really scary how well-crafted it is. The only consolation is that 99.9% of spammer/scammers don’t go through the effort to come up with anything this convincing.

From: Dina@(redacted).com
Subject: Not such good News
Date: August 17, 2004 8:05:25 PM EDT
To: (redacted)@freeke.org
Reply-To: bounce@(redacted).com

Hey dude,

It”s been awhile since I”ve written, so I just thought I would take a sec to catch up with you. How”s things on your side of the world?

Things have been kindof rough over here…Kara left me a couple months ago, and our divorce is final tomorrow. She soaked me for child support AND alimony :( Whatever, though, life goes on. At least I don”t have anyone bitching at me over my shoulder all the time LOL I spend most of my time online lately - it”s pretty cool how much shit you can see and learn. Ok, ok, so I spend most of my time surfing for porn LMAO Hey, I”m a lone dude, what else is there to do??

It”s so screwed up how people don”t cover their asses, though. You”d think with the kind of investment they have to make that these idiots would pay more attention to their stuff. Like this one: http://(redacted) dude they didn”t even bother to password protect the thing! And I”ll bet they are wondering why they can”t sell anything hehe

Alright bro, I”ve gotta run…nice talkin to you again, and say hi to Kristin for me.

cya,

Steve

:: Dave Walker 18:38 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

That Which Cannot Be Named

I know I’m violating the first rule of Adsense Club (“The first rule of Adsense Club is don’t talk about Adsense club”), which means I might get a GoogleSmack™ here, but it’s somewhat disconcerting that, after several months of nothing but ads for hosting services and blogging software, I’m now getting ads for cat pee. I guess that’s what targeted means.

:: Dave Walker 16:46 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Tired of Blue

Redesign here, in case you’re reading this in an aggregator or viewing the LiveJournal echo.

At least for a while, I’ve decided to leave the blue behind. I’ve tested against Safari 1.2, several Gecko-based browsers, Opera 7.5x, and even IE5/Mac. If someone could let me know whether or not it works in the beast (it should) I’d appreciate it.

As usual, you’ll enjoy it more if you’ve installed an interesting font or two.

Known bugs

1. The calendar is missing.
2. Comment pages are almost certainly a little out of whack.
3. The sidebars render before the main content, which is accessability-unfriendly. I will try to fix this.
4. Somewhere along the line, the print stylesheet broke. You can invoke a printer friendly page manually (Blosxom-style) by invoking a flavor, like so. (just replace “.html” with “.print” at the end of the URL, anywhere in my post hierarchy. God, I love Blosxom.)

edit: I moderatedly decreased the ugly in the “light” variant.

:: Dave Walker 17:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (6)

We Should Get Together More Often

• Technology really does change things. My parents, who live in Florida, sent me a link to their local television station’s website. This station happened to have a live stream of their weather coverage during the lead-up to Charley. As a result, I could sit here in Michigan and not have to wonder whether the storm was going to hit them or pass by — I could watch the very same Doppler radar coverage they were seeing and know that they’d be safe. Sweet.
• Sven-S. Porst does his usual clever Unicode explorations and gets to the bottom of character issues related to ΑΘΗΝΑ 2004.
• I used to get static from people who I like and respect for Windows bashing, but every now and again I read something that reminds me of the importance of shielding the general public from it. Clueless offshore “technical support” reading from scripts figures into this tale of woe, too. Broadband providers should refuse to install service on unfirewalled Windows PCs, and we need a more diverse pool of machines that aren’t all susceptible to the same nonsense. Well, I can dream.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Ambushed By A Kitten Gang

Tammie and I took Heidi and Tony for a walk yesterday evening, about twilight. We have a few set routes that we use for dog walks, chosen to provide a decent overview of the neighborhood. The idea is that if either of the dogs ever gets loose, they’ll know enough about the neighborhood to be able to find their way back home.

One route leads up an access road that runs between the high school and the railroad tracks. It’s a funny little road — it was only built because of resident complaints. You see, the new high school was proposed about 5 years ago and the initial plan was for its campus to run flush up against the railroad right-of-way. The problem with this is that there’s a rail yard about a mile and a half north of the school, so trains are often blocking the nearby rail crossing for hours (despite the fact that it’s illegal for them to do so for more than a few minutes at a time.) Residents insisted that there be an access road constructed west of the railroad so that the neighborhood would at least have access to a bridged crossing a quarter mile further south.

Anyway, the road is a little weird in that it’s got the high school and environs on one side, and the (fenced off) rails on the other. The rail line has always been host to a very fascinating collection of urban (and not so) wildlife. In addition to the expected critters (squirrels, pigeons, woodchucks, stray cats and dogs, the occasional rabbit, small snakes), I’ve also on two occasions spotted foxes and some folks have even claimed to have sighted coyotes.

It was pretty dark by the time we walked onto the road, and most of the light cast is pretty diffuse, coming from the high school. We’d gone maybe 75 yards down the road when I saw two small animals bounding up the grassy area to our right. At first they looked to me like small rabbits, as they were moving pretty quickly and bouncing quite a bit as they did so. Before I could do much more than mention them to Tammie, four more animals came out of the vegetation on the other side of the road and came running straight at us. These were pretty quickly identifiable as kittens. Heidi, our older dog, got very, very excited, and nearly pulled Tammie, who was holding her leash, across the road. The kitten closest to Heidi arched its back and hissed. It couldn’t have weighed a pound, and I think its instincts kicked in when it realized it was looking at about 50 pounds of apopleptic german shepherd. Tony, meanwhile, was simply fascinated. He’s only a little over two months old, and pretty much reacts to every new experience by wanting to play.

We pressed on past the kitten gang, and laughed about how simultaneously cute and creepy the “ambush” was. I mean, yeah they were kittens, but they came up on us really quickly…

We didn’t see the mother cat anywhere nearby, and wondered what would cause an entire litter to travel in a pack like that. We figured it must have been hunger, which led us to the unpleasant conclusion that perhaps the mother was no longer around.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Somethin’ Stupid

Frank and Nancy’s “Somethin’ Stupid” isn’t available on the iTMS. They ought to fix that: it’s a great performance. The linked album is well worth a purchase if you ever find it used. In addition to “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”, which everyone knows, it’s got at least two other definite 5-star songs: the aforementioned “Somethin’ Stupid” and the delightfully bizarre “Some Velvet Morning.”

Oh, don’t act so shocked.

:: Dave Walker 18:48 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

ISSYCWG

(or I See Something You Certainly Won’t Get)

I’m not really concerned with the bulk of this post, really, it’s mostly concerned with things I don’t care about. I’m not the kind of guy, at any level, who’s looking for an it’s-not-just-a-floor-wax, it’s-a-dessert-topping-too blogging client/aggregator/server whatever-the-fuh. Unix, man, simple, focused tools that do one thing (well) and aren’t selfish with their data.

I use a semi-fancy text editor as a blogging client. I could use a fancier one, or a simpler one. I serve my pages with an almost pathologically simple publishing system. I think the real reason I favor this way of working is that I’m rarely surprised by my tools. When you serve content, surprise is bad.

The following bullet point, though, caught my attention:

3. WYSIWYG copy and paste.

It totally amazes me that both Moveable Type and TypePad don’t have a way for Windows users to go to a blog post - copy it - and paste it.

The web is not WYSIWYG, not from the top of it’s addled little head nor to the soles of its duct-taped together Chuck Taylor’s. When you (or even worse, your tools) pretend that it is you set yourself up for certain disappointment.

It would be nice for simple authoring if the web was WYSIWYG, and I’d like some ice cream, please, sir. And a pony. Definitely a pony.

Early on in the web’s history, it was the norm to conflate presentation and content. Of course, this never really worked, which became screamingly obvious once the second and succeeding browsing useragents appeared. Suitably chastened, later formal iterations of HTML and related tech made this distinction more explicit. CSS was developed to give authors (some) control over presentation, but the standards were always painfully plain on some very important points: presentation and content are separate, and presentation can and will vary widely in differing implementations in various contexts (e.g. desktop vs. mobile, different useragents, etc.) and that factors such as accessibility, iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn, and a thousand other details have to be taken into account.

The sad fact is that a huge number of pages (perhaps even the majority) on the real, wild, web sport at least one of the following problems:

• Wrong or missing DOCTYPE
• Wrong or missing encoding declaration
• Wrong or missing mimetype
• Broken markup
  • improperly nested tags
  • improperly escaped characters
  • hacky markup that exists solely to work around, er, idiosyncrasies in the dominant useragent(s)

Any time you copy and paste from someone else’s broken page, you have a high likelihood of importing whatever brokenness existed in the source into your own. There are a few nuts out there like myself who like to poke the bear with a sharp stick by playing cute with things like curly quotes and uncommon characters, but I do it with eyes wide open, knowing that I need to tread carefully, and that I still stand a good chance of being mauled at any moment.

It’s true that the wide world of humans out there needs tools that make this stuff easier. I will be just as happy as everyone else when those tools arrive.

:: Dave Walker 09:05 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Ecorse, A River Town

My tiny town, Ecorse, sits alongside the Detroit River and has a few little marinas, boat ramps, and the like, which seem to be the focus of, um, lots of interesting news events. A random smattering from the last couple of weeks (complete with craptacular video!):

• Man Allegedly Caught Smuggling Drugs On Jet Ski
• Boaters Find Man’s Body Near Ecorse
• Woman Allegedly Steals Truck, Leads Police On Chase

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Michael Edward Parillo

A tip of the hat to “Galley Mike”, who passed on July 23rd.

I found a link to another nice obituary here.

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

:: [/obits]
:: tags: obits

:: Comments (1)

MyDoom-O Raging

Judging from the amount of traffic I’m seeing today, MyDoom-O is positively raging. I usually end up seeing way less traffic from these things than most people, and even I have gotten at least 2 dozen copies since this morning, all directed at a public-facing, widely disseminated address.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

If You Won’t Disco, I Won’t Dance

What do all the trendy aggregated political sites have in common? No support for feed autodiscovery.

:: Dave Walker 11:54 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (4)

Groovy Decor

A few weeks ago, I let loose a LazyWeb yawp, looking for an OS X tool that would allow me to build thumbnail images from websites, making use of Webkit.

Paul Hammond has built such a beast, a Python script, webkit2png, that makes use of PyObjC to harness WebKit to the task.

I’m not certain what I’ll end up using it for, exactly, but it’s the sort of handy tool that ends up suggesting more and more uses for itself, just by sitting on your hard drive. Thanks, Paul!

:: Dave Walker 17:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Miscellaneous Goobers, Return From Patagonia Edition

• A good start.

• “One thing I wish Apple had done differently is respect the white-on-orange icon. Such a small thing, but so important.” - Dave Winer

  Um, no. Can you imagine a company as aesthetically, well, sensitive as Apple biting off a chunk of little orange stupid?

• You know what I want for Christmas? Markup Barbie. You pull a string and she says “XML is tough.” - http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/07/06/tough
• “Keira Knightly Bazoomed for King Arthur Promotion”

• Blending reality TV with a bit of “rumspringa,” the UPN network is launching a controversial new series this month centered on a group of Amish teens as they venture from their rural environs into the outside world. - Reuters

• Before the buzz wears off on all the Jay-Z album remix projects, will someone please make THE BLACK DOG ALBUM? Seriously. Bytes? You know it would be fantastic. All those celestial breakdance fantasies swirling around Ed and Andy’s heads? There’s enough hip-hop there to make it work. - Dan Sicko

  Doing my part to spread the meme. :)

• As a resident of the Great Lakes State, I’m happy to hear that Kelly Ripa’s new $27.5mil deal requires her to comply with the provisions of the Great Lakes Agreement.

:: Dave Walker 11:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Extending HTML

Dave Hyatt’s been talking about the extensions that the Webcore team at Apple has made to support some of the new tech in next year’s OS X release, Tiger. This caused a bit of a stir, as a few people saw in this the potential of a return to the bad old days (circa 1996-7) of browser vendors adding extensions to HTML willy-nilly for competitive advantage.

The Webcore team is apparently listening to this feedback and are exploring ways of adding these extensions in a non-disruptive fashion. Towards the end of one of his posts, Hyatt makes a statement that fascinates me:

Going forward, I’m curious what the reaction will be as WHAT-WG works to further extend HTML. Assuming that the W3C has really decreed HTML4 to be obsolete, what happens when a proposal is made by multiple browser vendors to extend it? If the W3C rejects it, should the browser vendors be forced to keep their content namespaced forever? I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

It’s pretty obvious what’s happened here. The WHAT-WG has basically been forced to fork HTML, as the W3C has moved on to other horizons and isn’t really doing anything with the 97 percent of the web that’s already here. One hopes that the W3C will be open to a merge of the forks down the road, but, if they don’t, I think it’s obvious what happens next.

:: Dave Walker 08:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (3)

Taking Off For A Few Days

I’ll be mostly offline for the next week, but checking webmail sporadically. If you need to get ahold of me, you can mail me at marmoset (a t) gmail (d o t) com and I’ll try to respond as quickly as is practical.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

They - Jem [✯✯✯✯]

Of course, a scant few days after I pronounce the iTunes freebies too boring to bother with, they offer one of the best so far. I dont know if I’ll still like this song in a week — it’s got one of those so-catchy-that-it’ll-soon-annoy-me choruses, but I know a hook when I hear one, and this song’s got an irresistable one.

Judging from the other snippets I’ve heard, Jem (no last name) appears to be working the Beth Orton / Dido / Lamb axis: singer-songwriter-y female vocals over light electronics. How does it work over the course of a whole album? I have no idea, but this song’s nice enough to keep.

:: Dave Walker 18:15 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Online Loyalty Oaths

During last weekend’s shenaningans, I noticed a curious and distressing idea pop up a few times. Because there’s nothing I love more than a drastic oversimplification, I’ll refer to it as the “Online Loyalty Oath”. Briefly, there were a number of posts that basically boiled down to:

“If you were a real friend and not a total coward, you’d join in and yell a those people over there that were mean to me.”

or (alternate formulation)

“Didn’t you see the completely insulting thing that person wrote? Why didn’t you join in and publicly condemn it?”

If there’s one thing the Slashdot trolls did get right, it’s the idea that the degree of self-absorbption on display in blogs is something to be pitied, embarassed by, and, yes, ridiculed.

Look, if the empty boilerplate people always recite about the true deep meaning (hic) of blogging (the old “unfiltered voice of an individual” hogwash that even I might have been a big enough, class A1 sucka to believe at one point) means anything, any damn thing at all, it’s that, really, we (aw, sheesh), we aren’t obligated to say anything. If my text editor’s open and I see you taking a hit from an asshole, hey, I might throw you a virtual heavy-metal-goat-head sign of support. I may solemnly clasp my hand over my heart and wish you well. Maybe I’ll just open another window and download some cat pictures.

I read about half of the weekend’s ugliest posts while sitting in front of my keyboard with a pretty seven-month old girl cooing in the crook of my arm. Do you know how little I cared about giving anyone an ego stroke at that moment?

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

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

:: Comments (5)

Madonna Changes Her Name To Esther

(link)

via Randy

:: Dave Walker 15:46 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (3)

iTMS Stuff

I stopped posting reviews of the iTunes freebies because they got too boring for it to be worthwhile. The songs weren’t exceptional enough (in any direction) to be worth typing about.

On the other hand, I’m really liking the exclusive Pixies track. Interestingly enough, the lead vocal’s one of those old school Frank Black/Kim Deal duets, and it sounds like they never left. It’s got a great bridge and chorus (is Kim singing “waka waka?” Gawd, I hope so.) It’s not free, but it’s certainly worth a buck.

Sven-S. Porst has an early take on the German edition of the iTunes Music Store. Go ahead and get the Pixies track, Sven. :)

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

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

:: Comments (2)

My Newest Mail Filter

:: Dave Walker 13:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Ducks In A Row

There is a beautiful, beautiful rant from Ben Hammersley well into the comments of something a bit more substantive than the usual Orange vs. Blue shenanigans.

Ignore the specious aspersions being cast upon Ben’s professional integrity and parentage from the expected directions and listen to the imminently sensible things he’s saying.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Kewl Tool Roll

• (mac) Inquisitor: Google searching as you type. Quite nifty. via ssp

• (any modern OS) Instiki: Cool Wiki engine. Yet another stop along the road in my quest for the perfect personal task manager / to do list / project space. The notable things about this one: nicely self-contained (runs on its own included webserver), supports Markdown and Textile, runs on Ruby (Ruby built into OS X is too old, grab the prebuilt version that embeds the Ruby runtime or install a current Ruby dist via Darwinports or Fink).

• (web) Memigo: A headline clipping service that learns what you like, can export feeds.

• (mac) iEatBrainz: Uses the MusicBrains metadata engine to help you clean up your iTunes library’s metadata. Great for doing something about those “mystery tracks” that you collected from who knows where.

:: Dave Walker 16:39 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

The View From “Flyover Country”

(story)

thanks to G.I.G.I. via Fark

:: Dave Walker 08:57 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

The Olympic Spirit

via Gizmodo

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Snoop Wants A 300C

Snoop Dog calls Daimler-Chrysler Chrysler Group CEO Dieter Zetsche. The news story doesn’t contain the audio, but it’s out there.

:: Dave Walker 13:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (7)

Dada Spam

We just help you not to become looser!

To have NO problems with an e=recti_on, you should use:
\/|@Grr@: find all INFO at this place or
whaling explode amain hypodermic Bilbao

C|@L|s*: find all INFO at this place

*Note: C|@L|s is that same med as \/|@Grr@ but it’s effect lasts for 36 hours. Developed in 2001 year in US. FDA approved.

acoustics additivity sauces freeze omnibus
deafest snorted ballistic clamps abuses
blackouts commonly Knutsen quizzed shutout
advantages manpower forcible glamour culler
Fishkill heroines lifter Susanne brawl

As someone who took a term of linguistics, I find this fascinating. The rapid (negative) feedback look between spammers and antispam software has finally produced an entirely separate language, one that shares part of the latin alphabet, but almost none of the semantics. Its written form (it doesn’t even have a spoken form) is characterized by constantly variable spelling, syntax rules, and random blocks of noise words which are to be ignored, rendered in different colors.

Viewing source on it was even more entertaining. It had all sorts of garbage invalid markup with extraneous nonsense attributes and huge chunks of whitespace. It actually takes advantage of the permissive parsing of pretty much every current HTML engine. How about a rule that adds to a message’s spam score if it doesn’t validate as HTML 4.01 strict or XHTML 1.1 strict? ;)

It fooled SpamAssassin but not Apple Mail.

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

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

:: Comments (3)

Nice To See The Google Blog Loosening Up

After a few painfully corporate entries, the Google blog has finally produced a keeper. Buttermilk Fried Chicken Elvis Loved looks delicious.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Keith And Angle Brackets

Any day when you’re quoted by both Tim Bray and Norm Walsh is, by definition, a good day. Thanks, guys.

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

:: [/misc/webmemes]
:: tags: webmemes

:: Comments (0)

Purple!

Sun May 30 17:56:06 EDT 2004: gack… way too trendy. pls forget i said anything. :)

See more …

:: Dave Walker 18:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Yellow Magic Orchestra - Firecracker

Brilliant, brilliant track. I dare you, without googling, to try to guess the year this was recorded.

It was one of the first 7-inch singles I ever bought, when, for some inexplicable reason, a bizarre Japanese electronic disco record became a smash regional hit in Detroit. I remember them playing this at high-school basketball games the year my sister graduated from high school!

:: Dave Walker 18:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Burning A Comment Feed

For a few months, I’ve been offering a halfassed comments feed. It’s halfassed because I produce it using a hack that’s really too ugly to talk about in public. Well, it’s still halfassed, but I’m running it through Feedburner now so it will at least usually be wellformed and stuff (trying to clean up after stray ampersands and angle brackets and whatever else in comments and trackbacks and is a losing battle…) I’m not sure if anyone ever bothered subscribing to that feed besides me anyway, but in case you were, it has a new URL.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Escaping The Madness, Part Two

Oh é, ya sexy beast.

See more …

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

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

:: Comments (5)

Spreading the Word

Sam Ruby:

Meanwhile, you can help by spreading the word.  The word is détente.  RSS 1.0 has a reason to exist.  RSS 2.0 has a reason to exist.  And Atom has a reason to exist.

And if anybody tells you differently, and won’t listen when you suggest détente, take Brent’s suggestion and make use of the handy Unsubscribe button.  That’s what it is there for.

:: Dave Walker 09:47 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Too Funny To Be Imprisoned In The Linklog

Thanks Pietro:

Rumsfeld Fighting Technique.

:: Dave Walker 15:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

khtml2png-like functionality using Webkit on OS X?

Lazyweb, I invoke thee. khtml2png is a clever little utility that uses the KHTML engine to render a snapshot of a webpage into small thumbnail image. I realize that I could probably get it to compile on OS X with a little sweat equity, but it’s got some fairly heavyweight dependencies and, theoretically, everything that one would need to do something similar on an OS X system is already there— between Webkit and Quartz, I don’t think there would be much standing in the way of a native implementation.

Am I right? Has someone already done this?

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

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

:: Comments (6)

The Song Not The Singer

Sometimes I lose all self-respect and end up watching American Idol.

I’m not really sure why I do this. I really hate the stock-in-trade product of these shows: treacly, overwrought ballads delivered by eager-to-please amateurs, with the ultimate goal of delivering a “new”, radio-friendly voice to slot in comfortably next to all the other identikit melisma-abusers already boring the world to tears.

I can’t help thinking how much more interesting the competition would be, though, if they opened it up to a wider range of songs, and maybe threw the contestants some curveballs. Wouldn’t it be great to hear some big, strapping jock try to deal with Belle & Sebastian’s “Seeing Other People”, or to see someone tackle the La’s classic “There She Goes” without the obliviousness Sixpence None The Richer brought to the lyrical content? (hint: It’s a love song, all right, but…)

addendum: thanks to George for pointing out this.

:: Dave Walker 12:26 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (3)

Little. Orange. Stupid.

Robert Scoble: Why can’t you all use the XML icon?

• Ugly. Really, really ugly. Has anyone ever designed a site that looked better because it had a scrunched up, retangular orange turd with all caps, unkerned white Arial Bold sitting on it? I mean, really, orange and white?

• Inaccurate. Imprecise. Yes, syndicated feeds are XML. So are about a dozen other things you might reasonably find linked on a modern weblog.

• Bright orange screams “click me”, right? What happens if the user clicks it? Well, depending on what content type the feed is being served with, whether the publisher has styled the feed with XSLT or not, which browser the user is visiting with, and about a dozen other variables beyond the publisher’s and the reader’s control:

  1. The reader is presented with a screenful of unreadable gibberish, with redundant bits of the weblog content he was looking at just a second ago embedded in it. Reader thinks she’s broken something.

  2. The browser silently downloads the feed into the reader’s download directory, where it is instantly buried amongst the other 400 files already there, never to be seen again.

  3. The reader is presented with the same content on the weblog page, but styled differently. The reader thinks “what the hell was the point of that?”

Listen, I’m going to type r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y…

Feed autodiscovery is the only thing that makes sense.

If your aggregator can’t handle it, throw it out and get a new one. If your publishing software can’t handle serving it, join the rest of us here in the 21st century and get some software that does. If you need to serve multiple feeds (full content versus excerpts, or comments, or whatever), explain that inline (with, gasp, text) or on a separate “Feeds” page.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t try to shame the rest of us into foisting any more copies of that 36 x 14 abortion on the world.

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

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

:: Comments (21)

Brief SubEthaEdit 2.0 Update

It looks like the new SubEthaEdit networking protocol is based on BEEP (spec), and apparently “Ethereal is a nice way to watch BEEP traffic.” (link). So now you know.

:: Dave Walker 23:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Brevity

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

— Beckett

I’ve really been on a “the fewer words, the better” kick for a while now, at least in my informal writing. Yes, of course I’m lazy, but I think it might go a little deeper than that. Writing, for me, is usually an immediate response to “an itch”, something that’s on the tip of my tongue right now that needs to be said. If I don’t record the thing I’m thinking of within a couple of minutes of that initial impulse, it’s unlikely to happen at all.

This is good and bad.

Good because the flab, the verbal frippery, and the cute tricks tend not to survive the self-editing process. Bad because I tackle very few things in depth, and sometimes the things you omit leave you backtracking days later, trying to explain what you really meant when you quoted that marginally in-context bit of text without an iota of explanation.

Just saying.

:: Dave Walker 17:05 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

SubEthaEdit 2.0

There’s been a new release of SubEthaEdit. I’ve barely started using it, so I’m not entirely sure of what’s changed, but one change is that they’ve introduced a new URL scheme for document sharing. If you’re running SEE 2, you can connect to my test document here, at least for a little while.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

The Tree Guys Are Back

Getting all this crap done in one day was apparently beyond them. Grr…

:: Dave Walker 11:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

In Case You Thought The Syndication War Was Entirely Humorless Handwringing

This might change your mind.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Markdown, Two Months Later

I never consciously planned to do it, but two months after trying Markdown for the first time, I find I’m using it for substanially all of my web-based writing. I’d played around with other human-centered web markup formats before (WikiText, Textile, etc.), but with every one I always found myself having to unlearn too much HTML markup to feel efficient. Markdown succeeds, for me, in a few crucial ways where the others always failed.

1. Simple passthrough of HTML markup - the parser doesn’t strip HTML it doesn’t know how to handle itself. This is crucial.
2. Fits into my workflow. I do 90% of my writing in 3 programs: SubEthaEdit, Apple Mail, and in Safari textfields. Markdown works as a service, so I can invoke it with a keystroke in each of these places.
3. “Feels” familiar. Since Markdown uses email-style conventions for things like bulleted lists, text emphasis, and footnoted links, and I’ve been writing emails for 20 years, I never feel like I’m trying to shoehorn my writing into something new or unfamiliar.

I’m not storing my blog text in Markdown’s syntax. I’m writing in Markdown, then running the finished text through the parser, rendering it to HTML and filtering it through Tidy. Still, I find I’m producing substantially stupid-free (i.e. no open or improperly nested tags) text faster than I ever did writing my posts in raw HTML.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Technopolitics

• The World Wide Web Consortium injected itself into the syndication controversy by proposing that Atom seek standardization via the W3C process, rather than the IETF. This prompted a number of generally confused responses from various directions. The funniest, perhaps, was Robert Scoble’s, where he wondered why the W3C didn’t invite RSS as well. Um, just hazarding a guess, but…
• SixApart announced the licensing structure for Movable Type 3.0. People went kinda bats**t. The recent perceptible geeknoscenti move towards WordPress became a stampede.
• I’m still happy with Blosxom.
• Google started a corporate weblog, and for now it’s more corporate than weblog. There’s a feed for it too, which is currently Atom only, and of course that’s only a practical problem if one happens to use an unmaintained aggregator or one is allergic to free workarounds. They added image ads as an option for Adsense, but I haven’t seen one yet. They also launched Google Groups 2 as a beta. The two biggest features: new support for mailing lists (similar to Yahoo Groups lists) and the ability to read Usenet article summaries as Atom feeds. Still no sign of what I’d really like to see — providing Google web searches and Google News searches as feeds.
• Rogers Cadenhead, Andrew Grumet, and Adam Curry join Dave Winer on the RSS Advisory Board. Brent Simmons and Jon Udell leave, without comment. The number of non-Userland-affiliated persons on the board reaches zero, which is, seemingly, where it will stay. M’kay. OneCo?

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Note To Self

It really is impossible to do any sort of work that requires concentration when a nine-man team is outside your window, reducing trees to their component molecules.

:: Dave Walker 12:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

French Connection - Simon Stinger [✯✯✯✯]

This week’s selection is pretty fun. It’s pretty much 80’s throwback new wave, which would be rather tough to screw up. Probably the most obvious touchstone here would be the B-52s, circa Whammy. Apparently the band has quite an interesting stage show.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Cigarette Brands

Yesterday we were out and were supposed to pick up 3 packs of cigarettes for a friend as a favor. What was funny(?) was that this person was very particular about the brand. “I want the (Brand I Refuse To Give Any Google Juice) 100s, in a box.” They had to be in a hard box, not a soft pack, and they had to be 100s, not the normal length ones, and the brand had to be BIRTGAGJ.

We stopped at the gas station, asked for “3 packs of BIRTGAGJs, 100s, in a box”, and headed on our way. When we got to our friend’s house, we found that the attendant had given us 3 packs of BIRTGAGJs, regular length, in a box, and our friend was crestfallen.

I took them back and exchanged them with no problem.

The question I have for smokers here is “whuh?” Is there really that major a difference between the brands? Getting (uncomfortably?) blunt here, does it matter what kind of gun the bullet that splatters your brains on the wall behind you came from?

Slow, stinky, expensive suicide with brand loyalty?

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

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

:: Comments (4)

U Lied - Crea [✯✯]

The week of daily freebies is over. This is the first “free song of the week” series. I wonder if that means they’ll all debut on Thursdays? That doesn’t seem to sync perfectly with the industry’s new-release-Tuesdays, but I guess we’ll find out for sure next week. On to the song:

Meh. Inoffensive, unmemorable nu-soul. Competent singing, glory notes all in a row, friction-free arrangemen and production, and now-mandatory post-Erykah Badu “you wronged me now I’m not going to take it no more” lyrics. Next.

:: Dave Walker 15:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Yow, Web Services In Action

Rather than using a physical TV listings guide or viewing TV listings on a website, I prefer to use a specialized application to see what’s on. For quite a while, I’ve been using Tom Talbott’s MyTelly, which was always pretty nice. It’s written in Java, but it’s acceptably responsive even on my G3. The only drawback was that it retrieved its listings by screen scraping the listings at the Zap2it site. It did a good job of it, but of course it was handicapped by the inherent limitations of that technique — it had to grab entire web pages and labouriously filter and extract the programming from them.

Well, Zap2it has deployed a SOAP interface, and the newest MyTelly release talks directly to it. Wow. Fetching 8 days worth of programming data with the old screen-scraping MyTelly engine took 10-15 minutes over a cable modem connection. The new release fetches the same data in about 45-60 seconds. I suspect the amount of bandwidth consumed is a couple of orders of magnitude less than with the old version. Sweet.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Try - Nelly Furtado [✯]

I fell on this grenade for you. For you. Never forget this.

Starts with a heartbeat and an acoustic guitar. I shit you not.

All I know
Is everything is not as it’s sold
but the more I grow the less I know
And I have lived so many lives
Though I’m not old
And the more I see, the less I grow
The fewer the seeds the more I sow

It mostly goes on like that, for what seems like about 63 years.

There’s about 96 overdubbed tracks worth of sparkly digital crap and the string sections and the American Idol-style oversinging and the rah-rah-radio supercompression and the maybe they’re backup singers or just a flotilla of sampled-autoharmonized clones and the oy please stop oh just please stop it someone.

:: Dave Walker 12:48 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Ideal Music Store, Record Industry P.O.V.

• You don’t own any music. We own it all, regardless what you may think you’ve paid for. At best, you’re rented our content. Any conversion of this content to another format requires us to ding your credit card.
• Every time you play, hum, or think about music, we get to ding your credit card.
• If we could figure out a way to rig a taxicab-style meter onto every device you own that is capable of emitting a sound, we’d do it. In a heartbeat. It would, of course, be pre-authorized to ding your credit card.
• The revenue sharing structure between our industry and the musicians who create the music will be dictated by us. We will take whatever share of the proceeds we feel we deserve.
• We reserve the right to change the rules, in our favor, at any time. We’ve retained the services of your (quite affordable) legislature for this purpose.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Ideal Music Store, Customer P.O.V.

• Every recording ever made.
  • No “regional” restrictions on access. Whether the music was recorded in the U.S.A., the U.K., Germany, Japan, or Senegal, the customer wants to be able to have it on the same terms.
  • There’s no such thing as “out of print”. Any recording who’s copyright has not explicitly been renewed is irrevocably part of the public domain.
• Perfect audio quality.
  • Given current restrictions of storage space, bandwidth, and portable player capacity, the highest possible quality that is practical, in a format that is playable on all hardware, on all operating systems, and on all consumer electronics equipment.
• Free.
  • If not free, as much of customer’s payment as possible directed to the people (songwiters, performers, direct production staff, etc.) who actually made the recording. As little as possible diverted along the distribution chain to middlemen, lawyers, and multinational cartels.
  • Prices should reflect the reality that a downloaded file is less flexible, at present, than the same music on physical media.
• Instantaneous downloads
• No Corrupted Files
  • No bad encodings, arbitrarily truncated songs, skips, etc.
  • Copious, accurate metadata
• Absolutely no restrictions on what can be done with downloaded files
  • Unrestricted hardcopies (physical CDs)
    • Once a recording has been paid for in one format, it should be available at nominal (i.e. cost of production plus reasonable overhead) cost in other formats (physical and virtual.)
• Terms of purchase cannot be arbitrarily changed by one party. Once purchased by a customer, the rights the customer has cannot be reduced.

:: Dave Walker 13:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

What Kind Of Value does the iTunes Music Store Really Have?

A reader (hi Dad!) asked me to talk about the value proposition of the iTunes Music Store. It’s actually a really good question, and one that deserves a longer-than-usual sort of answer. Perhaps the easiest way to talk about the value of the iTMS is to look at what it could be, as opposed to what it actually is.

I’ve decided to tackle this question in four parts. The first part will be a look at what the ultimate music store would look like, from a customer point-of-view. The second will be a look at what the ultimate music store would look like, from a recording industry point of view. The third will be a look at how well each of these groups is served by the iTMS. The fourth will be a more general summary of the iTMS in its current state.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

La Wally, Drama Lirica in Quattro Atti: Ebben? Ne Andrò Lontana - London Philharmonic Orchestra, Renée Fleming & Sir Charles Mackerras [✯✯✯✯]

I’m not sure why I assumed that all of the free tracks in the current iTMS giveaway would be rock and/or roll, given that there’s far more than that in the current inventory.

What I know about opera you could pour into a shotglass and still have room for enough booze for irrbody in the club to get tips’. I’ll try to get through te rest of this without making a fool of my philistine self. I can confirm that m4a/m4p’s metadata standard is apparently quite robust, since it managed to contain that whole mouthful in the subject line, avec Unicode and a rather fetching portrait of Ms. Fleming, all without breaking a sweat.

For what my completely unqualified opinion is worth, I enjoyed today’s selection. I really wish I could say something useful about it, but knowing one’s limits has its own value.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Accidentally In Love - Counting Crows [✯✯✯]

d.w.:

I know I said that I’d review all the iTunes Music Store freebies, but don’t I get a day off? A review sabbath, if you will?

d.w.’s conscience:

Heh. You just don’t want to have listen to a Counting Crows song. Multiple times.

d.w.:

C’mon, I’m a good guy, mostly. I love my dog. I help old ladies across the street.

d.w.’s conscience:

A promise is a promise. You said you’d review them all.

d.w.:

I know. But I’m scared.

---

OK, I guess it wasn’t that horrible. Counting Crows are in upbeat, joyous Van Morrison-ripoff mode here, as opposed to their dreaded serious, intense Van Morrison-ripoff mode, which usually makes me want to rip my ears off and hide in the storm cellar. It’s got a decent hook, and with a different singer I’d probably even listen to it with something approaching enjoyment. It’s taken from the soundtrack of the upcoming Shrek 2, and I can absolutely see it working in that context.

:: Dave Walker 08:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Price I Pay - Jane’s Addiction [✯✯✯✯]

Not bad. I managed not to hear a single thing from last year’s Jane’s Addiction reunion record, Strays, which gives you an idea of the magnitude of the rock I’m hiding under with respect to current radio. I didn’t actively seek it out, either, becuase reunion records are usually, y’know, crap.

This track, unlike any of the others reviewed so far, actually does some interesting things texturally. It starts with a subdued electronics, (real?) strings and plucked guitar intro over which Perry Farrell, well, coos. This intro lasts for about 90 seconds before the second part of the song kicks in, a bass-led rolling thing with a circular guitar riff and a suitably frenetic chorus (points deducted for lyrical cliché). There’s an ambient breakdown after the second chorus that’s particularly effective.

The whole thing manages to stay interesting over it’s full five minutes and 27 seconds, and I guess that’s about all you can ask for, right? If anyone has heard the full album, I’d be curious if the record as a whole is up to the quality of this track (please use the comments.)

:: Dave Walker 11:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Skip If You’re Bored By Syndication Politics

I originally pointed this out in the linkbar, but Isofarro and Phil Rignalda do such a beautiful job of eviscerating the last few days’ full-court anti-Atom disinformation campaign in the comments of this post that I had to point to it in a real entry.

:: Dave Walker 10:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Pavement Cracks (Gabriel & Dresden Mixshow Edit) - Annie Lennox [✯✯✯]

This one’s a little tougher to review properly, because hearing it makes me want to hear a different version of the song. I think the vocal is excellent — a full 20+ years after Sweet Dreams, Lennox still has a helluva set of pipes. What I’m not enthusiastic about at all is the lackluster commercial trance backing her up here in this remix.

In this sense, this free song has probably done its job more than any of the others so far in the series, in that it makes me want to buy other tracks by the artist: in this case, I want to find an arrangement that better serves the singer. Sadly, the perfect version doesn’t seem to be present on this EP, as the mixes, at least from the 30-second excerpts, they all seem to be decidedly lackluster. I’d love to hear her work with i:Cube, or Funkstörung, or maybe Kirk Degiorgio, for example.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Courtney Love - Hold On To Me [✯✯✯]

Today’s iTMS freebee is Hold On To Me by Courtney Love, taken from America’s Sweetheart. Amusingly, the free track is drawn from the “clean” version of the album instead of the “explicit” one, so if you wanted to buy the full album you’d save 99 cents by taming yr. baser impulses, nyuk nyuk.

Now about the song… well, meh, maybe meh+. Courtney’s in her cracked-out Stevie Nicks mode here, I suppose. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the arrangement — it’s a little on the slick side, though the little soaring guitar figure in the chorus is nice. I’m going to be optimistic rather than negative and assume that that the multitracking in the choruses is a deliberate late 70’s / early 80’s AOR pastiche.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

New Feature - iTMS Reviews

I don’t think anyone else is blogging these, so I’m going to start a feature where I review the free iTunes promos. (There’s one a day until the middle of next week, and then, apparently, there’ll be one per week.)

I briefly mentioned the first two songs in yesterday’s entry.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

We Could Talk About The Weather

It’s currently about 72°F (22°C) here, with a projected high of 80°F (27°C) later in the afternoon.

It snowed two days ago.

:: Dave Walker 12:00 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Good To Know I'm Right, Occasionally

iTunes 4.5 was released yesterday, and I’ll defer to Sven-S. Porst’s breakdown of the good and the bad, since he’s done a convincingly thorough job of looking at the details. One thing he didn’t mention, though, is that the AAC encoder has apparently been updated.

One feature he wasn’t able to try out, being in a non-iTMS nation, was the new “free song” feature. Apparently there will be one new free promo song per week going forward. For this current week, as a “birthday celebration”, they’re giving away one free song per day. Yesterday’s song was from the Foo Fighters, and it was pleasant enough, though I can’t remember a single thing about it now that it’s over. Today’s song is from Avril Lavigne, and, ye gods, it is awful. I could spend aeons telling you why, starting with her infinitely irritating nasal whine and progressing on through the sub-diary-entry lyrics, but that’s ultimately beside the point. And no, I don’t care how old she is. Alex Chilton was even younger when “the Letter” hit, so deal. Sometimes it’s just good to know you’ve been ignoring a musician for all the right reasons.

:: Dave Walker 11:06 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

OK, About The Ads

All right, I know we’re all supposed to be virtuously noncommercial and all that, but as a wise man once said, bullets aren’t cheap. If you really can’t stand them, I broke them out into a <div> of their own with the id “ad,” and if you’re as smart as you think you are that should be enough for you to be able to block them on your end.

Daddy needs a new pair of shoes. I hope this whole experience doesn’t make you think less of me. :)

Comments are always welcome.

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

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

:: Comments (3)

Clinically Inclined

It seems odd that I’ve never blogged about SonicSunset.com, considering that I listen to the shows every week and that the proprietors are longtime friends, but looking at my archives I see that is indeed the case.

SonicSunset.com is the official website of the Clinically Inclined radio program, which airs most every Friday night (9:30-12:00 AM Chicago time, Saturday 02:30-05:00 UTC) on WNUR, Northwestern University’s FM radio station. The program is co-hosted by DJs Matt MacQueen and Dave Siska.

What I love most about the program is the way that Matt and Dave place even current electronic releases in a context that acknowledges all the various strains of influence that have shaped underground dance music, from the late 1970’s onward. Matt has spent untold hours rifling through stacks of dusty old disco, new wave, and funk records looking for forgotten, out-of-print gems. It’s a pure thrill to hear him mix an old Gino Soccio 12" into a current West London broken beat track, via an old New Order b-side or some forgotten “bonus beats” from an ancient Chicago house record. Dave plays closer to the traditional definition of “techno”, but has a helluva knack for pulling out tracks you love to death but can’t immediately place (he was responsible for my recent dive into the Irdial Discs back catalogue, for example.)

You can tune into the show live on Fridays at WNUR or grab archived shows from SonicSunset.com. They’re perfectly sized for burning onto 80 minute CD-Rs.

:: Dave Walker 16:20 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Trying DarwinPorts Instead of Fink

While setting up the new workstation, I decided to go with DarwinPorts instead of Fink. I like Fink OK, but the fact that DarwinPorts is a spiritual descendent of the much adored FreeBSD ports system, as opposed to Fink’s Debian heritage, makes me curious. Having two different port systems installed on my two main machines may cause a few local impedance mismatches, but I think the experience will be valuable.

I like it quite a bit so far. It’s a younger project than Fink, so it’s not as polished in one sense (no friendly GUI or binary distribution), but it seems more lightweight and less fragile overall. There aren’t as many ported applications, but all the main ones I care about (e.g. tidy, nano, ethereal, etc.) are there.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Even iCal is Fast

It goes without saying that I’m happy with my new workstation. I went from a 450MHz PPC750 (G3) to a dual 1.8GHz PPC970 (G5) with Quartz hardware-acceleration. I really haven’t done anything particularly compute intensive, but the difference in my ordinary, day to day tasks is just striking. Things I would actively avoid doing (using my ISPs Flash-encrusted homepage, for example) on the G3 happen instantaneously. Apple Mail is fast enough for me to use without reservation, reindexing of large folders is instantaneous, etc.

I was happy to find that the bundled software includes some stuff I’ll actually use. Apple has apparently licensed OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, and GraphicConverter, as well as iLife ‘04.

I’m still trying to build my working environment up, of course. I have to bring sure all my tools and scripts and everything else over, and I’ve got to figure out how to sync my Tungsten, etc., but it’s a joy when I don’t have to wait. At all.

:: Dave Walker 13:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Cue Michael Corleone in GFIII

Originally posted as a comment on this rant, but somebody at Harvard doesn’t like me and won’t allow me to post there.

The default, out of the box setups for Moveable Type and Blogger create files at index.rdf and atom.xml automatically, respectively, correct? Seems like a pretty good reason to look for those files if it’s indexing a known weblog that hasn’t done the expected autodiscovery mumbo-jumbo in it’s <head>.

Looking at my logs, though, Google is indexing my RSS 2.0 and RSS 0.91 files, and not my Atom and RSS 1.0 feeds.

Dammit, Google is flexing their muscles and trying to kill Atom and RDF. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Faster Blog

This blog should get a bit faster later today, as my server processes will no longer have to compete for RAM and cycles with my websurfing, tune playing, PDA syncing, compiling, retouching, text editing, “Collapse” playing, and all the other general faffing about. Yes, today, my venerable iMac DV+ becomes a dedicated server.

Consider me enthused.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

While I Washed Dishes

• Solex In A Slipshod Style - Solex
• It Could Be Sunshine - Love And Rockets
• Catholic Block - Sonic Youth
• Pull The Wires From The Wall - the Delgados
• Nothing Natural - Lush
• Cactus - Icarus
• Crest - Stereolab
• Don’t Cry For Me - the Zombies
• Plock - Plone
• Wake Up - Missy Elliot featuring Jay-Z
• I.S.A.A.C. - Tahiti 80
• Son of Mustang Ford - Swervedriver
• Severed Finger Samba - Akufen
• Groovy Train - the Farm
• Pop Shit - Dirt McGirt featuring Pharrell Williams
• Classical Gas - Mason Williams
• Windy - The Association
• Live At WZBC (Testpattern Set) - CiM

:: Dave Walker 16:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (3)

Ode To Hitsville U.K.

The Clash got a lot of static when they released Sandinista! all those many years ago. After all, it was self-indulgent, sprawling, unfocused, silly, and all those other words music writers like to reserve for studio triple albums, right?

Whatever.

That’s not the point of this post. The point is to celebrate the lead single from that album, Hitsville U.K., which is just, oh, oh so wonderful.

Hitsville U.K.
(The Clash)

They cried the tears, they shed the fears,
Up and down the land,
They stole guitars or used guitars
- So the tape would understand,
Without even the slightest hope of a 1000 sales
Just as if, as if there was, a hitsville in U.K.,
I know the boy was all alone, til the hitsville hit U.K.

They say true talent will allways emerge in time,
When lightening hits small wonder -
Its fast rough factory trade,
No expense accounts, or lunch discounts
Or hypeing up the charts,
The band went in, ‘n knocked ‘em dead, in 2 min. 59

- No slimy deals, with smarmy eels - in hitsville U.K.
Lets shake’n say, we’ll operate - in hitsville U.K.
The mutants, creeps and musclemen,
Are shaking like a leaf,
It blows a hole in the radio,
When it hasnt sounded good all week,
A mike’n boom, in your living room - in hitsville U.K.
No consumer trials, or A.O.R., in hitsville U.K.,
Now the boys and girls are not alone,
Now the hitsville’s hit U.K.

The lyrics are nice enough on their own, a little (idealized) mini-history of the U.K. indie singles scene, complete with a roll call of some of the leading lights (Rough Trade, Factory, etc.), and the extended Motown metaphor that forms the spine of the song is well done, but what sells it is the joyous performance. As would be expected from the title, musically the song is a bit of a Motown pastiche, but as always, the transatlantic back-and-forth that was the defining ingredient of the second half of the 20th century’s pop music is at best a gleeful approximation, not a slavish copy. Mick Jones’ bubbly bass playing is a joy, though there’s nothing particularly Motown about it. His (American) then-girlfriend Ellen Foley takes the lead vocal, Jones’ own vocal contributions are little more than well-placed asides. (“Remember!”)

The whole point of this is to steer you towards 4 minutes and 21 seconds worth of 23-year-old postpunkpop perfection, which is probably as worthwhile a thing for me to be doing on a beautiful sunny Sunday as anything else.

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

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

:: Comments (5)

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

I don’t actually have an entry here (indeed, the only reason there was one here at all was that my girlfriend hit save in my editor window), but, hey, I love the entry title so I’ll keep it.

:: Dave Walker 17:42 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/webmemes]
:: tags: webmemes

:: Comments (0)

Question Meme Thing

via Sven and Tiff

Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:

“wearing makeup. She mouthed the words thank you. Doyle”

Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?

A curtain.

What is the last thing you watched on TV?

The Daily Show.

Without looking, guess what time it is:

10:50

Now look at the clock, what is the actual time?

10:52 (I’m pretty spooky that way — my “internal clock” is scarily accurate, most of the time)

With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?

60-cycle hum from various electronics, the aquarium air pumps, the rabbit making herself comfortable.

When did you last step outside? What were you doing?

About a half-hour ago, I went out on the porch to let the dog in.

Before you came to this website, what did you look at?

eMac speedbump announcement.

What are you wearing?

A T-shirt with a pinup girl that says, I kid you not, “I love it when you call me Big Daddy”, and a ridiculously comfortable pair of dark blue soft, cotton pants.

Did you dream last night?

Yeah, dark, vaguely paranoid stuff. I ate dinner too late.

When did you last laugh?

Last night, during the Daily Show.

What is on the walls of the room you are in?

Some really, really old paintings my grandmother owned, which were probably kitschy in their day, but are actually pretty darned cool now that they’re, you know, ancient and shit. Various pictures of other people’s children.

Seen anything weird lately?

Not really.

What is the last film you saw?

Lost In Translation, via Netflix.

If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?

A new roof, a Mini, and a 6-month around-the-world trip.

If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?

I’d end violence.

Do you like to dance?

Yeah.

Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?

Lara, or Betty.

Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?

Charles.

Would you ever consider living abroad?

Sure.

:: Dave Walker 11:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/misc/webmemes]
:: tags: webmemes

:: Comments (1)

Easterlings

Very basic, but it gets the job done. Doesn’t get more Midwestern than this.

• Spiral Sliced Ham
• Baked Beans
• Macaroni and Cheese
• Corn
• Potato Salad
• Deviled Eggs
• Brown ‘n’ Serve Rolls
• Cranberry Sauce
• Mashed Potatoes and Gravy
• Sweet Potato Pie (first time I’ve made it completely from scratch)

:: Dave Walker 15:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Atom Companion

Sam Ruby:

It seems to me that there is a real need for a one stop shop for the information necessary to understand the ‘how’ behind syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites.  Specs are good, but they only tend to cover what is not covered by other specifications.

Companion to Atom.
(work in progress)

<Mr. Burns> Excellent…</Mr. Burns >

:: Dave Walker 12:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Sopranos Season 5

I’ll refrain from spoilers, because I know that some people won’t get to see these episodes until after the inevitable DVD release, but wow, I’m happy to see the Sopranos back at the top of its game. After a distinctly lackluster season 4, the last few episodes have been completely outstanding, worthy of the show’s heyday (seasons 1 and 2.)

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Don’t Be That Guy

It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating, that a blog isn’t a conversation. The blogger links, pontificates, dissembles, or whatever, and if he’s feeling froggy maybe he enables comments and/or trackbacks. She’s under no obligation to do so, of course. When you pay the rent, you make the rules.

That’s a great thing. Even if you don’t want to pay for a hosted service, there are places that will host your rants for free. Get it all off your chest, nucking go futs, you know the drill.

Despite efforts and advice to the contrary, I allowed myself to get sucked into one of the blogging world’s reigning permathreads, and quite simply, I got trolled. A certain individual, who notably doesn’t have a weblog of his own, pushed my buttons like a maestro in the comments of a third person’s weblog. I should have known better — I’ve been there before.

If you’re gonna pick a fight, don’t do it in the comments on someone else’s blog. That’s like camping out in somebody else’s backyard and taking a stinky steamer under his window. It’s just rude. Start your own blog.

Don’t be that guy.

:: Dave Walker 10:50 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

BLX 1.0 Compliant

I hereby pledge allegiance to the BLX 1.0 spec (.) I think it is vitally important for the weblogging community to focus its energies on a single, unified spec, free of pernicious BigCo, LittleCo, and FairToMiddlinCo influence. I know you’ll all do the right thing. Let’s be diligent in letterbombing any press outlets who stray from the vision of the One True Bolloxing.

:: Dave Walker 12:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Bits of Tid

• Thanks, Tiff.
• The paranoia flowing from a certain direction due to a particular newspaper article ought to be amusing, except it really isn’t. It’s kinda sad.
• Looks like Java on the desktop is officially dead, I mean, even more dead than it already was. All credit due to Sun though — their Microsoft payoff was a lot bigger than the one AOL managed for knifing Netscape.

:: Dave Walker 11:43 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Jabberwocky

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll, 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought —
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

“And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
  He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

:: Dave Walker 08:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/beauty]
:: tags: beauty

:: Comments (0)

Linky Lub

I’ve been using the excellent service del.icio.us to manage my transient links for about the last month or so. It’s a lot less work to maintain than a full-time linklog, too. I’ve been doing more or less daily linkdumps, but I might as well pipe them directly into the right sidebar.

I rearranged a few other deck chairs to accommodate them. The whole mess should still maybe validate, kinda.

:: Dave Walker 15:18 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

Markdown As An OS X Service

Gust’s HumaneText.service has been updated to rev 3 and supports Markdown natively, so my hack is no longer necessary.

I’m happy to report that it’s possible with fairly minimal effort to get Markdown.pl to function as a service in OS X. This makes Markdown functionality available inside of Cocoa text fields, which means that everything from Safari to Mail to SubEthaEdit to Stickies can benefit.

First download Gust’s HumaneText service.

By default, it’s configured to use PyTextile, but the package also includes ATX.

Install it, then, using Terminal, navigate to

~/Library/Services/HumaneText.service/Contents/Resources

Copy Markdown.pl to this directory. Make it executable with this command:

chmod 755 Markdown.pl

This is the directory that contains the text filters used by the HumaneText service. The service chooses which filter to invoke by means of a simple symlink. Delete the existing symlink:

rm filter

and recreate it, pointing to Markdown.pl

ln -s Markdown.pl filter

Tested under OS X 10.3.3.

:: Dave Walker 12:33 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

All About The Donuts

• The XML Files: All About Blogs and RSS — MSDN Magazine, April 2004
  A lucid, readable, and most importantly unbiased primer on blogging and syndication tech.
  
  
• Microsoft hit by record EU fine
  €497m, $613m, £331m [i.e. the interest on billg’s Christmas Club account]. More interestingly: “Mr Monti has ordered Microsoft to reveal details of its Windows software codes within 120 days”
  
  
• XP SP2 RC1
  Details on IE6/Win’s new popup blocker. For those of you who still use that thing.
  
  
• Interview with Matthew Dillon of DragonFly BSD
  A couple of weeks old, but very interesting. As a FreeBSD fan, I’m very interested in seeing where DragonFly BSD ends up.
  
  
• AbiWord 2.1.1 Released
  Includes a new native OS X binary. Interesting.
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Blankin’ USA

Sven-S. Porst has returned from his visit to the southwestern United States and has recorded his impressions on driving and riding, food, national parks and digital photography, geographic scale, San Diego and environs, the flight, airlines, and airports. Trackback isn’t a sufficently evolved mechanism, as of yet, to cope with small comments on a long series of posts, so I’ll throw my lot in with a slight ramble in a single post.

The issue of scale is one that frequently, I’d suspect, visitors are inclined to underestimate. The Los Angeles/New York City-centric movie and television exports give the rest of the world a hyper-compressed view of the USA. The scale factor turns affects not only the obvious sorts of things (driving time between major cities), but things like regional cuisine. For example, ssp mentions how overpriced and lousy the cheese selection was in most of the places he visited. It’s reasonable to suggest he’d have had an entirely different experience visiting Wisconsin. The fast food chain he mentions, In-N-Out, is almost nonexistent in Detroit, while midwestern favorite White Castle is, I suspect, absent in San Diego. Certain things are, of course, nationwide: cheap, delicious, but really fattening breakfasts, and monster SUVs.

• I am by no stretch of the imagination anything near an expert in photography, but I’ve been told by friends that the main problem with inexpensive digital cameras is that they tend to use cheap optics — the lenses are significantly worse than the ones you’d find in a decent 35mm camera. That’s the main reason that a print scanned from a film camera and compressed with a JPEG compressor at the same quality ratio as a low end digital camera can look so much better.
• I’m pretty sure that there have been lawsuits filed w.r.t. age discrimination against the airlines by flight attendants, so I’m not at all surprised that older attendants are present on international flights.
• California population : ~35,000,000
• HBO has the Sopranos. That’s all that needs to be said.

:: Dave Walker 12:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

We 3 Links

• Butterfly XML — Elegant XML
  “Butterfly XML Editor is an IDE built on top of a new real-time incremental XML parsing algorithm. The editor features syntax and error highlighting, incremental validation, code completion, XSLT pipelines, and side by side DOM and source viewing.”
  
  
• Dilbert Mar-21-04
  Gross, but very, very funny.
  
  
• Emap closes down the Face
  “The Face, the magazine that was once the epitome of cool, is to close after 24 years, unless a last minute buyer can be found.” (via Hans)
  
  

:: Dave Walker 23:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Unmitigated Gall Dept.

I just got a solicitation, via USPS snail mail, that looked a lot like this.

Googling ICLS scam brings back a wealth of info. If you’re a U.S. citizen and you get one of these, you can complain to the Federal Trade Commission.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

100% TypeKey Whining Free

• Markdown (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)
  Lots of pointless (to me) metabitching of the “why didn’t you just use so-and-so” variety in the comments (hmm, where have I seen that before…) There’s More Than One Way To Do It. Thank goodness.
  
  
• Zombies Drive Jesus From Top Of Box Office
  No comment, I just loved the headline.
  
  
• MacDevCenter.com: Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics [Mar. 19, 2004]
  by Mitch Chapman — Mac OS X Panther includes many updated developer tools. Among them is an enhanced version of Python 2.3 with its own SWIG-based bindings to the CoreGraphics library.
  
  
• Buying Guide: LCD Displays
  LCD monitors have finally overtaken CRTs in the marketplace, and now the chances are good that your next monitor will be an LCD.
  
  
• DVD-Audio News: AAC Chosen for DVD-ROM Zone of DVD-Audio Discs [HFR]
  The DVD Forum has chosen AAC for the DVD-ROM zone of DVD-Audio discs…
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (1)

You Owe Me A Dime

• Robot Christ used in Gibson film
  Go Go Robot Jesus!
  
  
• Inspiration - EP (iTunes Exclusive) - William Hung
  
  
  
• Sony readies Q2 dual-layer DVD+R drive debut
  Sony will ship its first dual-layer DVD+R recorders next June, the consumer electronics giant said yesterday.
  
  
• DARPA’s portable atomic clock
  built a portable atomic clock that’s accurate to within 0.0000001 seconds
  
  
• Audio Lunchbox
  Web based music store. No DRM, VBR MP3s and Ogg Vorbis. 99 cents a track. Indie labels.
  
  
• The Fault Tolerant Shell
  “If any element of the script fails, all running process trees are reliably cleaned up, and the block is tried again with an exponential backoff. You might think of this as exception handling for scripts.”
  
  
• Java, Mono, or C++?
  “Rephrased: is there some way we can find to move away from C/C++, without causing massive alienation and forking?”
  
  

:: Dave Walker 12:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Original MTV VJ J.J. Jackson Dies at 62

We got MTV when I was, I think, 13 years old. We’d only had cable TV in general for a few months. This was the early 1980’s, and cable TV had come to Ecorse only very recently. I’m pretty sure that we had the “basic +2” package, which was, at that time, about 45 channels, which included both HBO and Showtime, and which I’m pretty sure, cost under $20 a month. Ahem.

It was a Saturday morning, and I remember my dad calling me into my parents room so I could take a look at this weird new channel they’d just added. It was nothing but music videos, interspersed with these brief interludes with the “VJs.” I became quite fond of it — since the major artists weren’t at all convinced about music video, it meant that a lot of airtime was given to visually inventive acts like Devo, David Bowie, and the Buggles, who were way more interesting than the steady diet of REO Speedwagon and Journey that were on the radio. Anyway, if you spent a lot of time watching MTV, you became quite familiar with the VJs — cutey Martha Quinn (I’d still run away with you honey, just say the word), friendly southern goofball Alan Hunter, familiar AOR-style jock Mark Goodman, late-night caffeine (or some other stimulant) zombie Nina Blackwood, and world-wise, fatherly presence J.J. Jackson.

J.J. Jackson, who helped define the term VJ as one of MTV’s first hosts, died Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 62.

( article)

:: Dave Walker 12:33 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/obits]
:: tags: obits

:: Comments (0)

Just A Fool Whose Intentions Are Good

• Kevin Shields: “I lost it”
  Guardian claims the first Kevin Shields interview in 12 years. Chinchillas. A crying Alan McGee. A lost decade. “No More Sorry”
  
  
• The format=flowed FAQ (f=fAQ)
  “Format=flowed is a new way of displaying text. Currently, we find f=f most often in quoted text within E-mail messages.” The list of mailers that support it is especially useful.
  
  
• Amiga, Inc. to Focus on Mobile Markets with AmigaDE
  The dark, eldritch forces unleashed upon the world when one of the Elder Gods placed a curse upon the Amiga are once more set loose upon another unsuspecting corporate victim.
  
  
• Opera 7.50 Preview 3 for Mac available
  Choice is good. I’ve never been particularly fond of Opera’s interface, but it’ll be nice to have another standards-compliant rendering engine on the platform to test against
  
  
• mjb: it’s a grand ol’ party.
  Separation of powers? What separation of powers?
  
  
• 5ives
  Merlin’s lists of five things. Really quite good.
  
  
• Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Of All Time
  It’s that time of year…
  
  
• Wired News: Honey, I Shrunk the URL
  Brief article about Gilby, the guy behind TinyURL
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Escaping This Madness

…reasons why everyone who works with this stuff eventually ends up bald.

Tim Bray is now working for Sun, and as a result, he’s resigning from the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group (TAG). He mentioned this in a cleverly titled post, like so:

Unfortunately, the old escape/unescape two-step goes haywire when you view the post’s title from the sidebar on another page of his weblog:

When viewed in an aggregator, an entirely different bit of the title goes awry:

I think I’m going to take up gardening, or ASCII flat files.

:: Dave Walker 07:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (10)

founding editorial director

• Mac OS X: About the Mac OS X 10.3.3 Update
  Tech notes - what’s new in the latest free update (yellow bottle caps optional)
  
  
• Rael Dornfest on his plans for Blosxom 3
  A complete rewrite… completely object oriented… new plugin architecture… standalone CGI script, Perl module, or even as a subclass… much more
  
  
• BlogPolling Voting System :: Free Polls for your Website or Weblog
  Looks pretty painless
  
  
• The Rasterbator
  21st century version of those old TTY banner progs
  
  
• ~stevenf: New Rules for Spam
  A few ideas for tweaking spamassassin rulesets
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:46 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Delayed Reaction

this post was composed offline and posted retroactively

I’m in Cleveland (Chagrin Falls, actually) visiting my sister’s family and listening to Limbik Frequencies stream (highly recommended), and because I love you all so much I’m going to point out some truly wonderful free music. The Irdial-Discs label, which I’ve always admired the hell out of for walking it like they talk it, has a nice-sized chunk of their back catalogue online for free. I’ve only just started dipping into it, but the Aqua Regia material, for example, is just gobsmackingly wonderful, techno that’s well over a decade old but still sounds fresh.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

What Part Of Random Do You Not Understand?

• George Michael retires to make songs available for free download
  Pop star George Michael is abandoning the music business to release his songs online for free instead.
  
  
• Marc Liyanage - TestXSLT
  TestXSLT is a small, AppleScript-able Cocoa application for experimenting with the XSLT and XSL-FO languages on Mac OS X.
  
  
• Microsoft behind $50M SCO investment - Computerworld
  “Executives from Microsoft Corp. introduced The SCO Group Inc. to an investment fund that provided the Lindon, Utah-based company with a $50 million investment last October, a spokesman for the fund confirmed today.”
  
  
• intraordinaire » Sun, RSS, and my cock
  be sure to follow the links
  
  
• Engadget: Nokia sends mobile spam, breaks own cellphones
  “Unfortunately, the messages also disable the phones of anyone with a Nokia 3510i, 5100, or 6100… the phones have to be brought into a Nokia service center (and left there for a day) in order to be fixed.”
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

People Like Frank

• One view on liberal XML processing
  James Robertson: “ponder how well you would like a world where your radio bailed on weak stations immediately and your CD player refused to play a CD after finding a single error….”
  
  
• The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0): BigCo
  via Mark Pilgrim’s B-links
  
  
• AP - Virginity pledgers’ STDs not reduced
  “Teenagers who make a one-time pledge to remain virgins until marriage catch sexually transmitted diseases about as often as those who don’t pledge abstinence, according to a study of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents”
  
  
• New York Metro: The Friends of Martha Stewart
  A 19th Century Novel — Trollope, to be exact.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:49 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Bubble Metropolis

(BASS) partner, techno rebel, and all-around pearl of a guy Dan Sicko’s contribution to the Shrinking Cities project is online as part of this working paper.

:: Dave Walker 11:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Cheater Bait

• Scotland on Sunday - Our friends electric
  A rare thing: a Kraftwerk interview. Well worth checking out (thanks, Hans!)
  
  
• Inmate Caught 44 Years After Fleeing Jail
  “Authorities learned who Eddie Mayes was after he visited his son at a prison in Avon Park in December and wrote his real name on a visitors list, the Fort Pierce Tribune reported. A routine check of the names identified him as a fugitive.”
  
  
• spamradio
  “Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet.”
  
  
• distant, early morning: Pinging remote sites on updates?
  A list of sites to ping after updating your weblog.
  
  
• HeadlinedNews.com - Ipod Used In Domestic Homicide - Mar. 05
  A Memphis woman was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she bludgeoned her boyfriend to death with an iPod.
  
  
• radio vox populi: live from the commons
  As weblog authors update their sites their writing is collected, synthesized into speech, and streamed to listeners as an Internet radio station. Live from the commons 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

RSS/Atom Proposal Reaction

Well, for whatever reason I can’t post a comment in response to this post. (Er — request for comment? For some, I suppose…)

The further you get into the comments, the clearer it becomes that, despite the inclusion of a mention of taking the process to the IETF, there’s a fair bit of waffling on committing to what that process would truly entail: entrusting the process to an independent body and relinquishing “veto power.”

I agree with Ross Rader’s take: “Blogging needs real standards if it is going to survive. Merging the ATOM feed spec into the RSS feed spec using an informal methodology won’t give us what we need and will only serve to create a third variation that we can use to confuse users with.”

I’d like to see some user-focused compromise, but the ground rules can’t all be set by one party. I’ll be interested in seeing some iteration of this proposal that starts with a little less ground defensively staked off.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Blosxom Excerpts, Improved

Sam Ruby took a look at yesterday’s post and shared a small bit of plugin code that backports a solution for excerpts that he uses in his own Mombo blogging system to Blosxom.

It’s a nicer solution (using a standard div tag) than my meta-tag based one, IMHO.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Blosxom/Atom Entry Summaries

The discussion here got me thinking as to how to include both full feeds and meaningful summaries in my syndicated feeds. For now, I’m going to concentrate on doing this in the Atom feed, since Atom includes explicit, specified support for carrying both fully marked-up content and summary text for a given <entry>.

The obvious way to do this in Blosxom is to use a meta variable. To drastically oversimplify, the meta mechanism gives you a private namespace in a Blosxom entry to play with, letting you set variables that are available to any plugin you wish to write (or hack, in this case) to do something useful with them. To this end, I’m going to start adding one sentence summaries in a meta-summary variable to my entries, and I’m going to add a field to the story template in the atomfeed plugin to drop them into the feed.

Do any shipping aggregators use summaries in a practical fashion now?

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

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

:: Comments (2)

Creating Two Million New Jobs With A Linkdump

• APOD: 2004 March 5 - V838 Mon: Echoes from the Edge
  Variable star V838 Monocerotis lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy, about 20,000 light-years from the Sun.
  
  
• jwz - it’s martian! it’s meme-o-riffic!
  What if the Mars rovers were 15 year old girls? spiritrover + opportunitygrrl.
  
  
• Ohio Salad Arrives With Piece of a Thumb
  “Red Robin spokesman Dwayne Chambers said that employees, in their haste to get the injured man to a doctor, failed to follow the chain’s procedures and throw out all food in the area.”
  
  
• Internal memo proves that SCO is Microsoft’s sock puppet
  “We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call … their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today.”
  
  
• Bruce Sterling: Strategic Insights from the Zarqster
  “This letter is just amazingly sinister, malicious, bonkers, and cynical. It reads like a crazed supervillain from a Fu Manchu episode.”
  
  
• intendo: mindset in stone
  “But why sell the company jet to pick up a moniker that suits your brand? Simply enter your name, choose your values and your goals and, Hey Prestognia!, your new name will be automatically displayed - absolutely free of charge.”
  
  
• EFA files for bankruptcy
  Big dance music distributor fails, it might take a lot of smaller labels with it. :(
  
  
• Seniors Brawl After Salad Bar Dispute
  A dispute at the salad bar turned into a food fracas at an upscale retirement home, with a man taking a bite out of another’s arm and other residents suffering minor injuries.
  
  
• Unicode Checker 1.6 (Quarter Life Crisis)
  Earthlingsoft’s quite useful swiss-army-knife application for dealing with character encoding gets a major update.
  
  
• 10th Anniversary of the Original Green Card Lottery Spam
  I was around for this. It was the shitstorm to end all shitstorms. If only we’d known what kind of nightmare was going to follow it. The original seems almost quaint in its limited spread, and the way the sender used his own email address to send it.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

An accomplished and presumably irreversible deed or fact.

Faît accompli is today’s Word of the Day, and also a not at all shabby Curve song (5.4 MB AAC).

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Rings Around Me

• Free Retro Clipart, Free Fifties Clipart
  “Paperpast Archives”
  
  
• Bruce Schneier: America’s Flimsy Fortress
  “There’s far too much ‘security theater’ - ways of making people feel safer without actually improving anything.”
  
  
• Michigan Central Depot Renovation: Back To Grand
  Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick announced Wednesday that Detroit, without raising taxes, will spend from $100 million to $130 million to buy the derelict Michigan Central Depot and turn it into a state-of-the-art police headquarters.
  
  
• MobileWhack: Push To Talk Considered Harmful
  “Not only did I get to hear one side of a conversation, but both sides. At twice normal volume. With beeps.”

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Fame! I’m Gonna Live Forever!

• The Register: Sony confirms PSP to PS2 game portability
  “The PlayStation Portable will allow developers to create games that can be played both on the move and on a home PS2 or PSX console, Sony has confirmed - but the emphasis will be on new titles, not on ports of existing games.”
  
  
• ongoing — Yahoo Paid Search, Translated
  Tim Bray helpfully translates Yahoo’s market-ese. It utterly slays me that people have their noses out of joint because they think Google’s disrespecting their pet technology, but are willing to put up with this…
  
  
• Bruce Sterling: The Chairs of Bam
  “Disaster tourists may come and go, but those chairs, man, those things are the very efflorescences of globalization.”
  
  
• sfg online : McDonald’s announced today it is downsizing its supersizing.
  “As much as we (usually) like McDonald’s fries, ordering them in bulk always seemed particularly indulgent.”
  
  
• Introducing engadget
  A new gadgets weblog from the former editor of Gizmodo. I like it. For one thing, its syndicated feed provides full posts instead of just (yecch) excerpts.
  
  
• kent williams - ATKINS DIET GOES HORRIBLY WRONG IN HOLLYWOOD.
  Hee.
  
  
• echolex: A Field Trip to Wayne County Medical Examiner…
  Jenny-J gets a tour of the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s facilities. Morbidly fascinating.
  
  
• Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Oscar bombs
  “Nobody even had interesting new plastic surgery, apart from Joan Rivers, whose face looks like it was gnawed out of marzipan by the savages of Easter Island”
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:48 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

San Andreas

Just got an email from Rockstar Games. No details as of yet, but it lends credence to the idea of a “Streets Of San Francisco” themed 70s setting, perhaps. It’s slated to show up in October 2004 on the PS2.

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

:: [/entertainment/games]
:: tags: games

:: Comments (1)

Music To My Lists

Sven-S. Porst is back on the map after too long away. In honor of the occasion, I’ll webjack one of the posts he made during his server’s time wandering the woods.

First record I ever bought

My sister and I went halves on Mothership Connection by Parliament. Once I started my paper route and had regular money coming in, I bought the first two B-52s albums in quick sucession.

First gig

That would have been Yes at Joe Louis Arena in, I think, ‘83. The first show I ever drove to myself was probably The Call at the Ritz, in ‘85.

Best gig

This is a tough one. It’s tough to separate the emotion surrounding Kraftwerk’s Detroit show from the show itself. I have very fond memories of the time I saw My Bloody Valentine and Yo La Tengo in 1991. Of course, I don’t even know where to start when it comes to some of the great parties I’ve been to — all the times seeing Jeff Mills, Claude Young, Richie Hawtin, Derrick May, Carl Craig, and all those brilliant lesser known jocks melt brains in tiny little sweatboxes over the years.

Gig I wish I’d been at

Our car broke down on the way to see Wire in 1986. For some reason I still can’t figure out, my friends and I missed seeing Unrest and Stereolab the year they double headlined a club tour. I wanted to see Brian Wilson do Pet Sounds live. I also had to skip out on all the Movement afterparties last year.

CD in my player at the moment

Jay-Z, DJ Dangermouse and the Beatles: The Grey Album.

A record that makes me laugh

I’m not much for comedy records (what do you do with them after you’ve listened to them once?) but I always liked Richard Pryor’s and Cheech n’ Chong’s 70’s albums.

A record that makes me cry

Chris Bell: “You And Your Sister”

A record that reminds me of school discos

New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”, Front 242’s “Headhunter”, and Renegade Soundwave’s “Biting My Nails”, all of which were U-Club staples when I was in school.

A record that sounds better in the dark

Basic Channel: “Octagon”

A song I wish I had written

The Zombies: “Care Of Cell 44”

A record I’d like played at my funeral

Brian Eno: “An Ending (Ascent)”

Soundtrack for a long car journey

Duh, a 40-gig iPod on shuffle.

:: Dave Walker 19:02 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

happi leap day

• Mighty Atom: Really Similar Syndication?
  Webmonkey looks into the Atom format, and gives practical advice as to how to build a feed from a “view source” perspective.
  
  
• Notes From The Front, Yessay
  Tris McCall asseses the polarizing prog band Yes
  
  
• LJ FOAF
  LiveJournal now exports FOAF data.
  
  
• Blogdigger - RSS / Atom Search Engine
  Feedster competitor with a clean interface
  
  
• Huge cruise ship clears bridge span by 6 feet
  “Law enforcement officers watch from the Dames Point Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida, as the funnel of the Carnival Miracle cruise ship passes just six feet below the 177-foot-high span”
  
  
• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Ageing punks’ single stunt a hit
  Ageing post-punk band The Alarm have scored a top 30 UK chart hit - with a stunt disguising themselves as an unknown younger group.
  
  
  
• Wolverine State finally has one … but how?
  We’re the Wolverine State. University of Michigan athletes are nicknamed Wolverines. And Ohio folks called us Wolverines during the Toledo War in 1835. But there never was a confirmed sighting of a wild wolverine in Michigan — until Tuesday.
  
  
• Mac Word 6.0
  Interesting essay from a person who worked on Mac Word 6.0 and explains why it, well, sucked.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 08:07 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

THIRTEEN DOLLARS AND 86/100

Look what showed up in the mail:

February, 2004

Dear Michigan Music Purchaser:

As Attorney General for the State of Michigan, I am pleased to enclose payment for your claim in the settlement of the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation. This lawsuit was brought by the Attorneys General of 43 states and three territories and by counsel for Private Class Plaintiffs on behalf of purchasers of music CDs. In accordance with the terms of the court approved settlement, payment is being made to music purchasers who filed a valid and timely claim.

Whether you filed your claim online at the settlement web site, www.musicCDSettlement.com, or by mail, the attached payment represents full payment of your portion of the Settlement. Please note that the attached payment instrument must be cashed by May 20, 2004.

It is a pleasure to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion and to return value to consumers who purchased CDs while the challenged pricing policies were in effect.

Mike Cox
Attorney General of Michigan

Funny. Anyone in other states get their check yet?

:: Dave Walker 11:51 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

smile though your heart is aching

• Guardian Unlimited | Arts news | Fans finally hear lost work by master of pop
  
  
• He Can’t Suppress a ‘Smile’
  Brian Wilson is performing Smile live. A recorded version is expected in the fall. Um, wow.
  
  
• isolani - Atom: Javascript AtomAPI Client using XmlHttpRequest
  Um, you were saying…
  
  
• kent williams - San Francisco
  Watching the world wake up to history
  
  
• Heise Newsticker: Uncovered: Trojans as Spam Robots
  c’t has gathered evidence that virus writers are selling the addresses of computers infected with trojans to spammers. The spammers use the infected systems to illegally distribute commercial e-mail messages — without the knowledge of their owners.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:49 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Reverting

I’m sitting here with two bottlecaps, and I’ve got a decision to make. Suddenly it’s 25 years ago, and I’m standing in Harmony House, staring at a wall full of 45’s with $1.25 in my pocket. What musical love affair begins today?

:: Dave Walker 15:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)

don’t turn around, the commissar’s in town

• shahine.com/omar/ - IMAP, Thunderbird, and mail clients
  A Microsoft mail engineer talks about IMAP and various mail clients. He likes Mozilla Thunderbird.
  
  
• iChat icon theme of the day
  break out the image search
  
  
• Big and Bad: How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.
  “internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills” Heh.
  
  
• Prosecution Rests at Martha Stewart Trial
  I know y’all hate her, but she bakes a mean cookie.
  
  
• Smiles fade at Napster
  Music service is losing money and executives… in the days leading up to Napster’s re-launch in late October, HP suddenly — and without explanation — returned Napster’s $250,000 check… while Napster can legitimately claim it’s the second most popular online music service, information provided by insiders at two of the major music labels shows it sells only about a quarter the number of downloads from their artists as Apple’s market-leading iTunes store. Napster refused to release download figures.
  
  
• SCIFI.COM | Battlestar Galactica Greenlit For Series
  All principal cast from the mini will reprise their roles for the series, including Edward James Olmos (Commander Adama), Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck) and Tricia Helfer (Number Six), among others.
  
  
• Orkut Member density map
  
  
• Nelson’s Weblog: tech / aggregators
  Thoughts on choosing a news aggregator
  
  
• UTF-8 history
  “UTF-8 was designed, in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992.”
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (1)

Persistent Refer(r)er Spammer

A couple of months ago I noticed this link in my refer(r)er logs. I later noticed links to my blog from various quickie garbage Blogspot blogs which were nothing more than a bunch of spammy keywords and links to various porn sites, often links to alleged P*r*s H*lt*n and (more recently J*n*t J*cks*n) pics and videos. Someone’s written a bot that simply loads my front page (and the front pages of other sites that display refer(r)ers) in order to jack up their pagerank. This is obnoxious because I use dynamically generated pages here, so it wastes both server CPU and bandwidth. At first I simply filtered these links from my refer(r)er display, but, as I mentioned, since it was costing me highly in processor overhead, I’ve taken to guillotining these idiots (this idiot, really — I’m convinced it’s only one guy doing this) at the firewall so that I’m not wasting CPU simply to stroke this yutz’s, er, ego.

The thing that amazes me is the sheer number of hosts he’s using the launch this garbage. His bot has the user-agent string “Microsoft URL Control - 6.00.8169”, and every time I block one IP, he’s back within a day or two from a different host. So far I’ve blocked hosts in Canada, the Czech Republic, France, and the USA, among other places so it’s pretty obvious he’s using zombied/0wned machines to do his dirty work. He usually hits me manually from a web browser once, then launches the bots with a series of different spam refer(r)ers all presumably controlled by him. I imagine I could contact Blogger’s abuse desk, but he shifts URLs so quickly I doubt it would make much of a difference. As it stands, I already filter all of the likely keywords from my refer(r)er display, so he never gets his links displayed (which I presume he’s noticed by now), so at the moment I figure he’s only doing it for the annoyance value (ah, the easily entertained spam kiddie.) I imagine we’ll keep up our little arms race going until one or the other of us gets bored. So from me to you, my little URL Control buddy — to put this in language a porn spammer’ll understand, here’s a big facial, from me to you, right in yr. eye.

:: Dave Walker 04:19 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

science, don’t choke

• Generating XML With Genx
  Genx is a software library written in the C programming language. You can use it to generate XML output, suitable for saving into a file or sending in a message to another computer program.
  
  
• Apple pays off $300M in debt, becomes debt free | MacNN News
  Steve Jobs: “Apple is now a debt-free company — for the first time in over a decade! It sure feels good.”
  
  
• Sam Ruby: FeedValidator updates
  11 bugs, 4 patches, 1 feature, and 12 messages to the mailing list. All resolved.
  
  
• How to never lose Pepsi’s iTunes giveaway
  “Pepsi has stated they believe they will have to pay for about 1/3 of the 100 million songs it’s giving away. That means 2/3 of the people that win don’t care about iTunes. So I say, let’s let them have the unlucky caps.”
  
  
• Feed Parser 3.0 beta 18 is out.
  libxml2 if available. Libxml2 uses libiconv to convert between a large number of character encodings, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean encodings. The upshot of this is that the Universal Feed Parser just got a lot more universal.
  
  
• Rearview Mirror: The ghostly city beneath Detroit
  The salt mines. (via Les Orchard)
  
  
• Techno fest team builds on success
  Derrick May and his staff talk about this years’ Movement techno festival in Detroit.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

The Ministry Of Syndication Truth

First, read this post:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/crimson1/2004/02/13#a1102

I responded with a comment, mostly because of this line:

The only feeds that aren’t also available in RSS are two very marginal ones, that rarely update and mostly are irritating, not informative.

which I thought was rather obnoxious, given that there are (estimate) hundreds of thousands of Blogspot-hosted weblogs that are only available as Atom feeds, hence, any aggregator that doesn’t read them is (potentially?) (certainly!) missing a ton of interesting content, particularly since the sort of people using Blogspot are quite often newer bloggers, people outside the usual a-list mutual admiration society.

I can’t actually reproduce what I wrote, since apparently I crossed some invisible line in the sand when I pointed out how this is the sort of thing that probably would cost Userland customers, and that it was better to be pragmatic on this issue instead of religious. My post was deleted, along with a note (also since deleted) from Dave Winer about “deleting posts from the usual flamebaiters.” (paraphrase, obviously)

My own comment policy is that I only ever delete obvious spam and crapfloods. The idea of deleting a post just because it doesn’t sync with my rosy view of the world seems, I don’t know, small, like my little ideas are so fragile that they can’t stand an ounce of sunlight or a faint whiff of disagreement.

There are places like that in the blogosphere, and I’m happy not to run one of them. It must truly suck to be that way, like a raw, exposed nerve that screams and shrinks at the slightest rough contact. It’s nice to know that as long as I’ve got my own server, I’ve got my own little square of ground no one can fence off, or retcon out of existence.

Mr. Winer, you’re welcome to post here.

addendum: Apparently I’ve been blocked from posting at blogs.law.harvard.edu. Think about that for a minute, especially if you’re an alumnus. As of Sunday (15-Feb) I can post there again. Hopefully, that will remain true.

:: Dave Walker 14:56 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (5)

follow the fiddle

• Apple offers iTunes Prepaid Cards | MacNN News
  allow users to purchase iTunes music at a retail store (e.g., Target) and redeem it at the iTunes Music Store
  
  
• Yahoo! News - Canada Condemns ‘Racist’ Conan O’Brien TV Show
  Sense of humor implant, stat!
  
  
• LegalTorrents - Your source for legal BitTorrent files
  “This is a collection of legally downloadable, freely distributable ‘net.label’ electronica MP3 files which we’ve made available via BitTorrent.”
  
  
• 20 year-old Computer Chronicles episode for download
  Includes a demo of a 128k Mac, and a really amusing computer news segment, including a breathless description of a 200 megaflop supercomputer.
  
  
• The Many Facets Of Man-Made Diamonds
  “Synthetic diamond makers are targeting the gem market first, but their product could transform many other industries, too”
  
  
• Wired News: Copyright Enters a Gray Area
  The words from rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album on top of the rhythms and chords from the Beatles’ legendary White Album
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

D.O.A. PD

I didn’t know that the classic film noir D.O.A (1950) was in the public domain. Cool. You can download a copy from the Internet Archive, and even share it via BitTorrent or FastTrack or eDonkey or whatever, legally. Cool. Nice to have some completely legit content for your DVD burner or homebuilt media server or Gameshark Media Player.

:: Dave Walker 23:01 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/entertainment/movies]
:: tags: movies

:: Comments (0)

1 2 3 4 take the elevator

• Crashing the Party: Map Server Hacking
  
• My Yahoo and Atom
  “If users want the content and the content is available in Atom, then so be it. Tools need to aggregate Atom.”
  
  
• Doctor Who Plans Unveiled
  
• zeppo: Where babies come from - sanitized for your protection
  A visit to the cabbage patch.
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

We Love The Subs

I loved the Quiznos ads they debuted during the Super Bowl. I didn’t realize that they were done by the Joel Veitch, and it’s based on one of his old bits. Looks like my favorite of them, with the kittens doing Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, is no longer online, doubtlessly due to humorless lawyer people.

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

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

:: Comments (4)

I’ve Got This Really Cool Plan…

• Cloning Creates Human Embryos
  Cue much hand-wringing
  
  
• New NetNewsWire beta supports Atom feeds
  Can I get a Woohoo! here?!?
  
  
• Pepsi Blue is dead, slow rollout of Pepsi/iTunes promotion
  Ah well. I actually kinda liked the stuff.
  
  
• Fantasy Planes
  Retro-futuristic visions of air travel. Follow the links. Very fun.
  
  

:: Dave Walker 19:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

“I’m full of tinier men!”

• CNN.com - Swimmer drives with shark on leg - Feb. 11, 2004
  Luke Tresoglavic swam 300 meters (1,000 feet) to shore, walked to his car and drove to the local surf club with the 60 centimeter (23 inches) shark biting his leg and refusing to let go.
  
  
• Wired News: Hubble Space Telescope: 1990-2007
  The Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, once called the “best telescope in the universe” by astronomers and astronauts, will be taken off life support as early as 2007, NASA officials said. (nice short history of the HST, with image links)
  
  
• eyebrow_thief: eyebrows i have claimed
  Heh.
  
  
• Li’l G n’R - First Ever Guns n’ Roses Kids Tribute Band
  There’s a joke just waiting somewhere around here about candy and syringes, but I’ll just move on.
  
  
• Officials Say Mob Stole $200 Million Using Phone Bills
  “New York organized crime figures bilked millions of unsuspecting consumers out of more than $200 million over five years by piggybacking bogus charges.” In my mind, I hear Tony explaining this to Paulie and Silvio.
  
  
• Yahoo! News - Slobbering Newfoundland Named Top Dog
  Westminster Kennel Club (i.e. the Superbowl of the dog show world), includes slideshow
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

This Rut Must End

• Janet Jackson set to record song about breast-revealing incident - NME.COM
  I am shocked, SHOCKED!
  
  
• Sasha Frere-Jones writes about Timbaland and the Neptunes for the NYT
  “What typifies Right Now in 2004 are the sharp beats of three producers from the Virginia Beach area: Timothy (Timbaland) Mosley, 32, and the Neptunes, a k a Pharrell Williams, 30, and Chad Hugo, 29.”
  
  
• css-discuss wiki
  Being pretty much exactly what it sounds like.
  
  
• PalmInfocenter.com: PalmSource Introduces Palm OS Cobalt and Garnet
  Looks like they’re finally putting the tech they got from Be to use.
  
  
• Microsoft warns of widespread Windows flaw (i.e. here we go again…)
  On Tuesday, the software giant released a fix for a networking flaw that affects every computer running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003… “There are more attack vectors and more people that could be affected by this,” said Marc Maiffret, chief hacking officer for eEye Digital Security, the software firm that warned Microsoft of the vulnerability more than six months ago. (er, WTF?)
  
  
• macosxhints - How to access MySQL data in Filemaker via ODBC
  That could be useful.
  
  
• The Wooden Periodic Table
  Oh my, how literal.
  
  

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Where’d You Park The Car

• 2004 Grammys Thread
  The I Love Music crowd goes to town on the 2004 Grammy Awards. Excerpt: “I hope Coldplay achieves Rattle & Hum like absurdity in the next few years. For hilarity’s sake.”
  
  
• Don Park’s Daily Habit - Social Software for the Deads
  
• Yes: The Yes Album / Fragile / Close to the Edge / Tales from Topographic Oceans / Relayer / Going for the One / Tormato / Drama / 90125: Pitchfork Review
  Yes gets a “reassessment” at the hands of Pitchfork Media
  
  
• Raw: OPML2FOAF
  “The problem isn’t their fault, it’s bloody OPML again. Waste of pointy brackets.”
  
  
• Slashdot | Source of Amiga Video Toaster Software Released
  
• Movement 2004: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival
  Complete with a new promo video (QuickTime) promoting it
  
  
• Yahoo! News - Woman’s chastity belt set off airport security alarm
  ATHENS (AFP) - When a 40-year old British woman set off a metal detector alarm at Athens airport, bemused security staff found that it was caused by a chastity belt she was wearing.
  
  
• Keith Devens .com - Wiki: ProgrammerFonts
  

:: Dave Walker 21:03 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

In Briefs

…or, how else would you expect someone posting on Sunday morning to be dressed?

• Ulp. Every copy shipped potentially means another one of these will escape into the world: “Klickin’ & aGrinnin’” (requires Quicktime)
• An Introduction To FOAF
• The way he’s holding his arms really sells it.
• When is high-res higher res than you actually want to see? Maybe when yr. viddying porn. (via 90% Crud)

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

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

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Something I’d Never Noticed

I’d swear that Radiohead’s “Myxomatosis” and Kelis’ “Milkshake” use the same lead synth sound: that huge, rolling sawtooth wave flattening everything in its path. Funny, that.

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

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

:: Comments (1)

When Customized Shopping Goes Too Far

I encoded Squirrel Bait’s debut EP and I went on Amazon to look for the artwork to embed in the tags. Here’s the ad Amazon served to me on the results page:

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Quotemill

Ben Hammersley: “This, ladies and gentlemen, explains my opium habit. This right here.”

Rick Kisonak, for Salon: “VH1’s new “Bands Reunited” debuted on Jan. 19, and it is, without a doubt, the greatest show on earth.”

Dave Louthan: “I just want to enjoy my cheeseburger like anybody else. I don’t want to think: Is this the magic burger that’s going to kill me?”

Press release: “Tour dates for The Pixies’ reunion tour will be announced shortly.”

:: Dave Walker 23:37 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

Hey you!

• Sam Ruby takes steps down a path I’ve often considered in more fanciful moments but never had the guts to follow: building a PVR from scratch.
• Heh, teevee.org. “How to top this year’s halftime show? Two words: Donkey show.” and “A 12-year-old might find these ads funny, but Bud Light’s not supposed to be marketing to them. Unless the next step in this clever marketing campaign is the slogan, “Drink Bud Light — It’s What You’d Drink If You Were a 12-Year-Old Moron.”
• Mark Pilgrim indulges in the requisite bear-baiting. ;).
• I’ve been seeing a lot of people linking to musicplasma lately. It reminds me of a research project someone was running, back in the NCSA Mosaic / cat pictures era, called something like the Similarities Engine (I might have even used it through a telnet interface.)

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

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

:: Comments (2)

How I Learned To Write Backwards

edit: The Scripting.com validator has been revised and now works like the other validators running on the same codebase. Cool. Thanks.

Blogging format inside baseball. Skip this post if you have a life…

Here’s a great idea: take an existing, format neutral validator, remove functionality, add bugs (e.g. bogus non-well-formedness errors), and pass confusing information back to the users of the service (read the comments).

If you’re going to indulge in a pissing contest, you should be extra careful not to get any on your shoes.

:: Dave Walker 08:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (1)

Super Commercial Sunday, 2004

• Can you record the game on a PVR, watch the ads, and skip over the boring football parts? I wonder…
• John Sculley’s revenge? Details of how exactly the Pepsi/iTunes promotion will work. “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or… well… I guess we’re going to sell sugared water together, eh?”
• via jwz: “Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours.” (link) (dw: Don’t miss the compltely gratuitous d*** jokes)
• Hmm, Orkut. Well, it’s much more responsive than Friendster, which counts for something. It seems a bit more useful overall, actually — the forums (kinda similar to LJ’s communities) are a nice touch.
• Thanks to Typepad’s support for the Atom API, Jerry Steele rigged up an Applescript/Python combo that uploads pictures from iPhoto directly to a Typepad Photo Album. That’s what a flexible, extensible, symmetric syndication/posting API gets you, and this is only the start.
• Everyone’s favorite WMD/litigibot is still in DNS as of this writing. Also, via Groklaw: Looks like SCO actually contributed, under the GPL, files to Linux that it’s now claiming violate its intellectual property. We’re talking about source code RPM’s signed with SCO’s (neé Caldera’s) key! I’m no lawyer, but that looks like a slam dunk for the good guys.
• If you ever used a single floppy 128k Mac, you probably experienced the dreaded Disk Swapper’s Elbow.
• Steven Frank’s been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. First Panic ships Unison, then Steven previews his own experimental “sideways forum”, Somniphobia.
• Sven-S. Porst points out that you can drop shell scripts into the Script Menu on OS X, right along the expected Applescripts. Cool, I never knew that. I imagine that opens it to Python, Perl scripts, and the like, too. Stumbling around the Applescript site I also note a page full of (new?) special bookmarks for Safari, enabling interaction with the iTMS and Sherlock.
• “Those of us who either run computers that don’t get infected, mail clients that aren’t stupid and broken like Outlook that encourage infections, or that generally protect themselves so they don’t become part of the problem in the first place do not appreciate being caught in the crossfire of anti-virus tools that seem insistent on sharing the joy anyway, almost as if they can’t handle the thought that we are NOT inundated by viruses, so therefore, they’ll inundate us with bogus messages instead.” (link)

:: Dave Walker 09:58 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

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Netcraft Brings Teh Funny

www.sco.com is a weapon of mass destruction.

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

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

:: Comments (0)

Panic’s Unison

The very first thing I ever used the Internet for was email. I was a freshman at U of M, and MESSAGE, which ran on top of MTS on one of the big IBM mainframes on campus, was very popular among the student population. It was tied to a number of other campuses via Bitnet, so I was able to send email to friends at a few other universities as well. Most of my online time was spent on MTS and on local BBSes. The BBSes around at this point in time were mostly islands to themselves. I realize that things like FIDONet were around, but the boards I haunted didn’t use them. One BBS I used was hosted on someone’s Mac II running an early version of A/UX. What made this BBS special is that the owner was maintaining a Usenet feed. You could dial into this BBS and read and post articles on Usenet. That was the moment when the potential of the Internet really hit me. You had tens of thousands (at that point in history) of users taking part in hundreds of newsgroups, being replicated around the world in something not-at-all resembling real time (most of the Usenet nodes were using UUCP at that point, connecting via modems in the middle of the night and passing articles around. You could post an article on a Monday and it might take until Thursday or Friday to propagate around the Net. One of the coolest things about Panic’s page for Unison is that it takes a “when people were shorter and lived near the water” approach to describing what the application does, assuming (probably correctly) that the majority of people who happen across their product page will have no idea of what Usenet is.

Panic are really some of the all-star developers on the Mac platform. They’re not huge, like an Adobe or a Macromedia or a Microsoft, but their applications are always polished, tightly functional, and most importantly, a joy to use. I registered Audion ages ago and used it for years until the crushing power of the Smart Playlist secured the universe for iTunes.

Their latest application, Unison, is no exception. Everything about the app, from the whimsical icon to the introductory setup dialogs to to the progress indicators, screams polish. If you’re doing a long binary download in the background and switch out to another app, Unison even badges its dock icon with a jaunty green checkmark when it finishes. How cool is that? It really makes binary downloads completely painless, taking care of the alphabet soup of standards (uuencoding, base64, yyencoding, rar, etc.) and presenting the files in big, friendly format that even a tyke raised on P2P apps can understand. Don’t have a Usenet provider? Panic has partnered with a provider to bundle access if you need it.

Anyway, it’s a joy to use, and it’s nice to see a Mac newsreading app that does something different, as opposed to slapping a paint job on John Norstad’s ancient Newswatcher source.

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

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

:: Comments (2)

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

This is completely surreal. Thanks to Dan Sicko for the pointer.

nb: this President has only held 11 press conferences in three years in office.

I have never been more convinced of the absolute necessity of voting in presidential elections.

:: Dave Walker 10:53 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

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Never Knew

Everyone has their blind spots — things that seemingly everyone else in the world already knew, but that they themselves were ignorant of. Over the last week, I filled in one of mine: the Corn Chip Issue. It’s a really simple one with a very obvious solution: never buy off-the-shelf corn chips. Fritos, Doritos, and Tostitos are but a pale, flavorless imitation of something you can prepare at home for a small fraction of the money. Somehow, I never realized that all that you need to make tasty, crispy chips that rival the ones you get as appetizers at Mexican restaurants is a 99 cent bag of tortillas from the supermarket and a pot of hot oil. Slice the tortillas into wedges, drop them in hot oil for a couple of minutes, drain them on paper towels and salt lightly. Serve with salsa. That’s all it takes. Really, it couldn’t be simpler. Somehow I made it through decades without anyone telling me. In case your friends have likewise left you in the dark, I’m blogging it.

Seeya.

:: Dave Walker 18:45 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (0)

An Old-School Links Post

The LinkLog is good for giving me a nice list of things to look for, but it’s been pointed out that it’s a little impersonal and a lot less fun, so here’s a throwback. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of these links because they’re actively pinging around the “blogosphere”, but they’re worth hilighting just in case.

• As a follow up to the Mac Birthday post from the other day, here’s a link to Andy Hertzfeld’s wonderful Macintosh Stories at Folklore.org, as noted by John Gruber, Sven-S. Porst, and others.
• A nice deflation of the “blogging is so significant, let’s have conferences to talk about how important and significant our, cough, publications are!” poisonous idea.
• Create synthetic, query based RSS feeds at pubsub.com. I know Feedster can do something similar, but this seems really simple to set up.
• Umpdiddy billion free Blogger blogs now potentially can be syndicated via Atom. Should spur some more aggregator support, I would think.
• In related news, the official public face of the Atom project has launched.
• Congratulations to George Hotelling on the launch of Songbuddy.com.

:: Dave Walker 12:44 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

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

:: Comments (2)