randomwalks/dj

If I am going to take the time to click on Post Options, then go to Post Date and Time, then click on the radio button for Scheduled at, then actually type in the exact date and time I want the post to be published, then click on Publish Post and then double and triple check my Edit Posts tab to make sure it is ACTUALLY scheduled I DO NOT WANT TO CHECK AGAIN IN THE MORNING TO FIND THAT IT HAS MAGICALLY BEEN PUT BACK INTO DRAFT MODE BY MISCHIEVOUS MAGICAL GOOGLE ELVES.

Fred McGriff says...

STOP DOING THIS

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on March 12, 2010 3:23 AM

Let’s just get this part out of the way: The Mets have issues. Lots of issues. But, as if Jose Reyes’ thyroid, repeated late-season meltdowns, questionable ownership finances, and an assistant general manager turning into Hulk Hogan weren’t bad enough, now this appears:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – If Jenrry Mejia is assigned to the Mets’ Double-A team, he’s not going to be stretched out enough to immediately contribute in the Binghamton rotation. Jerry Manuel is determined to begin using Mejia in short and frequent relief spurts, to gauge how he reacts to pitching in that capacity, the Daily News has learned. The expectation is Mejia will remain in big-league camp through the final week working as a reliever.

The scariest part of this is not that Jerry Manuel is evidently making decisions on prospects. It’s that Omar Minaya is either in complete agreement or is totally indifferent to the situation at hand. Minaya’s job is to handle the team’s present and future assets with care and diligence. Manuel’s job is to manage the players assembled by Minaya and provide input on the margins, not to decide in autonomous fashion what capacity the team’s best pitching prospect should be used during spring. Neither is doing their job.

This becomes less of a possibility and more of a certainty once you realize who we’re talking about. Save the comparisons to Neftali Feliz and David Price. Neither began the season in their respective Major League team’s bullpen and both had more experience starting. Those two situations were of special circumstance (that circumstance being a heated playoff run). The Mets aren’t doing this to limit Mejia’s innings or propel them towards the playoffs. Well, they might actually be doing it for the latter, but more on that in a moment.

This is all tempting because Mejia is a great arm. Keith Law had his fastball sitting in the 93-96 range with cutting action and noted his overall repertoire as “top-of-the-rotation stuff” – big praise for a 20-year-old with a little over 150 innings of experience outside of short-season ball. Baseball America ranked Mejia as the Mets’ top prospect and quoted catcher Josh Thole as saying that the movement on Mejia’s heater convinced batters that it was a slider. They also note that Manuel watched Mejia during Arizona Fall League action to gauge whether he could be of relief help in 2010.

Could Mejia jump to the Majors in three weeks and succeed? Probably. He’d probably pitch quite well out of the bullpen. He has a fastball so hot that it removes the wrinkles from opposing hitters’ shirts. He could really dial that baby up even more in limited action. He might just be the best set-up man in the National League. Heck, maybe the next Mariano Rivera. And then what?

Well, then the Mets enter 2011, which happens to be the final year that Francisco Rodriguez is guaranteed a paycheck. It’s also the final year that Oliver Perez, Carlos Beltran, Jose Reyes, and Luis Castillo are under contract. It’s a big year. It could be the final year they have this nucleus to really go for it before drastically altering the look of the roster. So, maybe they move Mejia to the rotation. Maybe he hits the ground running and never looks back. Or maybe, like Joba Chamberlain, he has a few hiccups moving to the rotation permanently, and rather than sending him down, they send him to the bullpen where he once again turns the eighth inning into Hades for opposing hitters. And then what?

Well, then the Mets enter 2012 and Mejia is their closer. And then what?

Well, then the Mets enter 2013 and Mejia is still their closer. And so on.

Yes, that entire scenario is derived from a lack of confidence in the Mets and their ability to properly handle the situation. Did it fall down a slippery slope and is it a bit melodramatic? Yes, most likely. But at the same time, if they place Mejia in the pen it will open Pandora’s Box moving forward. More concisely: It sets the table for confirmation bias when Mejia is moved back to the rotation.

This isn’t Earl Weaver with Dennis Martinez, Wayne Garland, or Scott McGregor. Those guys had hundreds of minor league innings before Weaver broke them in as a long reliever. This is reckless handling of a long-term asset in order to save Manuel and Minaya’s jobs. Maybe that’s too harsh, but these guys have not earned the benefit of the doubt.

Originally posted by R.J. Anderson from FanGraphs Baseball, on March 12, 2010 3:00 AM

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPad

Steph Thirion's first iPhone game was Eliss, a touchscreen-based arcade game that had you combining and maneuvering planets around one another, and trying to size-match them up with black holes to earn points. As he told us (stay tuned for an exclusive interview with the indie developer), it was pretty hard -- even more so than he actually intended it to be. So, for his second iPhone game, Faraway, he's gone much simpler. Inspired by the iPhone game Canabalt, Thirion has created a one-button game in which the goal is nothing less than to explore the universe. He has it running on a Mac at the show (so he can project the video onto a bigger screen), and we got to have some hands-on time with the new game.

You control a comet that flies around an inky black void speckled with dots and circles; the pixelated space aesthetic from Eliss is back. This time, however, there's only one control, and it's a tap anywhere on the screen. Doing so will cause your comet to gravitate towards the nearest static dot, which will then slingshot you around the star until you let go, and the comet flings off in a new direction. There's an arrow pointing off of the screen, and by timing slingshots correctly, you will face the comet in the direction of the arrow.

Once you get moving the right way for a length of time (the game has a counter constantly counting down), you'll hit a gigantic circular body, like a large white sun. Once you hit that shape, the screen flashes, and you enter into another gameplay mode -- your comet will drag a line around the screen, and anytime you gravitate to a star, the line will connect between the stars you gravitate to. Continue connecting the line, and you can continue to rack up points, but cross or touch the line (or the outside edge of the screen), and that point of the game is over -- you're given your score and your comet is sent off in a new direction, a little bit of time added to the clock that's still counting down to game end.

It sounds complicated, but in practice, the one-button simplicity keeps it fairly easy to understand. There are also various shapes to hit outside of the gigantic sun you're aiming for -- red polygons that hit your comet will make it go faster for a little while (allowing you to close space to the next sun that much more quickly), and white polygons will add time to the overall clock, letting you play the game that much longer.

The game tracks your best score, but that's it, really -- the goal is to keep the comet going for as long as possible. And it's addictive -- just like Canabalt, every time you play you feel like you've figured out a new trick, or if you just hit a star's gravity just right, you'll careen off into a new high score.

It's a lot of fun. Thirion hasn't decided on a price or release date yet (stay tuned for more information in our upcoming interview), but especially if you like the one-button simplicity of Canabalt (and who doesn't?), Faraway seems like it'll be a fun expedition into the reaches of space.

TUAWGDC 2010: Hands-on with Faraway originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Mike Schramm from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on March 12, 2010 3:00 AM

In retrospect, I think the tree form and the Walker might have been a mistake. If recursion is not allowed (as is the case here), it might work better to avoid the recursive representation entirely, instead storing the parsed regular expression in reverse Polish notation as in Thompson's 1968 paper and this example code. If the RPN form recorded the maximum stack depth used in the expression, a traversal would allocate a stack of exactly that size and then zip through the representation in a single linear scan.

via swtch.com

I can't say I recall (without consulting The Dragon Book of course), but I seem to recall it being a pain in the ass. The RPN based solution looks a helluva lot easier. Will mark the paper as "you must read this later."

Originally posted by apgwoz from fold, on March 12, 2010 1:44 AM

...at Purely Paula.

Originally posted by Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks Archive, on March 11, 2010 10:54 PM

Hi all,

We’ve open sourced a few more plugins, and they’re all available in the Six Apart Github repository!

• GeoType allows you to associate GoogleMap data with an entry. Each map extends the MT Asset framework, so it’s managed similar to uploaded images or documents, and associated to an entry in the exact same way.

• PostOffice enables blog posting via email. You may have been following along in MTOS earlier this week about this one, Brad Choate made a lot of handy fixes.

• CentralAuthenticationService allows you to configure MT to delegate user authentication to a CAS server in place of the built-in native authentication scheme.

• BuildTracer benchmarks statically-published templates and provides a visual display of how long it takes each tag to publish. It’s originally by Akira and available on his site, but we’ve been updating it in Github to match the latest builds of MT.

Since we’re releasing these plugins as open-source and they’re not officially supported by Six Apart, we invite the community to improve upon them. Anyone and everyone is welcome to follow and contribute to the projects’ Github repositories.

Enjoy!

Originally posted by Natalie Podrazik from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on March 11, 2010 3:16 PM

We've just open sourced GeoType, PostOffice, CAS, BuildTracer for Movable Type. These are cool plugins!

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 11, 2010 2:23 PM

28 Days...

Originally posted by Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks Archive, on March 11, 2010 2:14 PM

In an unusual operation that was sparked by the team behind the Oscar-winning documentary film about dolphin hunting, “The Cove” the restaurant, the Hump, was investigated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Fish and Game, and the federal Customs and Border Protection agency, which all concluded that the restaurant was serving endangered Sei whale as sushi. Jennifer Steinhauer wrote the primary article about the whale-sushi bust for the Times, but and then Andrew Revin wrote the follow-up on .Earth, the Times' environmental blog: Elsewhere in the world, the appetites and indulgences of wealthy consumers are sustaining the flow of gorilla hands and other bush meat from African forests to swelling cities and the flow of exotic, endangered species  to medicinal products companies and restaurants in Asia. Is it jarring, or not, to see such activity here?

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 11, 2010 1:07 PM

Touched by the Hand of God, By New Order, Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 11, 2010 12:29 PM

Up until now, we’ve done most of our reading using a single layer of data. This works well when you have abundant space, but breaks down when you try to work on a smaller device. As we pack more and more data into smaller spaces, we need to consider how this data is presented. The answer that provides the best compromise of accessibility and usability is to layer our data using modal dialogs. And now, a story.

via www.capndesign.com

Matt Jacobs publishes his notes on talk he gave about "The Tablet" and multi-layered computing. Well worth the read, or if you want the short-hand version you can page through his slides.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.com, on March 11, 2010 12:06 PM

Up until now, we’ve done most of our reading using a single layer of data. This works well when you have abundant space, but breaks down when you try to work on a smaller device. As we pack more and more data into smaller spaces, we need to consider how this data is presented. The answer that provides the best compromise of accessibility and usability is to layer our data using modal dialogs. And now, a story.

Matt Jacobs' The Multi-Layered iPad is an excellent introduction to the challenges facing liberal arts 2.0^* thinkers. When Matt says "Book" I think "Blog," but that doesn't mean I love books any less.

^*As defined by Jason Kottke and SnarkMarket and then again by Apple.

UPDATE: I forgot to complain about the term "decablogger." Totally spurious.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 11, 2010 11:33 AM

Back in January news broke that management group OTG—they were behind the food offerings at JFK's Terminal 5—were planning a group of new restaurants for LaGuardia Airport. Today Dom De Marco confirms to Feast that he's in talks to join the project and add a branch of the famed Di Fara. Hopefully, he has another old man in the wings who can painstakingly make every single pie to get the ambiance right. [Feast]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on March 11, 2010 11:30 AM

As discussed, I gave a talk last night about The Tablet. Thanks very much to Liz for organizing the event. When I began planning my talk, I found it was easier to write it out as a blog post so I could find the narrative. I did just that.

What follows is the blog post and some of the imagery attached. At the very end, I included my slides from the talk, which have some additional imagery. (If you’re more of a visual person, skip to my slides on Slideshare.)

Up until now, we’ve done most of our reading using a single layer of data. This works well when you have abundant space, but breaks down when you try to work on a smaller device. As we pack more and more data into smaller spaces, we need to consider how this data is presented. The answer that provides the best compromise of accessibility and usability is to layer our data using modal dialogs. And now, a story.

photo by nirbhao

During college, I oftentimes bought my textbooks used, primarily because they were cheaper. The cheapest books were thoroughly marked up, with notes in the margins and important phrases highlighted. Sometimes, it was great to already have the important bits noted for me, but most of the time I just wanted to read. My wish was to be able to remove that layer of data only temporarily. Little did I know that 10 years later, that would be possible.

When data is presenting it a single layer, ancillary data exists separately from the primary text. When you’re studying, you write down the important parts in a notepad and create study tools with flash cards. When you’re watching a film, the credits appear at the end of the film and the deleted scenes are accessed in another menu entirely. When you’re reading a novel, contextual content is often in appendices and definitions are, well, in your dictionary.

The iPhone and other smartphones have improved the situation. Instead of having to make a note during a movie or keep your finger on the current page while flipping to the appendix, you can pull out your phone (or laptop or whatever) and look up the information. Of course, that is still two information sources in the same plane.

It’s also gotten a lot easier on the web. Sites like the New York Times offer the ability to double-click a word and get the definition. Flickr lets you annotate photos with text. The Definitive Guide to Django provides an online version of the book that lets you comment on each paragraph. As the ultimate example, Google lets you overlay a variety of information on top of a map.

Since we still do most of our reading on paper, we’ve been stuck with just a single layer of data. The best we’ve got are footnotes and notes in the margin. The introduction of the Kindle has provided a suitable replacement for reading devices. Having 1,000s of books in your hand is wonderful, but the Kindle only provides two layers of data: text and definitions. And without a touch screen, trying to get a definition is tough. You have to navigate to the word with the thumb nubbin before the definition pops up. It takes you out of the flow of reading a lot more than clicking a mouse or tapping the word.

How This Would Work

Bringing the multitouch interface to such a large surface area will allow us to bring far more layers of data to a document. Let’s come back to our studying example. My wife is taking an Anatomy & Physiology class and has a test coming up. She has out her text book, flash cards, a notebook and a reading guide. While going over her notes, she might want to refer back to the source text for some additional information. She has to find the right page, then find the right paragraph and look for context.

Now, let’s say Apple or some inventive fellow builds an iPad application meant for studying. You can download your textbook and, as you read, tap on a paragraph to open up a modal dialog for taking notes. Or maybe you just select some text and copy the text into your notebook. Next time you go through the book, you’ll see a little speech bubble, like the Django book example, alongside the text. When it’s time to study, click the ‘View notes’ button and you’ll see a version of just the text you’ve highlighted and your notes. Back to the book. If something you’re reading is confusing, selecting text could let you define or Google it. If that doesn’t pan out, you can add a public note. Your friends in the class would be notified and can answer your question. The answer will show up in context. Taking the social element further, being able to view your study partner’s notes overlaid on your page could answer questions you didn’t know you had.

Below are some design explorations I put together to illustrate the example.

These types of interaction could be carried over to a work of literature. If you’re in a book club, the reading questions could come be visible at relevant point. You could make notes in the margin that the rest of your book club could see. There’s also an opportunity for authors to provide something like a director’s commentary. When you find out SPOILER ALERT that Bella choses Edward over Jacob, Stephenie Meyer could put in a note explaining that it took her months to make this decision and it was only after talking to a bellhop at the Paris in Las Vegas that she made her decision. Or, possibly more interesting to some of you, how Malcolm Gladwell did his research about Hush Puppies.

As a final example, adding a touch interface to films, means one of my personal dreams can be fulfilled. When you want to know more about an actor, pause the movie and tap his face. Using iPhoto’s facial recognition software and a partnership with iMDB, the actor’s name and his last 5 films will pop up in a modal dialog. They’ll also be a link to any relevant extras that include that actor.

What We’ve Learned

There is nothing wrong with the old way of studying or reading, so long as you have all of your information around you. The challenge of bringing a comparable or better experience to the iPad is finding a way to improve portability without sacrificing accessibility.

Using modal dialogues and layering data lets you display ancillary content without taking away from the source text. Since that’s why people are coming to your content, that should have the focus. Providing the rest of the data should be seamless, but natural. Finding that balance will lead to an engaging (and hopefully unforgettable) experience.

Presentation Slides

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on March 11, 2010 11:00 AM

Most of you have probably heard about Microsoft's now-completed Visual Studio 2020 competition, where the grand prize was to meet Scott Guthrie, the effective head of the Developer Division. People were invited to make submissions, and one of them was shown on Code Project and began life as the Visual Studio 2010 Concept IDE.

Well, Ph.D. student Andrew Bragdon has his own take on "inventing the future". Code Bubbles is an IDE that will be presented at this years ICSE. The level of thought that has gone into this design is simply astonishing. It has the feel of a tiling window manager like XMonad or awesomewm, but without the traditional MDI Application or SDI Application WIMP metaphors we're used to; as a result, it eliminates a ton of clutter. It also integrates key ideas from Eclipse contributed by Borland/CodeGear: The Mylyn project for integrating workflow deeply into the IDE. This is some real inspiration for Gilad Braha's Newspeak project (Vassili Bykov's Hopscotch IDE) and Dan Ingalls' Lively Kernel, since the staple of any good Smalltalk-like language is the environment!

Will makers of 30" monitors will be shaking developers down by their ankles? :)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog, on March 11, 2010 10:54 AM

This is not really a call to action, but rather the name of a ☞ cool website that allows you to try out Redis commands through a web browser and follow a quick tutorial. It is very similar to ☞ Try MongoDB.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from myNoSQL, on March 11, 2010 10:51 AM

via tiffchow.typepad.com

Tiff blogs about how kids get pissed off when they learn that Pluto isn't a planet. BUT! Check out the dateline on that letter -- November 6, 2006. Kids that have been learning about planets since Pluto's been declassified have a completely different take...

Case in point: took the kids to the Chabot Space and Science Center this past weekend, and watched a great film with them about the solar system. My when the kids in the movie flying their animated cardboard rocket finally made it to Pluto my nine year old turned to me with this shocked look on her face and whispered "But Dad! Pluto's not a planet!"

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.com, on March 11, 2010 10:50 AM

From Geekologie, via .tiff.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on March 11, 2010 10:40 AM

It is expected to be in the high 30s and low 40s this weekend in western North Dakota and eastern Minnesota. The annual Red River "hundred year flood" is on. And in the its latest attempt to attract Anderson Cooper, the region is pulling out all the stops. Moorhead and Clay County have already declared states of emergency. Fargo's Cass County jail is prepping to move its prisoners north to Grand Forks where they stand less of a chance of being drowned. An upside of the rising waters? Real estate sales are booming. At least ten homeowners have sold their doomed riverside domiciles to the city of Fargo, which already purchased 24. And what could be more fun than watching all the action (live!) on the Grand Forks Herald 2010 Flood Cam.

Gripping.

Some readers may remember the flood last year. For those who do not, by all means check out the Big Picture's fantastic gallery. And by "fantastic" I mean "fucking nightmarish."

The flooding is expected to be less severe than last year when, after a near record snow season, temperatures went from 17 degrees below zero,on March 12, to 40 degrees two days, then quickly ratcheting up to 50 degrees. And then, from March 22 to 24, it rained.

Of course, residents, especially those in Fargo-Moorhead, are still shitting bricks… which they are then putting into bags and piling along the riverbank.

But seriously, freezing floodwater is abominable.

Abe Sauer is not looking forward to this.

Originally posted by Abe Sauer from The Awl, on March 11, 2010 10:30 AM

New bike routes will provide safer connections on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge, in an attempt to divert cyclists from Delancey Street. Image: NYCDOT

NYCDOT unveiled a slate of pedestrian and bicycle improvements to the transportation committee of Manhattan Community Board 3 last night. Presenters asked for votes on two street safety projects: the construction of a planted center median on the Bowery between Canal and Division streets, and the addition of new curbside bike routes to improve connections to the Williamsburg Bridge.

Despite a few moments of crankiness from one member ("I can’t in good conscience vote for any more bicycle lanes"), the committee approved resolutions in favor of both measures.

The new bike routes on Suffolk, Stanton, and Rivington streets would complement improvements built last year, which extended the Williamsburg Bridge approach to Suffolk. Slated for implementation in May, the painted, curbside lanes are intended fill in key east-west connections north of where Delancey Street feeds into the bridge path.

The changes are important because Delancey remains extremely dangerous even as biking on the Williamsburg Bridge increases rapidly.

This January, 74-year-old Fuen Bai was killed by a school bus driver while riding in the no-man's-land between the bridge and Allen Street. Every year, traffic injures dozens of pedestrians and cyclists on the corridor, according to CrashStat. Meanwhile, DOT bike counts indicate that cycling on the bridge has quadrupled since 2004. Despite all the people biking over the bridge, the tantalizing proximity of the Allen Street bike path, and the dismal safety record of Delancey Street, the new plan does not address Delancey itself.

DOT's strategy is to divert Williamsburg Bridge bike traffic to calmer, safer side streets. "One of the issues is that people don’t know about the alternatives," Bicycle Program Coordinator Josh Benson told the audience last night. "When you get out there and try this route, it’s gonna make sense. It will change people’s behavior." DOT has no plans to add bike infrastructure to Delancey, he said.

Ian Dutton, a member of neighboring Community Board 2, noted at the meeting that a similar strategy on the other side of town has helped direct cyclists to side streets like Bleecker and Prince instead of the Houston Street traffic sewer. Still, he said, the proposal amounts to a tacit admission that Delancey Street is supposed to function like a highway.

Delancey Street "is obviously the most dangerous corridor in that part of the neighborhood," said Transportation Alternatives' Wiley Norvell. "We can’t continue to skirt it in its entirely. It’s time to give it the attention it deserves."

The CB 3 committee also approved a plan to build a raised, planted median on the Bowery between the Manhattan Bridge and Division Street. The project would reallocate some space from moving and parking lanes to create safer pedestrian crossings on some of the most hellish blocks in Manhattan, where crossing distances currently exceed 80 feet.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on March 11, 2010 10:25 AM

Hi all! I've been working furiously on ThinkTank over at Expert Labs for about six weeks now. Once in awhile I'll post an update on where we're at with the project. This is such an update, and it's cross-posted from the Expert Labs blog.

ThinkTank development has been going strong, but we need your help. If you're a ThinkTank tester and/or a web developer, join the mailing list, fork the code, install ThinkTank on your server, and help us build the software and documentation. If you don't know what you can do or where to start, here are the three main priorities for ThinkTank right now:

1. Facebook Integration. We've been working hard to make ThinkTank an extensible platform that any social network can plug into. We've just abstracted ThinkTank's Twitter functionality into a plug-in prototype, and it's time to try out plugging in another data source. Its popularity makes Facebook the next logical choice. To start, we need to add Facebook Connect functionality to the ThinkTank webapp, which will allow users to grant ThinkTank access to their Facebook account (much like you can via Twitter OAuth right now). If you've got experience implementing Facebook Connect in PHP, please help us build this plug-in.

2. Google Buzz Integration. Buzz may have just launched, but its instant adoption by millions of Gmail users (and its open APIs) makes it a perfect fit for ThinkTank. Like Facebook, we want to develop a Google Buzz plug-in that will feed posts and replies to those posts on Buzz into the ThinkTank database. Keep in mind that ThinkTank's plug-in framework is still under development, so we'll be refining it as we work on getting new services interfacing with ThinkTank.

3. Documentation. A big barrier to users and developers getting involved with ThinkTank is the lack of thorough documentation. While we've gotten several pages started in the ThinkTank wiki, we need more. If you've installed ThinkTank or plan to, document your experience in an installation guide. As you dive into the code and grok the app's design, add and edit the developer's guide. Documentation is one of the more tedious parts of developing code, but it saves future users and developers so much time, and it's the perfect way for non-coders to help out with the project. You don't have to ask permission: if you've got helpful information to share about using or developing ThinkTank, dive right into the wiki and press that Edit button.

While these are the project's major priorities right now, ThinkTank has over 30 open issues large and small. If you're interested in improving ThinkTank for your personal use as well as helping better-inform public policy, join us on the mailing list, follow and fork the project on GitHub, install ThinkTank and contribute what you can.

Thanks in advance for your time and interest.

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on March 11, 2010 8:48 AM

Ad agency Mullen chose to focus on Zappos’ famous customer service for their new ad campaign. The twist is, behind the puppets and comedy are recordings of actual customer service calls. Mullen’s making of video explains how they basically pranked Zappos to get the audio for the ads. The results are funny, fresh, and true to the experience of calling Zappos. Awesome stuff.

Originally posted by Ryan from Signal vs. Noise, on March 11, 2010 8:33 AM

I’m not entirely sure of the source of this photo and normally I wouldn’t just grab something off of the internet and paste it onto our blog but this image must be shared. It’s nice having the streets back but those days of madness were a lot of fun, weren’t they?

I was alerted to it’s existence by The Peak, and the link to the photo is http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs519.snc3/27224_351893710875_581315875_4172162_1824896_n.jpg … if you know exactly where it came from please comment below so we can give proper credit.

Originally posted by Bob Kronbauer from Vancouver Is Awesome, on March 11, 2010 8:26 AM

Digg Going The Cassandra Way:

I’ve just read about another high profile web site, Digg, going the Cassandra way. While this is not absolutely new as we’ve already heard about Cassandra in production @ Digg, the important bit is in this quote:

At the time of writing, we’ve reimplemented most of Digg’s functionality using Cassandra as our primary datastore.

I also have found interesting what motivated Digg to reach this decision and the reasons why a NoSQL solution would fit their specific scenario:

[…] the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight.

[…]

Our domain area, news, doesn’t exact strict consistency requirements, so (according to Brewer’s theorem) relaxing this allows gains in availability and partition tolerance (i.e. operations completing, even in degraded system states). […]

As our system grows, it’s important for us to span multiple data centers for redundancy and network performance and to add capacity or replace failed nodes with no downtime. We plan to continue using commodity hardware, and to continue assuming that it will fail regularly. All of this is increasingly difficult with MySQL.

The same article mentions a couple of improvements Digg have added to Cassandra to make it more Digg-usable (all of these been promised to be open sourced):

• full text, relational and graph indexing systems
• increased comparitor speed
• better compaction threading
• reduced logging overhead and Scribe support for logging
• support for row-level caching
• support for multi-get
• slow uery logging
• improved bulk import functionality

I’d definitely be interested to hear more about the details of this process, so if you have any contacts at Digg it would be great if you could make the introductions! I bet their story will be as exciting as Twitter’s one.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from myNoSQL, on March 11, 2010 8:03 AM

While researching a This Recording post about how Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash’s love affair affected their respective artistic outputs — because, I guess, I have assigned myself to be the Us Weekly of 40 years ago? –   I fell into a YouTube odyssey of Graham Nash’s British Invasion band The Hollies, specifically, an odyssey of iterations of this song, Carrie-Anne.  One of the great things about writing a post on my own blog is that I never need to have a “peg,” but if I were writing for some other publication (”Can you have 1000 words about your longstanding obsession with the song Carrie-Anne by noonish? Ok, cool, make sure to include lots of parentheticals and rambling digressions about your own life!  Here is lots of money”) about this, I would mention that the Hollies will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Monday.  Ergo, this song is newsworthy.

Of the many versions of this song that exist on YouTube, most are of the band lip-synching to their hit on variety shows, as was standard practice back in the day.   Because the recorded version of the song contiains a steel drum solo — per Wikipocrypha, it “may have been the first piece of pop music outside the Caribbean genre to feature a solo on steelpan” — there is always a weird moment in these videos when the band members have to stand there and try not to act awkward about the disembodied steelpan that, clearly, no one present is playing.  The version above is of a 1969 live performance (sans Nash, who spread his wings and flew LA-wards in 1968), and it replaces the steelpan solo with a solo by a disembodied string quartet; somehow this is preferable.  It’s still weird, though.  I mean, a lot of things about this song are massively weird.

For starters: it is supposedly about Marianne Faithfull, but if that’s the case it is a bizarre overextended metaphor about schoolboys and girls and teaching, and also contains a very harsh neg — “You lost your charm as you were aging, where is your magic disappearing?” — which, wow, if you think Faithfull’s magic is disappearing in 1968, you know, just wait til she spends  years living on the streets as a homeless heroin addict.

Also — and this is a weird thing that I love about the song — its verses, each sung by a different Holly, do not rhyme and have no set meter (there is probably a musical term for this).  “When we were in school our games were simple/You’d play the janitor I’d be the monitor/then you played with older boys and prefects/what’s the attraction in what they’re doing?”

The lyrical content about school and games might be what originally lodged the song in my consciousness. I remember hearing it for the first time when I was around 8 or 9 years old.  Music with a slight edge of naughtiness that I didn’t quite understand intellectually, but somehow understood viscerally, was just beginning to seem appealing.  I played my parents’ and grandparents’ records and listened to the Oldies station in bed at night, tape-recording songs I liked so I could hear them again later. I didn’t listen to the New Kids or Debbie Gibson or whatever would have been age-appropriate, I think due to nerdiness and not having cable.

That summer I took my first solo plane ride,  joining my grandparents on vacation in northern Maine.  I think I’ve written about this trip before; my memories of it seem predigested in a way that memories can only be when you’ve run them through the meaning-sieve a few too many times already.  I made this into a story, in other words, and now I have to sort out what really happened from the montage-sequence glue I stuck around the memories to glom them together. I remember the taste of the orange Bubble Yum I chewed on the plane to keep my ears from popping and the Maine smell of chamomile crushed underfoot, salt air, and damp clothes.  Also: a sense of constant feverish imaginative life — after all, I spent this trip mostly alone, left to my own devices by my grandparents, away from my parents; I felt like it was the beginning of my adulthood.

There was a boy about my age vacationing there that week with his family too.  This is the part of the story that I’ve told before, to myself at least.  I don’t remember anything about him, not his name or what he looked like; I have the vague impression that we spent rainy afternoons together in the cottage his family was renting, playing card games, and that we ran around on the beach together, but I don’t actually remember doing either of those things.  All the times I’ve played card games bored at the rainy beach in my life blur together and all I have is the familiar impression of antsiness soothed by a series of pointless challenges.  We fell in love, in my mind, obviously.  I had read a lot of books.

There was a wedding at the inn one night, the party held outside in a big white tent.  A misty rain may or may not have been falling, or maybe the sky was clear and every single constellation in the summer sky shone down on us.  The boy and I sat on the stoop of his rented cottage, which was just uphill from the inn, watching the party; the music was loud, mostly songs from the 60s.  And this song floated up the hill to us, the question of it repeated over and over.   I wanted to dance but I didn’t want to seem weird, so we just sat there, I think, unless I asked him to dance and he said no. “What’s your game now, can anybody play?”

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on March 11, 2010 7:14 AM

(Cross posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, demonstrated last December a preview version of Product Search for mobile with local inventory, which lets you see right in your search results whether items are in stock at nearby stores. We're happy to announce that as of today, if you're searching for a product that is sold by participating retailers, including Best Buy, Sears, Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, or West Elm, you can just look for the blue dots in the search results to see if it's available in a local store. If you see a blue dot, you can tap on the adjacent "In stock nearby" link, and you'll be taken to the seller's page where you'll see whether the item is "In Stock" or has "Limited Availability" near you. You'll also see how far away the stores are from you -- as long as you've enabled My Location or manually specified your location.

If you have an iPhone, Palm WebOS phone, or any Android-powered device, and you're in the US, just go to Google.com in your mobile browser, tap on the "more" link, and then select "Shopping." Or look for the "Shopping results" section in Universal Search results when you search on Google.com.

Finally, if you're a retailer and you'd like to participate in this program, we want to hear from you. Please fill out this brief form to let us know that you'd like to be considered. In the meantime, you can get prepared by making sure your Local Business Center data is up to date, and ensuring that your Product Search data is in great shape.

Posted by Paul Lee and Yury Pinsky, Product Managers

Originally posted by Paul Lee from Google Merchant Blog, on March 11, 2010 7:00 AM

South by Southwest 2010 starts Friday in Austin, Texas, and the TED team is heading down to present two panels:

How to Create a Viral Video
Saturday, March 13, 11am

From pranks and mashups to world-changing talks, viral videos infect our minds every day. But how does a video go viral? Margaret Gould Stewart from YouTube, Jonathan Wells from Flux.net and Jason Wishnow, TED.com's Director of Film + Video, share strategies -- from editing to distribution to, well, having the right friends. Plus: hear direct from Damian Kulash of OK Go about their new 7-million-views-in-9-days music video -- and how his label's ban on embedding video led OK Go, just yesterday, to leave the majors and start their own label.

(We're having an OK Go moment here at TED. If you haven't yet seen the jawdropping treadmill video -- watch it. And the new, also jawdropping video for "This Too Shall Pass," proudly embedded above. They know from viral video.)

Offering Your Content in 100 Languages
Sunday, March 14, 9:30am

The web is a global medium, but most websites are siloed in a single language. A social translation program is one way to make your website more accessible to a global audience, while also turning users into contributors. Is social translation an option for your website? If so, how do you ensure quality? What motivates volunteers? Is machine translation an option? Learn from leading-edge social translation projects, including panelists from Global Voices and Mozilla, as well as June Cohen, who oversees TED's massive Open Translation Project, which has so far subtitled TEDTalks in 72 languages and counting.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED Blog, on March 11, 2010 6:10 AM

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Other Events, iPhone, App Store

"What kinds of games do you like?" Adam "Atomic" Saltsman asked of his panel audience at the Canabalt postmortem during the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. "Role-playing" was yelled out, as was "puzzler," and eventually Saltsman picked "platformer" as the genre. Without another word, he quietly went to work on a laptop. Then, his partner at Semi Secret Software, Eric Johnson, took the podium to tell us all about what it was like to make one of the App Store's most popular games.

He started by saying that the game was originally developed in just "five very long days," and was created for the Experimental Gameplay Project and based around simplicity -- it only uses six colors and, obviously, the one button. For a game that's so simple, it actually had a lot of complex influences. It drew from older games, like Another World and Flashback, as well as modern works, like Half-Life 2 and District 9.

The level design was originally assembled around the idea that "the farther you go, the harder it gets," but they later evolved the difficulty to be based around the player's running speed, so that, to an extent, you could self-mediate the difficulty by hitting obstacles and slowing down a bit. The buildings were all designed with what Johnson called "lego pieces" -- little bits of graphics that are interchangeable to create somewhat randomized designs.

Jackson also talked about what he said might be the most inventive part of Canabalt: the marketing. The game was originally designed as a Flash game, and throughout the entire time the game was available for $2.99 on the App Store, there was always a free complete version available online for the public to play. The developers were ok with that, however, for three reasons. First, they said, there was no Flash on the iPhone, so if you wanted to play the game on the iPhone, you had to buy it. Second, there was a "try before you buy" element that a lot of people liked, and that they believe sold some games for them. Third, they figured some people would buy the game just to support the developers, especially because of the Flash game.

Jackson said no matter what the reasons, having a free Flash version to play worked great for them (they shared that they'd sold 115,000 copies on the App Store in just five months), and while the server costs of keeping a popular game up online are not insignificant, Semi Secret Software will continue to do the same thing with their future games (in fact, you can currently play Gravity Hook HD, their next game, online right now even before it's released on the iPhone.

The other decision they made on marketing was with price -- despite calls to the contrary, they decided to stick with the $2.99 price on the iPhone. That proved to be very "polarizing" -- almost all of their App Store reviews mentioned the price, both positively ("this is totally worth the money") or negatively ("How dare you charge this much"). They believed that while they would have sold more copies at 99 cents, the $2.99 price gave them a different type of customer, and as they showed with the chart below, they got a different type of reviewer. Free apps, they said, tend to attract a lot more negative reviews in general, while people who pay for paid apps tend to take a little more "ownership" in the game they support.

Finally, the guys announced their brand new development kit for the iPhone, called Flixel. The app, which they're bringing into a closed beta right now but will eventually release publicly for free, is designed and used by the guys to bring Flash games right over into the iPhone, and help developers rapidly prototype Flash games in an iPhone format. To show off the software, Saltsman hooked the computer he'd been working on into the projector, and showed off a quick little platformer game (as per the audience's request at the beginning of the 20 minute panel) called "Platformer (I guess)."

The game was super simple (and bugged -- he had to tweak it a little bit as he played, and the little guy couldn't go downstairs), but it was a very nice working prototype of a possible touch-based platformer. Nothing you could sell, but as a demo for Flixel, it worked.

We'll keep an eye out for both Gravity Hook HD and Flixel, and we'll try to corner the guys from Semi Secret later this week to try and talk to them both about their work on Canabalt and what they're up to in the future.

TUAWGDC 2010: Canabalt postmortem originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Mike Schramm from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on March 11, 2010 5:00 AM

What a great way to start off this morning: a new series of map-based illustrations by Christoph Niemann. Reserve Battery Park is a favorite. So is this omelet recipe:

Tags: art   Christoph Niemann   maps

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on March 11, 2010 4:23 AM

It's time to welcome @ruthbourdain—a Twitter account that combines the haiku-like ridiculousness of Ruth Reichl's tweets with the pessimism and bad jokes of Tony Bourdain—to the dancefloor. The avatar alone is worthy of praise.
· @RuthBourdain [Twitter]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on March 11, 2010 3:53 AM

Improving the product, not faithfully reproducing the physical object, always gets priority. I passed on a long, complex page-turning animation because it didn’t make sense (you’re paging up/down, not left/right) and it would have been distracting. And I opted for an extremely brief cross-fade, rather than a slide, because slides take longer and are more visually jarring. DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD. via www.marco.org

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 11, 2010 3:45 AM

We’re often told that we should design our websites and software to mimic real-life objects. The iPhone strengthened this idiom, and Apple has been driving this home hard for the iPad.

But it’s not absolute, and it’s not always the best idea. My favorite counterexample is the typical calculator app:

Nearly everything about a real calculator is faithfully reproduced, but with the good comes the bad: nearly every limitation and frustration has also been reproduced. There’s very little reason to use the software facsimile over its real-world equivalent, and in some ways, the physical object is better.

Despite being faithfully designed to look and work like a real-world object, the Calculator app hasn’t made any progress. It hasn’t advanced technology. It hasn’t made anything more useful or created new interaction models.

My preferred calculator, which I will keep blogging about until it’s ubiquitous, wasn’t designed against any physical objects because there’s no physical equivalent to what it does.

Please ignore the two glaring errors I made while cobbling this together for the picture.

Functionally, it’s almost a calculator. But it’s also almost a spreadsheet and almost a list pad. By not constraining its design to that of a common physical object, it’s able to be and do much more than anything in the physical world ever could.

It does a much better job of a number of critical features than the Calculator app, such as multipart calculations, parentheses, editing existing values, and dynamic value references. Even trivial operations are so much nicer that Soulver converts rarely even open Calculator (or use one), preferring instead to keep a Soulver window open somewhere as a scratch pad.

The interface paradigm of mimicking real-world objects shouldn’t, therefore, be applied universally.

So last week, when good writers (1 2 3 4) started discussing the merits of emulating page-turning, I took notice. Especially since I added pagination to Instapaper Pro 2.2 and had to make some difficult decisions in the process. There was no question in my mind that it was better for reading than scrolling — even better than my semi-automated, low-effort tilt scrolling.

But I didn’t implement it because books have pages and lack scrolling. Books aren’t even the right physical-object equivalent for Instapaper. Not all reading happens in books.

Instapaper is more like a magazine than anything else, but I’m not about to try to reproduce the soggy, wrinkled covers from being shoved in the mailbox, the perfume samples, the ten-page “continued on” jumps in the middle of articles, or the subscription cards falling out as you’re trying to read.

(The iPad version of Instapaper that I’ve made so far, incidentally, doesn’t resemble any physical objects. I haven’t shoved huge newspaper or book graphics in there in a misguided effort to win an ADA. Just as Soulver looks like nothing but Soulver, Instapaper on iPad just looks like Instapaper.)

I implemented pagination because it improves reading, not because a related physical item separates text into pages.

Improving the product, not faithfully reproducing the physical object, always gets priority. I passed on a long, complex page-turning animation because it didn’t make sense (you’re paging up/down, not left/right) and it would have been distracting. And I opted for an extremely brief cross-fade, rather than a slide, because slides take longer and are more visually jarring.

DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.

It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on March 11, 2010 3:24 AM

Another reason to protest Obama: His support for nuclear power plants.

Originally posted by Nicolas Lampert from Just Seeds: Blog, on March 11, 2010 3:00 AM

I was wondering at the picture of Heidegger's spatulate head on the cover of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, then noticed what seemed to be missing from the back of his skull was in fact his slicked-back hair, and noticed the mustache he is wearing in the style most commonly associated with Hitler. Given the subject of the book, this is certainly not an accident.

I hadn't much followed Heidegger Nazi controversy, however the author of this book, Emmanuel Faye, believes that "the diffusion of Heidegger's works after the war slowly descends like ashes after the explosion - a grey cloud slowly suffocating and extinguishing minds", and that the vast literature on Heidegger continues to spread "the fundamental tenets of Nazism on a worldwide scale".

That seems hyperbolic, but OK. I'd always been entertained by the very thing that seems to most frustrate philosophers about Heidegger, such as when he writes things such as "the Nothing noths", but now it seems that was not as harmless an entertainment as I had thought.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on March 11, 2010 2:41 AM

29 Days...

Originally posted by Jerry Horne from Twin Peaks Archive, on March 10, 2010 10:30 PM

via fourfour.typepad.com There is much wrong and much right about fourfour's Oscar's recap. The animated gifs on this page almost melted my Power Book, but they are worth it.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on March 10, 2010 7:43 PM

Comments

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hacker News, on March 10, 2010 7:37 PM

March 10, 2010

Player of the Day: Jose Reyes, shortstop, NY Mets

Of course, different people have different ideas about what makes an exciting baseball player. But, in general, the blueprint would look an awful lot like Jose Reyes.

In fact, not that long ago, Bill James and I plotted out formula (admittedly the formula is a lot more me than Bill — he just offered suggestions) to try and determine the most exciting players in baseball. I lost that original formula, but I tried to recreate it, taking into account triples (the most exciting play in baseball!), stolen bases, batting average, defensive excitement (subjective) and a couple of other things. I’m pretty sure I created the most wildly flawed formula to appear on the Internet today.

Here then, according to this wildly flawed formula, are the 11 most exciting seasons of the last 25 years:

1. Jose Reyes, 2006.
2. Jose Reyes, 2008
3. Jimmy Rollins, 2007
4. Ichiro Suzuki, 2001
5. Carl Crawford, 2004
6. Jose Reyes, 2007
7. Chuck Knoblauch, 1996.
8. Hanley Ramirez, 2006
9. Tony Gwynn, 1987
10. Tim Raines, 1985
11. Carlos Beltran, 2001.

Obviously, you can create your own formula — and I hope you will — but the point is that at least according to one fairly standard view, Reyes defined exciting baseball. He hit lots of triples. He also hit doubles and a few home runs. He led the league in stolen bases three years in a row. He made dazzling plays at shortstop. Sure, there were always people who thought Reyes needed to get on base more and could have been a touch steadier defensively. But that stuff would come! The point with Reyes was excitement. He was exciting. The Mets were exciting.

Anyway, that’s how it was in 2006, when Reyes was 23 years old and the Mets won 97 games. That’s also how it was in 2007, when Reyes stole 78 bases — most in 20 years — and the Mets led the National League East by seven games in mid-September, you know, before losing 12 of their last 17 and blowing it to the Phillies.

Oh well, there was excitement even then. The Mets signed the best pitcher in baseball, Johan Santana. Reyes has probably his best season — led the league with 204 hits and 19 triples, stole 56 bases. And the Mets led the National League East by 3 1/2 games in mid-September, you know, before losing four of their next five and never again getting back into first place.

Sure, the late season fadeouts hurt. They hurt a lot. But — and it’s easy to forget this — the Mets still looked to be in awfully good shape. Reyes was exciting. Santana was dazzling. Third baseman David Wright was one of the best players in baseball. Center fielder Carlos Beltran was one of the best players in baseball. Carlos Delgado had hit 38 home runs — the 11th time in 12 years he hit 30-plus homers. Francisco Rodriguez came to New York after he had set the single-season save record in Anaheim — finally, the Mets had their answer for the Great Rivera.

So, how did it all go so wrong? Just look at the Mets now. They are now arguing over Jose Reyes thyroid. That’s the big story at Mets camp these days. The Mets seem to believe — based on what they’re hearing from doctors — that Reyes has an overactive thyroid. Reyes seems to believe — based on what he’s hearing from doctors — that his thyroid is fine. Everybody is waiting for the results from the latest tests. These days, Jose Reyes’ thyroid has the third highest Q-Rating in New York, behind only David Paterson and David Letterman. It could get its own show by the weekend.

Of course, the thyroid talk is just an emblem of the Mets issues — of Carlos Beltran’s knee surgery, of David Wright’s power outage, of Carlos Delgado’s hip injury, of the surgery Johan Santana had to remove bone chips, of the Mets abominable 70-92 record last year*

*The Mets became the first team in baseball history to spend $140 million (well, $149 million and some change) and have a losing record. Here is a list of all the teams to spend $140 million on payroll in a season and their win total:

2009 Mets: 70 wins
2009 Yankees: 103 wins
2008 Yankees: 89 wins
2007 Yankees: 94 wins
2007 Red Sox: 96 wins
2006 Yankees: 97 wins
2005 Yankees: 95 wins
2004 Yankees: 101 wins
2003 Yankees: 101 wins

In other words, the thyroid talk is just the latest in a whole bunch of really weird things to happen to the Mets. Of course, Mets fans — at least the ones I hear from all the time — seem to think this is all just part of being … Mets fans. The It’s all part of the tradition. The Mets have a proud history of “The Mets Being The Mets” that, of course, goes back to the 1962 team that most people would agree was the worst baseball team of the last 100 years.

The teams that followed were not much better — until the 1969 Miracle Mets and the 1973 Ya Gotta Believe Mets. Then, the late 1970s, another dreadful lull, that time when Joe Torre came to understand that it’s hard to be a genius with Lenny Randle at third, Doug Flynn at second and Craig Swan as your Opening Day starter.

Then, came the great mid-80s Mets that didn’t win quite as much as they should have won. Then came the dreadful early 1990s Mets, the good-but-not-good enough late 1990s Mets, the dreadful early 2000s Mets, and finally this team dealing with a spotty lineup, a spotty rotation and a thyroid problem.

The thing is, that if they could stop the bad momentum … this Mets team has talent. Johan Santana, if he’s healthy, is as good as anybody. Beltran appears to be on the mend after knee surgery — he says that he’s feeling better about his knee than he has in years. You would like to believe that David Wright, having worked out whatever swing problems he had last year, will return to being a terrific player. Jason Bay gives the Mets a strong middle-of-the lineup bat. The rotation — with 20-somethings Mike Pelfrey, John Maine and Oliver Perez — could be OK, and K-Rod is still a top closer no matter what Goose Gossage may have said about him.*

*I guess Gossage called K-Rod a “clown” because of his theatrics on the field, and K-Rod responded by saying he had never heard of Gossage. So, that went well. Gossage also suggested that while Mariano Rivera is the best “modern reliever,” he prefers himself and the 52 saves he got where he got at least seven outs. Rivera, he points out, only has two of those. Case closed.

And while this is off-topic, it should be pointed out that Gossage does not have the most 7-out saves in baseball history, and he doesn’t have the second most, and he doesn’t have the third, fourth, fifth or sixth-most either. One of his teammates, Sparky Lyle, had more.

The list of most saves, 7-or-more outs:

1. Rollie Fingers, 74 saves
2. Dan Quisenberry, 65 saves
3. Gene Garber, 64 saves
4. Hoyt Wilhelm, 61 saves
5. Mike Marshall, 57 saves
6. Sparky Lyle, 56 saves
7. Goose Gossage, 52 saves
8. Lindy McDaniel, 51 saves
9. Bill Campbell, 49 saves
10. Bob Stanley, 48 saves.

And then there’s Jose Reyes. He was hurt for almost all of the 2009 season. He has had a rough camp with his thyroid issues and with the FBI questioning him about his connection to Canadian doctor Tony Galea, who has been charged with conspiring to smuggle HgH into the U.S. But here’s the thing. He’s only 26 years old. He says that he feels healthy. He still has the talent to be one of the most exciting players in the game. And he and the Mets are due for something good … it has to happen one of these days.

Originally posted by Joe Posnanski from Joe Posnanski, on March 10, 2010 6:07 PM

Don’t forget, tomorrow night is the opening of the Eames Century Modern show at the Eames Office. 7pm to 11pm. Free and open to all, live music from The Mattson 2, screen printing on site with David Dodde and Fresh Pressed, and meet and greet with the Eames family, House Industries designers and Erik van Blokland.

Originally posted by Ben Kiel from House Industries Show and Tell, on March 10, 2010 1:49 PM

Shared by Bud
I like google reader, and when I talk with my friends, it quickly becomes clear that I'm some kind of super user. It sounds like this update will fix some of the cruft that currently infects this great product like the bizarre relationship between staring (now delineated as bookmarking) and liking (which is more akin to expressing an opinion).

Since I've been working on Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is. And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren’t interested in taking the time to get Reader set up. That’s why today, I’m happy to announce an experimental product from the Google Reader team that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone, while giving Reader users a new way to view their feeds. It’s called Google Reader Play, and it’s a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web that’s easy to use and personalized to the things you like. Best of all, there’s no set-up required: visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try.

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you've read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

Reader Play adapts to your tastes -- as you browse, you can let us know which stuff you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you more items we think you'll like. If you want, you can also choose categories, and we'll personalize your stream to only show you stuff from those categories. And you don't even need a Google account to use Reader Play. Of course, if you want to star, like, or share items, we'll ask you to sign in to your Google account. Since Reader and Reader Play share the same infrastructure, any actions you take in one will be reflected in the other.

You might be wondering where we find all the awesome stuff in Reader Play. It uses the same technology as the Recommended Items feed in Reader to identify and aggregate the most interesting items on the web. If you sign in, Reader Play will also be personalized with items that people you’re following have shared in Google Reader, and items similar to ones you’ve previously liked, starred, or shared.

Since Reader Play is an experiment, it’s launching in Google Labs for now. To be clear, Reader Play isn't intended to replace Google Reader: both Google Reader and Reader Play are about finding and reading interesting stuff online. In essense, Reader Play is a different view of Reader. It's designed to be a fun and easy way to browse interesting items, while Reader is a highly customizable way to organize your feeds, keep track of what you've read, and much more. In Reader, you can switch to this view by clicking "View in Reader Play" from the feed settings menu.

Try Reader Play today and let us know what you think. Send us feedback in our forum or on Twitter, and check out our help article for more info.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Official Google Reader Blog, on March 10, 2010 12:37 PM

via http://drubk.com/?page=6

Originally posted by rusdesign from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE, on March 10, 2010 12:23 PM

Perhaps the simplest solution would be to ban marriage outright. Or, better yet, to declare everybody as married to everybody else. But then what would the database engineers do all day?

via qntm.org

This is probably the best commentary I've read on (gay) marriage in a long time. The data modeling is just an added bonus.

(Note to my wife. I'd never agree to ban our marriage or be married to anyone else)

Originally posted by apgwoz from fold, on March 10, 2010 12:14 PM

The news that Issue #60 ("Append file support") in the Quick Search Box for the Mac bug tracker has been marked as "fixed" by Dave MacLachlan will make a vanishingly small number of people exceedingly happy.

And since the other 99.99% of you have no idea what I'm talking about you can move right along. There's nothing to see here.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.com, on March 10, 2010 12:06 PM

I’d heard about this for a while, but it’s quite a treat. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but this was my favorite excerpt.

Exploratory learning can be engineered into repeatable systems: Moments of delight and skill acquisition are highly reproducible. All you need is a well designed and balanced system of interconnected feedback loops that helps guide and encourage the formation of new skills.

Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/03/ribbon_hero_turns_learning_office_into_a.php

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on March 10, 2010 12:02 PM

Serious Eats rounds up the best spots to eat in Austin. Filing this away for later eating.

Permalink: http://www.capndesign.com/archives/2010/03/where_to_eat_at_sxsw_2010.php

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Capn Design, on March 10, 2010 11:57 AM

via www.coolhunting.com

When coolhunting launched their fabulous redesign they used courier as the text font. I loved that but was in the minority. Other readers have spoken and they've switched to georgia. It does read well but I miss the retro.

(disclaimer ((if I actually need one)) - six apart services where I work helped with the redesign but I actually DO think it is fabulous.)

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on March 10, 2010 11:30 AM

Filed under: Apple

Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It's been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone's view controller class is testable or not.

In response to these discussions, iPhone developer Jonah Williams has written up a view controller unit testing how-to over at the Carbon Five web blog. His write-up offers examples that show how to incorporate some best practices into your code.

Williams points out how broken NIB bindings are a common problem for iPhone OS applications. To address these issues, he regularly adds simple assertions that test that each IB outlet and action are set properly from inside his view controller class implementations. These assertions check that IBOutlet instance variables are not set to nil and that IBAction targets have been assigned, adding a layer of protection against broken bindings.

Another typical view controller issue involves responding to application memory warnings. To respond, he adds tests that ensure that each view-dependent property gets correctly released and re-created as views unload and then later reload. By building these into test methods, he can execute this behavior on demand, and ensure that the sequence will execute flawlessly in real world conditions.

Finally, Williams discusses view controller interdependencies. Often instances are tightly intertwined, with objects acting as clients for each other. For example, a simple table view controller, living within a navigation controller, might present a detail view via yet another view controller when a row is selected. That's three separate controllers to account for, when you really only want to test one at a time. Williams suggests isolating these view controllers away from their interdependencies to test each component separately and provides examples of how you can do so.

What made Williams' approach pop for me is how he carefully exposes and isolates dependencies for testing. These are features that can otherwise be hard to inspect and validate in the normal course of programming. His write-up is well worth reading through, and provides an excellent jumping off point for investigating view controller unit testing.

TUAWiPhone devsugar: Unit testing for iPhone view controllers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on March 10, 2010 11:30 AM

From Slice

If such a plan were enacted, a $2.75 slice in NYC, for instance, would jump 50¢ to $3.25.

Science Daily recently reported that researchers have recommended the use of surcharges (taxes and fees) on unhealthy food items like pizza and soda to help offset the nearly $150 billion a year the U.S. government spends on health care issues related to obesity.

Doctors Mitchell H. Katz and Rajiv Bhatia published an article titled "Food Surcharges and Subsidies: Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is" on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The two suggest that raising the cost of or specially taxing food items that are high in saturated fats and sugar will have consumers thinking twice before making unhealthy meal choices. Their recommendation is an 18% tax on such items.

On a $2.75 slice (an average price point for slices in NYC), that would translate to a 50¢ surcharge. On a large pepperoni pizza from Domino's ($13.05), that's an extra $2.35.

This tax would be similar to the cigarette tax that some states have in place in an attempt to reduce smoking. For example, New York State places a tax of $2.75 on a pack of smokes, whereas homes of Big Tobacco charges far less. Virginia only taxes 30¢ a pack; South Carolina, 7¢. I wonder if pizza-producing states like New York would similarly tax less for pies if some such bill goes through.

But the bigger question is whether states should tax "unhealthy" foods to reduce obesity-related medical expenses or just mind their own beeswax. Shouldn't it be up to individuals to decide how they want to consume their ideal (or even not-so-ideal) daily caloric intake? And what about the inclusion of pizza in public school and other government institutions' cafeterias?

Should pizza be generalized as an "unhealthy food" when there are endless possibilities and variations?

We want to read your thoughts on this. What do you think?

Originally posted by Pizzalicious Lauren from Serious Eats, on March 10, 2010 11:30 AM

Dear Emily,

I’m sorry for wearing sweat pants to our first dinner date and for getting stoned before meeting your parents for the first time.

This was in 1999, before we were married. We’d been friends for a couple years at that point, and had recently started seeing each romantically—the result of a particularly drunken night at the WXOU Bar on Hudson Street, near where we lived in the West Village. I’d asked you out for a first proper dinner date, to Hangawi, a fancy Korean restaurant on 32nd Street.

It’s funny now to think about what I was thinking as I got ready to meet you. It was a Saturday, and I had been wearing a pair of green sweatpants that I used to wear on weekends. They were the kind that George Costanza used to wear on Seinfeld, the kind that Jerry once said announced to the world, “I give up. I can’t compete in normal society.” It occurred to me that I might change into something else, but I stood in my bedroom and thought for a minute and decided against it. I put on a white polo shirt and my Converse All-stars and walked out the door.

It wasn’t that I was trying to feign ambivalence, to give the impression I didn’t care enough to put on pants with buttons and belt-loops. I had made it very clear, in fact, that I wanted us to be girlfriend and boyfriend. If anything, you were the one who took some convincing. (Glaringly easy, in hindsight, to see why.) My thinking, as best I can explain it, was more along the lines of "take me as I am." I was a guy who wore green sweat pants on a Saturday. I wanted to make a good impression, but changing pants for that reason felt wrong. Like I’d be faking it, presenting myself as someone I was not. This type of thinking makes very little sense to me now and is derailed by something as simple as the fact that I certainly didn’t wear those sweat pants exclusively. I had lots of other pants, many of which I often changed into before dinner without much thought at all. But that day, I felt myself in the hands of fate: These were the pants you put on this morning, these are the pants you shall wear tonight.

I don’t know. I used to be really superstitious, too. And that’s just a terrible way to live. I was smoking too much pot those days, I suppose.

Which brings me to the second part of this apology. A couple months later, our relationship having miraculously survived my sweat pants, you’d arranged for us to go to dinner with your parents—my first time meeting them. Bored, sitting around my apartment that afternoon, I came to the same kind of question as before: Here was a situation in which, on any other day, I would be smoking pot. Should the fact that I was soon to be meeting these important people, the parents of the woman I was falling in love with, should I let that change my routine? I knew that I’d be brighter-eyed and clearer in conversation if I refrained, and I definitely wanted your parents to like me.

But then I thought, well, the way things are going, chances are I’ll be spending a lot of time around these people in the future. There would be lots of days like this. I wasn’t planning on making any major changes to my personal lifestyle. They might as well get to know me half-lidded and cloudy-headed. I packed a bowl.

Dinner went fine. Your parents turned out to be groovy 60s-types anyway. Towards the end of the evening, after I recognized a reference one of them made to the Steve Martin-Lily Tomlin movie All of Me, and mentioned that it was as a favorite of mine, your dad said, “Anyone who appreciates All of Me is all right by me,” and my heart felt warm in my chest. I’d lucked out.

Still, thinking back, it seems pretty stupid. There’s a reason most people would choose not to get stoned before meeting their girlfriend’s parents. Just like there’s a reason to change out of sweatpants before going on a date to a fancy restaurant. Making decisions based on principle rather than pragmatism is a prescription for failure. Even more so when the principle is so confused and self-defeating.

Was all this a test for you? I guess in a way it was, odd as that sounds. Not that I’d meant it that way. But I remember the expression on your face when we met at the restaurant for that first dinner date. You looked down at my sweat pants, and then back up to me, and gave a bemused little sigh. “So this is how it’s going to be, huh?” You thought for a second more and said, “All right.”

Again, I lucked out.

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on March 10, 2010 11:20 AM

Legendary art director George Lois shares his memories about his twelve favorite Esquire covers.

He tells how the job came about: "I was a well-known advertising agency guy, and the former editor of Esquire, Harold Hayes, he called me up. We met at The Four Seasons, and he said, 'Could you help me try to do better covers?' I got this Bronx accent, and he had this southern drawl, and it must have been a funny discussion. 'You have to go outside and find a designer, a guy who's talented at graphic design, but understands politics, culture, and movies,' I told him, and he said, 'Do me a favor, could you do me just one cover?' I said, 'Okay, I'll do you one.'"

Here's one I'd never seen before, featuring Chief John Big Tree, the supposed model for the Indian Head nickel.

Tags: design   Esquire   George Lois   magazines

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on March 10, 2010 11:19 AM