randomwalks/dj

The Blazers' already depleted roster was even thinner Saturday at practice as guard Juan Dixon, forward/center Brian Skinner and center...

Originally from Behind the Blazers Beat, on March 11, 2006 11:13 PM

Mike Clark and Dave Thomas are bringing the Rails Studio to the Pacific Northwest. This is an excellent chance for anybody in this neck of the woods to get their hands deep into Rails. As well, if you're looking to check out a Rails Studio but aren't in this part of the country, come on out! Portland is a great city to visit and we've got lots to see and do. [link]

Originally from James Duncan Davidson, on March 11, 2006 11:13 PM

4 days. Over 1200 people. Over 2000 images. Over 25GB of Data. 160 images posted to Flickr. 2 camera bodies. 3 flashes. 4 memory cards. 1 dual-core G5. Those are just a few of the statistics behind last week's photo shoot at ETech. But, more significant for me beyond the numbers is—now that I've been shooting the O'Reilly conferences for a year—how my tools have changed. The biggest tool changes have been in post-production. I've used several different workflows and found problems with all of them. All the while while suffering through broken workflows, I played around with thoughts of how to make the things better. And then, as a huge fall surprise, Apple provided what looked, at least on paper, like just the ticket the form of Aperture. [essay]

Originally from James Duncan Davidson, on March 11, 2006 11:13 PM

If you want to understand the secret lives of cities, you have to look at the infrastructure that supports them. Infrastructure may not exactly be urban destiny, but the sunk costs we've invested in roads, sewers, pipes and wires exert tremendous influence over the kinds of urban innovations (like smart grids) we in the developed world can, in any realistic way, adopt. In other ways, the lack of established infrastructure in developing world cities both restrains and enables new possibilities.

One of the barriers to change here is that infrastructure is often hidden from our eyes, by choice or inattention. Because of this, resources which open our eyes to the systems which support us are inherently worldchanging. Explaining infrastructure is a form of making visible the invisible.

Geoff Manaugh has posted two excellent pieces illuminating New York's water system and the (heavily engineered)workings of the San Francisco Bay. I've been the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model he profiles in the second post, and, while I am admittedly a geek for this stuff, I found it both riveting and revealing in a way that many digital tools sometimes are not. GIS-based mapping is obviously a wonderful tool for grokking systems, but there's something about physical models which appeals in a deeply visceral way.

Both posts are worth reading. Any other suggestions for insightful explorations of urban infrastructure?

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Pulling Back the Curtain – Information and Knowledge Resources at 06:53 PM)

Originally posted by Alex Steffen from WorldChanging: Another World Is Here, on March 11, 2006 11:10 PM

Ning-powered app for finding other Mario Kart friendcodes. Fun!

Originally posted by infovore from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 11:09 PM

If a hotel can offer customers wireless Internet access, why can't co-ops and condominiums?

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 11, 2006 6:05 PM

Originally from gimme! coffee, on March 11, 2006 6:04 PM

Originally from gimme! coffee, on March 11, 2006 6:04 PM

Originally posted by ezrakilty from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 2:56 PM

another proj from friends at stamen

Originally posted by anselm from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 2:56 PM

---

AFC sez, about the current Whitney Biennial:

It's hard to get past the feeling that rather than examining current trends, Biennial curators Chrissie Ilse and Philippe Vergne began with a set of concerns they were interested in and then sought out artists who met those interests. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, but it does strike me as an intensely egotistical practice to be making the claim that contemporary art making is about the things you happen to be interested in. Old school political activism is not the pulse of nation.

Despite impressive resumes, having heard Ilse and Vergne speak I find it hard to believe the curators had a real understanding of what inspired the work they managed to find. The most engaging art in the show often used recycled imagery, or constructed fictional narratives, and the curators forward increased travel as the explanation for this phenomenon. I guess artists with nominal pre-Whitney success are making a lot more money than I knew, because I just assumed travel was as much a credit risk to these people as it is to me.

Hear, hear. No, I still haven't seen the show--take this for what it's worth as a preReview. An artist friend who had a frustrating studio visit from Vergne and Iles reports that they didn't look with their eyes, or even their ears, but with their mouths. And what is it with Europeans and the fucking spirit of '68? Catherine David took that same tack with Documenta a while back. Yes, a wild liberating time for young Parisians, running wild in the streets, believing for a few moments in the possibility of universal socialism---GET OVER IT! I mean, Deep Dish TV? As much of their politics as I might agree with, what they do isn't art, it's political activist media. This is like Larry Rinder touching Rural Studio with the curatorial magic wand a few years ago and saying "I have the power to make you an artist." It's just not fair to people who do art 24/7 and deserve some comprehension. OK, I will shut up until I see the show. We're quibbling about the themes and the people, not the work.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on March 11, 2006 2:55 PM

85% of U.S. troops in Iraq said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks”. Says a survey of 944 military personnel in January and February 2006.

Originally from Social Design Notes, on March 11, 2006 8:24 AM

I'm on a panel on quitting work and getting your own thing going later today (Saturday @ 5PM). Hopefully, I'll have some insightful contributions to make. We have a site for the panel where we've gathered some links and will be putting up info.

Originally from random($foo), on March 11, 2006 8:23 AM

"This essay provides a primer on idea pitches, and although most of my experience is in the tech-sector, I pitch to you that the advice here will be relevant to pitching business plans, yourself (e.g. job interviews), screenplays, or anything else."

Originally from random($foo), on March 11, 2006 8:23 AM

A nuts and bolts guide and some tools for helping to start a small business

Originally from random($foo), on March 11, 2006 8:23 AM

Next week the first ever international streetart exhibition will open in Slovenia. It features a terrific group of artists from around the world including Space Invader from France, Flying Fortress from Germany, M-city from Poland, and The London Police from the Netherlands. The local Coatian artists will include Filjio & Kenova and the Slovene artists Lele, Rone84, Ioke42, Sektion 1.3, Tacek, Zek Advance, Skrana, Ratt One and Ash. Click here for more info.

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 11, 2006 8:23 AM

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 8:22 AM

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 8:21 AM

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 8:21 AM

great floppy RAD array. brilliant!

Originally posted by cory_arcangel from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 8:21 AM

crazy!

Originally posted by mathowie from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 11, 2006 8:21 AM

This parody clip of "America's Next Top Model" is from Product Invasion, an effort by the WGA to protest product placement. (PRODUCTINVASION.COM)

WATCH THE TOP MODEL FOR SALE VIRAL CLIP

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed, on March 10, 2006 11:51 PM

SXSW Interactive

The 2006 edition of SXSW Interactive takes place in Austin, Texas from March 10th to March 14th. The conference and festival, which focuses primarily on technology and the web, runs along side the SXSW Film festival. On the 15th, the day after the interactive conference ends, central Texas turns into the hottest music spot on earth as over 1300 bands from all over the world descend upon Austin for the SXSW Music festival.

Webmonkey's Bryan Zilar recently sat down with Shawn O'Keefe, Festival Coordinator of SXSW Interactive. They discussed the different ways that the emergence of new technologies such as online film distribution, digital communities, blogs and videoblogs are changing the face of SXSW. Shawn also told us about some of the Web 2.0 collaboration tools [Jambo] that the festival organizers have employed to help build a stronger sense of community among the conference participants. And finally, Shawn sheds some light on the mysterious gathering known as Nuclear Taco Night. This Webmonkey Q&A is also available as a podcast (8.1MB MP3).

Originally posted by jo from networked_performance, on March 10, 2006 11:51 PM

Bryan Chaffin, editor of The Mac Observer: “I personally do not view Think Secret as a rumor site. I believe that they follow standard journalistic practices — that they double-source information. I think, as a matter of fact, they do, in terms of journalism, some of the best work in the Mac web.”

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on March 10, 2006 11:51 PM

"In the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, we experimented to find ways networked communication could augment and amplify the content of classroom education, promoting collaborative processing and retention."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 10, 2006 11:50 PM

Ali Shalal Qaissi tells the story behind the scandalous picture of him hooded atop a box and attached to wires.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 10, 2006 11:50 PM

Another guy addicted to French female singers of the 60s.

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 10, 2006 11:50 PM

I am a little addicted to the three songs of theirs that I have. When will they come out with a full-length album?

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 10, 2006 11:50 PM

My dreams are answered
Originally uploaded by david.

I like to watch The Wire, Deadwood and whatever's playing on New York 1. Customers of Time Warner Cable can now get NY1 on demand, as if it wasn't already convenient enough that they replay every story every hour.

Anil jokingly calls NY1 "The Subway Strike Channel." I'm not laughing! As gothamist and others (including the New York Times, but behind their paywall) noted, NY1's strike coverage was unrivaled. If they offered a "Best of the 2005 Subway Strike Coverage" DVD for $30, I'd buy it. I am hoping for another strike this year, even though I know that's impossible, just so NY1 can cover it again.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 10, 2006 8:31 PM

The task of bringing hundreds more crappy redundant themes to the masses has been taken on by some Malaysian guy named Justin. Woo! He cleverly deals with the problems of all previous contests by keeping all the themes secret until after the competition. Genius. This way, he avoids bandwidth trouble (they’re all getting handed over to themes.wordpress.net when it’s all over, which is much better than establishing yet another repository) and all the post-result comments saying ‘WTF, why did that piece of shit win when this one is obviously sooooo much better, whoever your judges are they clearly don’t know shit about design’ etc. etc.

(Well, ok, they’re still going to get the post-result comments. If your judges were competent to judge a design competition then you wouldn’t be ashamed to announce who they were.)

There are, of course, no lists of criteria by which the prizes will be judged, and no requirement that themes be out-of-box XHTML and CSS-valid, include all necessary plugin hooks, be i18n-ready, include documentation and have authors willing to provide support. So, once more, we’ll be getting a deluge of crappy inadequate themes rather than a sensible number of decent ones. Joy.

functions.php is a nice thing, though, so I may re-style an old template and bung it their way. Hell, if this piece of migraine-inducing junk could win two awards in the last contest, anything’s worth a go.

Originally posted by wank from wordpress wank, on March 10, 2006 7:25 PM

A seasoned entrepreneur reveals the 17 most common mistakes startups make and how to avoid them -- plus, the 5 things you must do to ensure success.

Originally from random($foo), on March 10, 2006 7:20 PM

an impressive data visualization technique that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. using the content of exchanged messages, 'themail' displays the key words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual & how they change over the time period of the relationship.
'yearly words' (large faint words) show up in the background, whereas 'monthly words' (columns of yellow words) appear in the foreground. in many cases, keywords change sharply from a month column to the next, exposing the ever-changing nature of people’s conversations. see also email mountain.
[ibm.com (pdf)]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 10, 2006 5:38 PM

These RSS aggregators are ruining the web for me. The other day I noticed I hadn't been to Poplicks in like two months cuz I didn't have them in bloglines, and tonight I realized I was doing the same thing with Cocaine Blunts. Does this happen to anybody else? Luckily I caught this in time to see that Noz has...

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com, on March 10, 2006 5:38 PM

Nokia has introduced a new version of Lifeblog designed for the Nseries.

Originally from Nokia N70 Blog, on March 10, 2006 5:37 PM

Off to SXSW. Be back in two weeks or so. Say hello if you see me at any Interactive, Film, or Music-related activities, or, you know, just hanging around Austin, TX.

Originally from kathryn yu dot com, on March 10, 2006 5:37 PM

Craig Newmark says that free online mail services lose 1-2% of their email. (via rc3oi)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 10, 2006 5:37 PM

Over on his very-intermittent blog, William Gibson is apparently floating fragments of whatever it is that he’s currently writing. Atmospheric, as always.

Originally from ongoing, on March 10, 2006 5:36 PM

So this is my first post from my new home office. I can't tell you how excited I am about this space. A little background: as some of you know, we bought a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn about three and a half years ago. We renovated the top two floors for ourselves before we moved, but left most of the garden floor untouched, since we were renting it out. I had a very small and incredibly crowded (given all my gear) office on the top floor, right next to all the bedrooms.

About six months ago our tenants moved out, and the kids have been basically using the entire bottom floor as one big play/art area, which was a great indoor option during the winter. But over the past three weeks, we've been doing some work on space, and I now have the back room to myself, looking out on the garden. It is complete heaven down here. You can expect a marked increase in blog quality now that I have such spacious digs.

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 10, 2006 5:36 PM

I heard this over and over again at ETech, and it sticks in my craw like a sour lump of food gone bad: “User generated content”. Feh. I am not a user, I’m a person. And you know, I don’t put in all this time and work and obsession to be a cog in anyone’s business model. Just saying.

Originally from ongoing, on March 10, 2006 5:33 PM

Originally posted by krezel from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 10, 2006 5:33 PM

Adriaan, who works for me at Kula and is the author of the blog editing tool Ecto and 1001, just released Endo his new aggregator/feed reader. Check it out when you have a chance.

Make sure you try smart groups and don't expect it to behave like a normal 3-pane application. ;-)

More about it on his blog.

Comment - TrackBack

Originally from Joi Ito's Web, on March 10, 2006 5:31 PM

Archaeologists are really big on studying bog bodies (and the ones I've seen were certainly high on the Pitt Rivers' Scale of Weird-and-Super-Cool). Almost perfectly preserved by the bog environment, these material histories are able to persist through time in ways not possible in most other environments. However, like ground reclaimed in the Fens, what appears solid is actually full of breaches.

Bruce Sterling has posted his Emerging Tech talk and I'm still fixated on his fixation on words. This whole rationale behind coining neologisms interests me, and particularly how he understands terms like 'internet of things', 'spimes', 'theory objects', 'everyware', 'thinglinks' etc. are being mobilised to replace (with varying successes) what he considers to be no-longer-adequate terms like 'ubiquitous computation'. I think he understands perfectly well how much this is all language games and image wars, and he's playing for all it's worth.

But my favourite bit is when he talks about the need for bogs:

"I rather admire [Adam Greenfield's] term 'everyware.' It's certainly more elegant than 'ubicomp,' which is really a verbal disaster as an English noun, or 'ubiquitous computation,' which takes forever to say and is also hard to spell. I think that Everyware is somewhat confusing in verbal speech, though, because it's a pun. If you Google the word 'everyware' you find there's already a company named Everyware. My main critique of the term is that I'm not sure it carries enough new freight with it. It's a nicer name for an older grab-bag. Has this word been prematurely optimized? Is this word going to scale upward when we start really understanding this emergent technology?

Adam Greenfield is trying to speak and think very clearly, and to avoid internecine definitional struggles. As a literary guy, though, I think these definitional struggles are a positive force for good. It's a sign of creative health to be bogged down in internecine definitional struggles. It means we have escaped a previous definitional box. For a technologist, the bog is a rather bad place, because it makes it harder to sell the product. In literature, the bog of definitional struggle is the most fertile area. That is what literature IS, in some sense: it's taming reality with words. Literature means that we are trying to use words to figure out what things mean, and how we should feel about that. So don't destroy the verbal wetlands just because you really like optimized superhighways..."

So we're left to ponder how data and meaning accrete, how naming tends to stabilise things, and how definitional struggles are exactly where we should want to be. (Deja vu? Me too! If not firmly against disambiguation, this is at least convergence without consensus.)

While he notes interesting differences between hype and argot or jargon, Sterling falls short of acknowledging the ramifications of 'object' mis-identification (however transitional) or the implied reality that un-tagged or dis-connected 'objects' are effectively invisible. In this carefully sorted future/present world, Sterling also manages to exclude himself (and his followers) from discussions around similar or related ideas that do not mobilise the same (lest we forget machine-read) terms. In this world, we can be assured that most, if not all, of the discussions that accrete around terms like 'internet of things' involve people with the same interests speaking the same languages, or those with shared cultures, objects and literacies. So what happens to difference and disagreement?

Sterling piggy-backs Kuhn's paradigm shifts when he implies that when enough of the 'right' people (alpha-geeks) agree that a term is no longer useful to their interests, they agree to come up with new 'right' terms (like the ones above). And of course Sterling is most concerned with shifting processes or transitional states: this is where things happen, where things (be)come True. Where many stories are told, but only some persist.

As the man-himself writes:
Mood: celebratory
Now Playing: Hey lazyweb! Make somebody else do it!
Better her than me, boyo

Originally posted by Anne from Purse Lip Square Jaw, on March 10, 2006 5:30 PM

Since the steroids controversy has flared up again thanks to Barry Bonds, I thought I'd raise again the question that I posed in a Wired essay last year: why are steroids against the rules while enhancement surgeries -- like laser eye surgery -- are completely legit? Shouldn't it be more of an offense to permanently alter your body in order to improve performance?

Finally, new surgical procedures will be so effective and feature such rapid recovery time that Tommy John surgery will look like bloodletting by comparison. In fact, there's a chance you've had one of these next-generation procedures: laser eye surgery. Great hitters anticipate the type of pitch being thrown - fastball or curveball? - by detecting the rotation of the seams of the baseball, which means that good eyesight is as valuable to them as strength or agility. One study of more than a dozen players who had opted for laser surgery found that "players coming off eye surgery are likely to see substantial improvements in batting average and power."

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

I was going to post a photo of a market in Lagos but it took too long to load.  Close your eyes and imagine a big, crowded space with vendors and buses and you have it.  I forget the name of the market.  I am getting bad about knowing the names of places I have been to here in Nigeria.  Seke and his family have been taking me around and when you have guides, you just get go where they tell you to.  When I travel, I tend to be like that.  I like to be led.  (It is only when I travel though.)

When I first got to Lagos I thought it was kind of insane.  This is a big statement from a New Yorker.  Honestly, the beauty was lost on me.  I had just been to two really beautiful places, Cape Town, South Africa & Kigali, Rwanda.  Both cities have beautiful mountains and hills.  Lots of green while being real cities.  (Though Cape Town is a much, much, much bigger city than Kigali.)  Lagos is not beautiful in that way.  It is big and dirty and kind of chaotic.

Then a few days in I had this thought that has not just applied to my perception of Lagos but to my interactions with people as well:

Why don't I just appreciate this place for what it is and not think about what it's not?  Why don't I stop trying to make it into what I want it to be and like what it is? 

This concept has changed a lot for me.  I now have warmed up to this crazy place.  There are a million and one things to do.  People are very hip here.  They dress so well I can barely keep up!  Buildings may not look so beautiful on the outside but when you get in them, they are these incredible, beautiful places.  I am not sure I could navigate this place if I did not come here to see someone who lives here.  I have been spoilt by this experience and I know it.

This idea has really helped me with my interactions with people.  I have stopped thinking things like Why can't you just ...? and just realized that not everyone has the reactions to things that I do or are in the same mood I am in all the time.  Maybe other people have this understood about people but I am still learning.

(Note:  I have been wanting to share more pictures but I have been having a hard time with both Typepad and Flickr while I've been away.  I'm not sure what is up because I have a fast internet connection but Flickr takes a million years.  I have begun to upload photos on Snapfish and that has been somewhat easier but photos are coming.) 

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

"Life will be everywhere," explorer Penelope Boston told us at TED2006. "It will be everywhere we look." Boston boldly proclaimed that we'll find life throughout the universe, as soon as we start looking underground and in caves. And she may well be right...

In a thrilling report published in the journal Science today, we learn there are strong predicters of life on Enceladus, a relatively obscure moon of Saturn. It's only 300 miles wide, but new images (returned by NASA's Cassini spacecraft) have revealed spurts of icy crystals, a possible indication of underground water pockets. And where there's water, there may well be life. "We find ourselves staring at the distinct possibility that we may have on Enceladus subterranean environments capable of supporting life," writes Dr. Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team. "We may have just stumbled upon the Holy Grail of modern day planetary exploration. It doesn't get any more exciting than this."

More detail: Cassini imaging website | New York Times article

Originally posted by June Cohen from TED Blog, on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

VoodooPad and VoodooPad Lite have been bumped up to version 2.5.4. This release has some intel fixes, some WikiWord parsing fixes, and performance improvements.

Get it while it's fresh!

Originally from [GusMueller blog], on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

faisal.com: “Sheepdog is a system for managing shell .files across multiple unix machines so you can keep a fairly consistent environment (paths, aliases, etc) across all your machines while still keeping machine-specific customizations.”

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

W. G. Scott: “zsh is to the other unix shells what OS X is to other operating systems. If you appreciate OS X, it is likely you will appreciate what zsh has to offer.”

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 10, 2006 5:27 PM

I'm back from ETech. The theme this year was The Attention Economy, and I have to agree with Matt's Thoughts on etech that I didn't walk away with much new information about attention. But ETech is always about more than the theme, and a 2nd emerging theme from the conference was ubiquitous computing. In fact, Bruce Sterling's opening talk was called The Internet of Things where he discussed his concept of Spime—a virtual object that manifests itself physically for a time while retaining the trackability of a virtual object. (As I understood it.) For example, shoes could be digitally designed, fabricated, and made location-aware. That way you could simply Google them if you can't find them in the morning. (His extended thoughts on Spimes are in Shaping Things.) Many sessions touched on ubiquitous computing and controlling the physical world in a more fluid, digital way.

Another emerging topic was Yahoo!, with three or four sessions devoted entirely to Yahoo! products. Of course I'm very interested in Yahoo! after working on Yahoo! Hacks, but their presence felt heavy-handed. (Granted, many members of the ETech selection committee were acquired by Yahoo! over the past year.) But the sessions I saw were straight product-pitches with little or no bearing on the conference theme of Attention Economy. I don't mind seeing demos or product pitches if they're within the context of larger ideas. Yahoo! wasn't the only offender there. Just to compare: Google was absent from the conference, and I only saw one pitch from Microsoft.

My favorite sessions were about big ideas: Maribeth Back's reading rooms, danah boyd's G/localization, Derek's distributed communities, and Clay Shirky's patterns for social software. I think what I'm personally looking for is a more academic, less commercial conference devoted entirely to social interaction mediated by technology. That's a convoluted way of saying Social Software Conference, but I'd also like to hear about trends in ubiquitous computing and networked devices as well.

Once again, I came away from ETech with notes full of ideas to digest and play with. And even though I might not have a better handle on attention, it's often the unexpected threads that emerge from the conference that turn out to be the most valuable.

Originally from onfocus.com, on March 10, 2006 5:26 PM

Originally from Lifeblog, on March 10, 2006 5:26 PM

I'd say this about sums it up:

Happy:

• Cal's Flickr rundown.
• Ben and Matt's session on playsh.
• Jo's session on conference hacking - turns out it's just like planning a rave.
• Escaping on Wednesday with Mike, Seth and Jonas to get a tour of the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
• Loafing about on the hotel floor with geo-positive geeks.

Unhappy:

• Zimbra's advertainment.
• Everything Technorati touches.
• Too many people, too many concurrent sessions.
• Spotty wi-fi.

Originally from tecznotes , on March 10, 2006 5:26 PM

Taking the whole GloFish thing to the next level, students at Singapore Polytechnic say they have created a plant that can communicate with people, by glowing when it needs water. Believe.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 10, 2006 5:24 PM

It was only a matter of time before the Linux headz got bored and made an iPod MAME. It now exisits so us mortals can now turn our iPod's into 80's arcade machines. Nice.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 10, 2006 5:24 PM

This woman on the subway is exercising her right to bear arms.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 10, 2006 5:23 PM

If you've been following the lost camera story, there's a happy ending for you...Judith got her camera back from the mean Canadian family.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 10, 2006 5:23 PM

Rediscovered this while looking for something else last night: a list of questions from a panel Jeff Veen, Jason Fried, and I did on Design for Web 2.0 in Octobr 2004. Have we made any progress?

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 10, 2006 5:23 PM

72 degrees this early in March means eating lunch outside. (And 90 in Austin this weekend? Woo!)

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 10, 2006 5:23 PM

A video that recreates the introduction to "The Simpsons" with live actors is spreading across the Internet faster than Homer can say "Doh!" - and it is part of a "viral marketing" campaign for British Sky Broadcasting. Created by Sky and the advertising agency Devilfish, the video was originally intended as an on-air promotion for the Sky One network, which airs new episodes of "The Simpsons" in Britain. The company decided to release it on the Internet as part of a word-of-mouth brand building exercise, tapping into the popular Web video sector. (REUTERS)

CLICK TO WATCH REAL-LIFE SIMPSONS INTRO

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed, on March 10, 2006 5:23 PM

As New Yorkers were about to be wrapped in a balmy coat of springlike warmth, the sight of Lola and Pale Male could not have been more welcome.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 10, 2006 5:20 PM

Gauging from the first episode, which marks the beginning of the end, this season may be the most creative and richly imagined one yet.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 9, 2006 10:45 PM

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in email.

-- Eliot Spitzer

Originally from Caterina.net, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Bertha Lewis sells out for $500k.

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

I knew the oldies weren't dead.

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:44 PM

Barry Bonds, Steroids, and Hypocrisy is far and away the most trafficed post on Hello, Typepad. Since the San Francisco Chronicle and Sports Illustrated published excerpts of an upcoming book that alleges an absurdly high amount of Steroid use on the part of Bonds and other athletes associated with Balco (including Hello, Typepad favorite Marion Jones), interest in this topic has peaked (see my measure map graph for this post, to the left) so I thought I'd just reiterate my opinion, because I'm stubborn like that.

If indeed Bonds is guilty of everything the Chronicle reporters say that he is, and more, he is at least behaving consistently. There's blood in the water around Bonds, but there's money too, and don't think for a second that reporters wouldn't be covering this story if there wasn't. We know this because it's been going on for twenty years and no one started talking about it until Jose Canseco came out with his book. What's more, Baseball didn't even have a real Steroids policy until three years ago.

The fans and press are exactly as hypocritical as Bonds himself in this case. As sad as it makes me that he clearly cheated, his behavior is a symptom, not a disease.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 9, 2006 4:31 PM

As groundbreaking begins at the WTC site, the politics still swirl around the memorial... WNYC

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 9, 2006 3:07 PM

The rant is several hundred words long, and it starts like this:

The NBA has a major fucking problem on its hands. And this problem is reflective of many issues the league, and the sport of basketball on the whole, faces. THERE IS ZERO RESPECT SHOWN TO REFS.

athetic outing in recent hoops tourneys tells you something. NBA players are so used to NBA-style calls and the inevitable bitching about the calls, that they have no idea how tohandle true, pure basketball refereeing. In the Olympics and international tourneys, the refs are from all across the world-- and they interpret rules literally. And the poor dumb Americans have yet to adjust. At the end, there's a call for a photo (or better yet, video!) of Rasheed Wallace getting ejected from the McDonald's All-Star (high school) game after he fouled out. Anyone know where such a thing can be found? I'd love to see it.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 9, 2006 3:07 PM

As long as we're talking about rants, let's not ignore this article at Sports-Central by Isaac Miller. It starts like this:

Guaranteed contracts have ruined the NBA. The NFL maintains a high level of competition because every player is always competing for his job. It seems unfair that an NFL team can just cut a player because they don't want to pay his salary, but it's better than what happens in basketball. In the NBA, free agents sign six- and seven-year deals for millions of guaranteed dollars. Then they put it into cruise control and collect their loot.

of the 10 highest paid players in the league are Allan Houston, Chris Webber, Stephon Marbury, and Brian Grant. These guys convinced teams to give them huge deals a long time ago, and now they are laughing all the way to the bank. Anfernee Hardaway, Grant Hill, Keith Van Horn, Jalen Rose, Eddie Jones, Tim Thomas, and Antonio Davis are all in the top 20 (all make over $13 million this year). That's 11 out of the top 20 highest-paid players in the league who don't deserve half of what they make, less in some cases.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 9, 2006 3:06 PM

New analyses suggest the statue-building settlers landed on the once richly forested island centuries later than thought – and quickly destroyed its resources

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 9, 2006 3:06 PM

The device could one day allow paralysed patients to operate computers, and has huge potential in the computer game and entertainment industries

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 9, 2006 3:06 PM

Like nearly everyone at TED2006, Jill Sobule was stirred by Al Gore's spectacular speech on the clear and present danger of climate change. The time for action is now, Jill thought. And so she wrote a song.

But since everyone else was so down about the impending collapse of ecological systems, which could lead to floods, drought, hurricanes, food shortages, mosquito overpopulation and species extinction (if we don't do anything to stop it), she decided to write a happy song about global warming.

And here it is. Written and performed first at TED. Recorded in Los Angeles. Al Gore loved it, and so will you: Jill Sobule's "Manhattan in January." Download the MP3.

Originally posted by June Cohen from TED Blog, on March 9, 2006 3:06 PM

It’ll take you 20 minutes to get through all of these, but Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard Screencasts are worth taking a look at if you’re interested in syndication, microformats, and mashup’s.

(via: Dave’s Wordpress Blog)

Originally posted by erik from [eriksmartt.com/blog], on March 9, 2006 1:19 PM

"Ten Club would like to promote the album through MySpace.....to do that, they would like to have my user name, which is "Pearl Jam" I don't know if i want to let MySpace go, just like that. I will now email the guy and see what he has to offer."

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 1:19 PM

Originally posted by wardo from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 1:19 PM

There's more ways than one to send a message. Like Hector Serrano Studio's fan txt. "When shaken, the fan’s integrated LEDs light up to display a message programmed beforehand by the user. (click on “products,” then on “fan txt”). The fan modernizes a centuries-old method of flirtatious communication. [via Product Dose]

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 9, 2006 1:18 PM

Japanese media artist couple Mika Miyabara and Tatsuo Sugimoto's new concept for movie editing helps children understand the process of editing which has become too abstract since losing the actual film itself.

Movie Cards turns digital, abstract film material back into something tangible: paper cards.

1. Film your story with a digital camera.
2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed.
3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera.
4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be.
5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided.
6. Preview on your monitor! Done.

The advanced concept of Movie Cards, enables you to print out each frame of your movie clips. The result looks very close to actually holding a film in your hand.

Since every frame has an individual bar-code printed next to the image you can edit the length of the clip by scanning the start and end frame of your sequence instead of cutting the film.

The developers also suggest to cut all of your desired frames and create a little flip-book.

Check also Cati Vaucelle's brilliant Moving Pictures : Looking Out! Looking In!.
Via PingMag.

Originally from we make money not art, on March 9, 2006 1:18 PM

Gladwell has a long and fascinating response to Freakonomics up on his blog, which includes this brilliant twist on the abortions-cause-the-crime-rate-to-drop argument:

For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960's. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn't want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn't lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970's, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but, Levitt argues, that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals.

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on March 9, 2006 1:18 PM

I'm not really a web forums type guy, but the light weight interfaces of bbPress and Vanilla do a lot to redeem the medium. Anyone got a preference from using them?

Also anyone have a mbox import script for importing old list traffic?

Part of the very slow, long running process of re-launching the Magpie site, and breaking my Sourceforge dependency.

Originally from Laughing Meme, on March 9, 2006 10:46 AM

Today visitors at Cebit will have a chance to see and play with Nokia Lifeblog 2.0. It is a major overhaul of Lifeblog which should improve and expand the product. I am looking forward to the increased metadata, promised speed improvements and more robust sync. The support for Audio notes, could bring a very interesting twist to liferecording. Getting a record of Calendar notes as metadata is great.

Since I left Nokia I have not seen it, so I am eagerly looking forward to upgrading, I just need to wait for the version compatible with older NSeries devices. I am still using my N90 Transformer and running Lifeblog and Y! Go on it. I am still Liferecording at similar pace. Today my Lifeblog has 17887 items in it, 11161 images, 4889 sms's, 30mms, 843 videos, 405 notes and 286 posts.

My big concrats to the team, who I know has worked extremly hard to improve the product.

Originally from ChristianLindholm.com, on March 9, 2006 10:46 AM

"This fun to use old-fashioned script comes with two fonts: Ballpark Script and Ballpark Swashes. Ballpark Swashes includes over 58 different swashes in place of characters, designed to attach to the ends of the Ballpark Script letters."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 9, 2006 10:45 AM

"RunFatBoy is an easy to use workout system designed for beginners. No more intimidating images of people with ripped abs. No more complicated medical jargon. Workout plans are automatically updated for you. You can adjust your plan if it's too intense."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 9, 2006 10:44 AM

A number of people have asked me what I think of the bestselling book "Freakonomics" written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. On the front of the book, there is a glowing blurb by me which would suggest that I love it. On the other hand, chapter four of Freakonomics is devoted to the question of why crime dropped so dramatically in America—and particularly New York—in the 1990’s, and in that chapter Dubner and Levitt reach a very different conclusion than I do in "The Tipping Point." In fact, "Freakonomics" specially singles out for ridicule the theory of broken windows, which I suggest in the Tipping Point played a big role in New York City’s recovery. So what gives? Why do I love a book so much, if it contradicts my own book? Have I renounced the theories I put forward in the Tipping Point?

I have two answers. The first—obvious—point is that it is not necessary to agree with everything you read in a book to like that book. I have a number of problems with several chapters in Freakonomics, because I find the way in which economists approach problems occasionally frustrating. That being said, it’s very difficult to read Freakonomics and not find yourself saying "wow" every five minutes. I loved it.

Now for the long answer: what do I think of the substance of their crime argument? Is the Broken Windows theory central to the question of whether crime dropped, or isn’t it?

The Freakonomics argument starts off very much like the argument I make in The Tipping Point. The startling decline in crime in major American cities in the mid-1990’s is a mystery. No one predicted it. Everyone thought that high crime rates were a permanent feature of urban life. And the standard arguments to explain why crime falls don’t seem to work in this case. Levitt and Dubner go through all the usual explanations for crime decreases—a booming economy, decline in the crack trade, innovative policing strategies, tougher gun laws, aging of the population—and find only two that they think really matter. Putting more police on the street, they say, which happened in major cities all over the country in the early 1990’s, was a major factor. So were the soaring numbers of young men put away in prison in that same period. But neither of those two factors, they argue, are sufficient to explain the full magnitude of the crime drop. There has to be something else—and their candidate for the missing explanation is the legalization of abortion.

Levitt’s argument (and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the argument from now on as Levitt’s) goes something like this (and keep in mind that I’m grossly simplifying it here). The huge declines in urban violent crime rates happen, more or less, eighteen years after the passage of Roe v. Wade. States that legalized abortion earlier than the Supreme Court ruling saw their violent crime rates fall earlier. When you look at falling crime rates, the reductions in violent behavior are almost all concentrated in the generation born after the legalization of abortion, not before. People undergo abortions, in other words, for a reason: because they are poor, or don’t want a child, or live in an environment where it is hard to raise children. An unwanted child has a higher chance, when he or she grows up, of becoming a criminal. By removing a large number of unwanted children, legalized abortion ended up lowering the crime rate. Levitt makes it clear that he’s not passing judgment on this. He’s not pro-abortion, as a result of this observation. He’s just explaining the way he thinks the world works. He also stresses—and this is because even more important—that he doesn’t think that crime fell in major American cities solely because of abortion. He thinks abortion is simply one of several factors—albeit a significant one—in the crime drop.

Is Levitt right that legalizing abortion has played a role in lowering violent crime rates? Levitt has a few critics, and he’s dealt with them pretty effectively, I think. (Check out Freakonomics.com) There are some other technical critiques of his work from fellow economists, that, I have to confess, I can’t follow. My own response is chiefly that I find the argument incomplete.. For instance, the biggest drop in fertility in the U.S. came with the advent of the Pill in the mid-1960’s. The Pill allowed lots of women who would otherwise have become pregnant not to become pregnant because they were poor, or didn’t want a child, or lived in an environment where it was hard to raise children. But the fertility drop caused by the Pill didn’t lead to a decrease in crime eighteen years later. In fact, that generation saw a massive increase in crime. The advent of abortion in the early 1970’s, meanwhile, caused a far, far smaller drop in U.S. fertility but—Levitt argues—that drop is consistent with a fall in crime. In other words, the unwanted children whose births were prevented by the Pill would not have gone to become criminals. But unwanted children whose births were prevented by abortion would have gone on become criminals. Why is this? I can think of some hypotheses. But they are just that: hypotheses. I would have been a lot happier with Freakonomics if the crime chapter had been twice as long—and spent more time explaining just what is so peculiar, in terms of crime rates, about births prevented by abortion.

But that’s a quibble. In the course of making his argument for the importance of abortion Levitt is also pretty dismissive of other, alternate, theories—especially the theory that I spend a lot of time on the Tipping Point, namely the broken windows idea.

It’s here, though, where I think Levitt’s argument is a bit unfair. Levitt concludes that there are three factors that matter the most in the crime drop—abortion, high rates of imprisonment of young men, and increased number of police officers. The last of these three factors he glosses over pretty quickly. But I think that’s a mistake, because what is increased police presence? Well, having more police on the streets than before means that law enforcement can be more aggressive and pro-active. It means officers can do a lot better job getting guns off the streets. It means that they can be much more vigilant than before. It means that they have the time and resources to start cracking down on the kinds of seemingly minor "lifestyle" crimes than might have gone ignored before. The kinds of things that I argue were so important in responding a civil environment in New York State—the crackdowns on graffiti and public urination and panhandling and turnstile jumping in the subway system—are all the kinds of things that police departments can do when they have more officers on the streets. In Freakonomics, Levitt pretends he has refuted the Broken Windows explanation. He hasn’t at all. In fact, to the extent that he concedes the huge role played by the expansion of police departments in the 1990’s, he tacitly supports the Broken Windows theory.

So why is he so anxious to discredit Broken Windows? One—understandable—explanation is that he makes his own argument more compelling by dismissing all other arguments. (I know all about this tactic. I do it all the time). But a deeper explanation, I think, has to do with the difference between the perspective of economics and the perspective of psychology. Levitt is very interested in the root causes of behavior, in the kinds of incentives and circumstances that fundamentally shape the way human beings act. That’s the kind of thing that economists—particularly behavioral economists—think a lot about. And rightly so: who we are and how we behave is a product of forces and influences rooted in the histories and traditions and laws of the societies in which we belong.

But there’s a second dimension to crime, and that is the immediate contextual influences on human behavior. If you talk to a police officer (or a psychologist) they’ll tell you what a "typical" murder looks like. It’s two men, drunk at a bar. They get in a fight. They step outside. One pulls a gun in anger and kills the other. You can prevent that homicide by creating a population of people who are less likely to get drunk and angry in bars. You can also prevent that homicide by decreasing the likelihood of either of those drunken men having a gun. Police-work is concerned, necessarily, with this kind of immediate influence on behavior, and one of the things that having lots more police did was to make it possible to reduce the number of guns on the street that could end as a cause for a homicide. Drunken young men still fight in bars in New York City. But now they fight with fists—which are a lot safer.

Freakonomics is a book about deeply rooted influences on behavior, because it’s a book written by an economist. The Tipping Point is a book, by contrast, about the kinds of things that law enforcement types—and psychologists—worry about, because it was written by someone who is obsessed with psychology. I prefer to think of Freakonomics not as contradicting my argument in Tipping Point, but as completing it.

One final point (just to complicate things even further). Since Tipping Point has come out, there have been a number of economists who have looked specifically at broken windows—and tried to test the theory directly. Some have found support for it. Others—particularly Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago—find it wanting. If you crave a rigorous critique of broken windows, read Harcourt. He’s every bit as smart as Levitt.

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on March 9, 2006 10:44 AM

When you do as much heavy-editing in Movable Type as I do between this site, the Six Apart website, our internal blogs and others, you get really tired not having an easy path from the published blog back to Movable Type.

Nearly four years ago, I posted a silly little hack to have MT itself publish the entry's edit URL on the published blog, showing it only if you had a cookie that was set from a separate page. Later, I expanded this to include links directly into Movable Type for all editable content. Now, there are a couple of new tricks I want to share with you that I've been using lately and which have made my life a lot easier.

Using CookiePath to show administrative content

The first is an update to the cookie-based edit entry link technique thanks to the CookiePath configuration directive introduced in Movable Type 3.2. By setting:

CookiePath /

...in your mt-config.cgi, your MT user cookie will be set to the root of your blog's domain instead of subfoldered in your CGIPath. That means that you can use Movable Type's own login cookie to handle the entry editing link display in PHP.

That is to say, in entry context, you can do the following to insert a link to the entry's editing screen:

<?php
    if ($_COOKIE['mt_user']) {
        echo '<a href="'. $cgipath .
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&amp;_type=entry&amp;id='. 
            $entryid .'&amp;blog_id='. $blogid .
            '" title="Edit this entry">[edit]</a>';
    }
?>

At the top of that same template, you'll want to put the following:

<?php
    $cgipath =  $this->tag('MTCGIPath');
    $blogid =  $this->tag('MTBlogID');
    $entryid =  $this->tag('MTEntryID');
    $is_admin = false;

    if ($_COOKIE['mt_user']) { 
       $is_admin = true;
    }
?>

Now, anytime you visit the page, you will see edit links for each entry. Simple, but effective especially when you consider the wealth of other author-specific content you could put on not only your individual entry pages, but all pages (e.g. edit template, edit/delete/junk comments, shortcut links etc).

The Edit Bookmarklet

Of course, perhaps you want to avoid littering your pages with edit links for every piece of content. If so, you can instead create a bookmarklet which does the work for you.

First, let's start with the individual entry template. Insert the following code at the very top:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$>'. 
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&_type=entry'. 
            '&id=<$MTEntryID$>&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

Note: The code above is for templates using the Static publishing mode. If you're using the Dynamic publishing mode, you need to replace all MT tags <$MTBlah$> with the corresponding PHP/Smarty function: $this->tag('MTBlah'). See "Dynamic Publishing: PHP Architecture Overview" for more information on this. Below, for brevity, I'll show only the static template code.

Save, rebuild and drag the following link up to your browsers bookmark bar: edit this page in MT.

Now, navigate to one of your blog entries, click on the bookmarklet and you'll be transported to the MT editing page for that entry. If you're using Safari, as I am, and you put that bookmarklet within the first 9 bookmark slots on the bookmark bar, you can even use the Command-Number keystroke (e.g. Command-1 for the first bookmark) to get you there. Soooo easy.

Of course, the nice thing is that this works across installations as long as the template code is included in any blog's templates in that installation. With the same bookmarklet, I can quickly get into MT from the blog's published here at JayAllen.org, at Six Apart or any others I have rights to.

What's more, this technique isn't limited to editing entries. You could craft template code to send you from your main index to your blog's main menu:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$><$MTAdminScript$>'.
            '?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

You can make another bookmarklet (show entry comments) to show an entry's comments from an individual entry page, inserting the following code into your individual entry template:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['comments'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$>'. 
            '<$MTAdminScript$>?__mode=view&_type=entry&blog_id='.
            '<$MTBlogID$>&id=<$MTEntryID$>&tab=comments');
        exit;
    }
?>

You could also use that same bookmarklet on your main index with the template code below (put in your main index template) to quickly get to the blog's full comment listing:

<?php
    if (isset($_GET['edit'])) {
         header('Location: <$MTCGIPath$><$MTAdminScript$>'.
            '?__mode=list_comments&blog_id=<$MTBlogID$>');
        exit;
    }
?>

These are the types of shortcuts and tools that make my life slightly more blissful and I'm sure you can extrapolate further. I'd love to hear some of your favorites or any other shortcuts you commonly use down below in the comments.

Originally from JayAllen - The Daily Journey, on March 9, 2006 10:43 AM

13-year old Stella Browne from New Jersey went missing on Monday has sent her mother a series of chilling text message describing her situation, reports Mobile Tracker. One of the messages reads: "Someone was following me and I just don't remember what happened. I just woke up in a basement. I'm scared." According to the Associated Press, the Jersey City police have classified Browne's disappearance as suspicious. "Browne went missing Monday morning after leaving home for school. Her mother said she's only received text messages from her daughter, and that she has not called nor is she answering her cell phone."

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 9, 2006 10:31 AM

I guess I haven't read too many shareholders reports, but Warren Buffet's 2005 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders is honest, philosophical, and actually entertaining. [pdf] It's easy to see why Buffett has such a cult following. Read it. You'll enjoy it.

(On CEO compensation) "It doesn’t have to be this way: It’s child’s play for a board to design options that give effect to the automatic build-up in value that occurs when earnings are retained. But — surprise, surprise — options of that kind are almost never issued. Indeed, the very thought of options with strike prices that are adjusted for retained earnings seems foreign to compensation "experts," who are nevertheless encyclopedic about every management-friendly plan that exists. ("Whose bread I eat, his song I sing.").

(On the Berkshire Annual Meeting) "Kelly Broz (neé Muchemore), the Flo Ziegfeld of Berkshire, orchestrates both this magnificent shopping extravaganza and the meeting itself. The exhibitors love her, and so do I. Kelly got married in October, and I gave her away. She asked me how I wanted to be listed in the wedding program. I replied "envious of the groom," and that’s the way it went to press."

(via iwtytbr)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 9, 2006 10:30 AM

The conference blurb said “It’s time to build The Attention Economy”. What’s that, I wonder? The shindig was certainly equipped with lots of people holding forth on the subject, so this was my chance to find out. I took to accosting total strangers in the hallways saying “What do you think about this whole ‘Attention’ thing?”...

Originally from ongoing, on March 9, 2006 10:29 AM

Lenovo's C100 is an attempt to overhaul I.B.M.'s staid and expensive line of business computers.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 9, 2006 10:29 AM

A retrospective-ish article on Michael Van Valkenburgh as he develops what could be "New York's third great urban landscape," (but who's counting?) Brooklyn Bridge Park: 85 acres along 1.3 miles of the Brooklyn waterfront. Metropolis |...

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 9, 2006 10:28 AM

vadePD is an example PD patch and cocoa application that work together as a test video/3D OS X native application. The Paradiddle framework allows a Cocoa app to commuicate via udp to Pure Data and send/receieve variables.

Originally from unmediated, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

Jot is a program that lets designers, artists and animators directly annotate 3D computer graphics models (and animation) for stylized (NPR) rendering.

Originally from unmediated, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

"Hobbes and Rousseau argue about Dave Winer."

Originally posted by djacobs from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

mcclure makes drawings with an exacto knife..

Originally posted by lauren_cornell from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 9, 2006 10:27 AM

Today is International Women's Day, where the achievements of women are celebrated, which seems particularly appropriate in the cognitive sciences as there is a strong tradition of female participation.

In fact, the majority of cognitive scientists are women and most males will find themselves outnumbered on psychology and neuroscience courses.

This is, perhaps, because there are some strong female role models who have made a huge impact on the understanding of human thought and behaviour.

One of my many female heroes is neuropsychologist Professor Elizabeth Warrington, who published her first paper in 1962, and, although now officially retired, is still heavily involved in research and is publishing regularly.

Warrington was one of the most influential figures in the development of cognitive neuropsychology and helped define the field during its emergence in the 1970s and 1980s.

Many of the standard clinical assessments of cognitive function were created by her, which are now crucial components of clinical assessment after brain injury.

Link to Royal Society Fellowship Citation for Elizabeth Warrington.
Link to PubMed entries for Elizabeth Warrington.

Originally from Mind Hacks, on March 8, 2006 11:51 PM

Christine Ebersole's performance in this irritatingly mixed blessing of a show is one of the most gorgeous ever to grace a musical.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

I love to read and struggle to read Zero Seconde, which is a blog about blogging and research and things that really interest me and that’s written in beautiful French. I can read French, but slowly and with an understanding that is often rather skewed, which can be quite interesting and quite frustrating. (I can fake a conversation quite well!) Anyway, In a long post partly responding to my post about how I’m not blogging with my students this semester, Zero Seconde writes that blogging is the future of academia, yet also that once a new academic has the network blogging gains, and can publish in more traditional ways, things change. I’m going to have to read the post again, with a dictionary, I think, because I think it makes some interesting points. Another response to my not blogging with students post is from Barbara Ganley. All worth thinking about. I’m still kind of relishing not blogging with my students to be quite honest. I did sit down last week and set up our LMS (our university uses dot lrn) with discussion forums for students to participate in and one for assignments to be posted to so they can see each others work and discuss it. Maybe I’ll blog with next semester’s students.

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

2nd Annual Independent Food Festival and Awards: Most Heavenly Pork Bun: Momofuku berkshire pork bun There have been a lot of images of heaven through the ages. Light, fluffy, cloud-filled scenes full of rubenesque women with harps. A stern-looking...

Originally from A Full Belly, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

Not only Lauritz Meltzer’s birthday, it’s also womens’ day! The UN Secretary-General notes women are better represented in governments than ever before: “There are now 11 women Heads of State or Government, in countries on every continent. And three countries – Chile, Spain and Sweden – now have gender parity in Government.” Only 240 countries left! (That point was shamelessly stolen from Martin who has many other great womens day links).

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

Pushcart NYC: a weblog devoted to street vendor food in NYC....

Originally from A Full Belly, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

You can now use your Macintosh to send and receive messages via your Bluetooth phone with message2net , reports mocoblog. Message2net handles multipart SMS messages, group SMS and also connects to the Address Book application. Integrated phonebook management lets you edit contact information stored on your cell phoneÂ’s Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card and transfer that content back and forth via Address Book.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 8, 2006 11:50 PM

Documentation: Cocoa Drawing Guide

Originally from ADC Reference Library Updates, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

Introduces the basic concepts, terminology, architectures, and design patterns of the Cocoa frameworks and development environment.

Originally from ADC Reference Library Updates, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

Explains how to create scriptable Cocoa applications that use the scripting definition (sdef) format.

Originally from ADC Reference Library Updates, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

Slides are up! You can get them as PDF or flash.

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

Apple’s documentation team just keeps getting better and better. Not only is the writing clearer and more connected to real-world applications than it has been in the past, the team seems to be getting prolific! Today they dropped a huge update on their site, including a bunch of brand new titles.

The completely new documents:

• Cocoa Fundamentals Guide - This looks like a new “first stop” document for developers just coming to the platform. But perhaps more importantly for the rest of us, it contains a chapter completely dedicated to Design Patterns and how they relate to Cocoa. Sweet hallelujah! Many developers have been waiting a long time for documentation like this to start coming out of Apple.
• Cocoa Drawing Guide - This appears to tackle many of the details about how one goes about exposing the advanced facilities of Quartz through a Cocoa-based application. The Advanced Drawing Techniques appears likely to eliminate a lot of mailing list confoundedness. Hopefully the fact that this document shipped with “Alpha Draft - Confidential” at the bottom doesn’t mean it was a mistaken release.
• View Programming Guide for Cocoa - It just keeps getting better! This one discusses the high-learning-curve tasks associated with creating a custom view in Cocoa, and again includes an “Advanced” section as well as an “Optimization” section for those “wish I could chat with an expert” moments.
• Scroll View Programming Guide for Cocoa - It may seem strange to find this new document in the midst of others with much larger scope, but I can see how this will come as a great relief to people who have beat their heads against their keyboards while trying to get scroll views to behave as expected. In particular, the concepts discussed in synchronized scroll views should help a lot of people out.

And one major update:

• Cocoa Scripting Guide - Apparently the result of a merge and rewrite of two previous scripting documents. As anybody who has added scripting support to an application knows, more documentation is always welcomed.

Exciting times. Thanks for the update, Apple!

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

Whoa! This incredible piece (only a tiny inset shown here - check the link and be sure to scroll to the right...) took over 2 years to complete.

Quote from the artist, Paul Stride-Noble, who is selling it as a print:

Pixeltown is a result of working for 2 and a half years as a full time web designer. The company I was with had little to no work for me to do so instead of focusing on how I could help the company survive and find new clients....I hid behind my monitor and made Pixeltown.

Yes, I was finally made redundant but Pixeltown continues to thrive.

Originally from shey.net reblog, on March 8, 2006 11:49 PM

A slew of follow-up points to Sunday’s “Familiarity Breeds a User Base”:

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on March 8, 2006 11:48 PM

david posted a photo:

West village

Originally from david's Photos, on March 8, 2006 11:48 PM

another interesting news stories treemap data visualization. each rectangle is a single article, of which the size & color indicate the article age & popularity (determined by clicks, subscriptions, or features in weblogs). the map can be filtered or rearrarranged to view articles that meet certain criteria, or that contain specific text. the Hive Group website shows a wide range of similar treemaps that are based on different datasets, such as the iTunes, Wikipedia or Amazon collection. see also newsmap & week in review. [newsisfree.com]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 8, 2006 11:46 PM

As mentioned previously, Mike, Erika and I will be attending this year's SXSW interactive festival and we're very excited about eating some Tex-Mex! We're also excited about our panels this year. If you're going to be a fellow attendee, you should come see Erika and others speak on Running Your New Media Business on Sunday, at 3:30.

On Saturday, along with Lane Becker, we will be running Battledecks: Southwest Invitational. It's an MC freestyle battle mashed with a powerpoint presentation, and it will feature some of this industry's biggest talents. If you only see one interactive panel, it should be this one.

Rule #1: No knives. See you in Austin!

Originally from Off the Hoof, on March 8, 2006 11:46 PM

OMFG roxor. Etc. Except, eww, touchwheel for controls? I bet that's REALLY hard. Then again, maybe it'd be like those old giant roller-ball controllers they used to have...

Teeny-weeny!

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on March 8, 2006 11:46 PM

Back on the road, so let me leave you with some of my should-be-working-but-the-Internet-is-just-there type stuff. This will be an expanding thread.

+ Barry Bonds now has to deal with The Shadows, an apparently definitive account of his steroid use by the two San Francisco Chronicle writers who broke the story last year.

+ Dream Hampton on Octavia Butler. How great is this? Both writers seriously undersung and misunderstood in their fields.

+ Why Dook sucks. Just picked up Blythe's book and can't wait to break it open. 3/8 UPDATE: Broke it open and it's just as good as the article. Fantastic book.

+ Me and Brian Coleman have a psuedo-intellectual menage a trois with Carly Carioli of the Boston Phoenix. Warning: hip-hop journalism geek porn.

Originally from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on March 8, 2006 11:45 PM

Azeez is careful to explain that he is not selling Native American food. He says that cuisine would involve elk, deer, and buffalo, which would probably not go over well with his customers. He describes his food as simply American, but points out some traditional elements, like corn and beans, which make it unique. When newcomers approach the cart, they usually glance around for a menu, but the only sign is a hand-painted one that reads "From Atlantis with Love," which Azeez did not care to explain. He has grown accustomed to curious faces, though, and always greets the clueless with: "I make sandwiches—like wraps—for $5."

I know someone - who shall remain nameless for the moment - who frequently treks out of Brooklyn solely for one of these sandwiches. Another friend of mine says that cart-owner Moneer Azeez once explained the name "From Atlantis With Love" to him, which makes a lot of sense when you think about lost lands. Check out this review from the Voice (quoted above), plus this new fansite i secretly found. I'm definitely going to try a vegetarian sandwich the next time i'm downtown!

According to the Voice, Moneer Azeez's food cart (New York's only Native American street vendor) can be found on the SE corner of 2nd St and the Bowery from 6pm to 2 or 3am during the week and often later on weekends.

Originally posted by beXn from beXnlog, on March 8, 2006 11:44 PM

"Oh, are you in a band?" "No we make rcyled wood furniture". latimes

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 8, 2006 11:43 PM

kermit as keanu...miss piggy as ...well, u can guess. And beaker with some awesome bullet moves...this is what fair use is about...students getting their chips and referencing culture.

Originally from unmediated, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

a community driven discussion for building your own PVR / DVR / HTPC (think Tivo without a recurring $ub$cription). Anything from mini-itx, case modding, which video card, to which software package is most advanced is fair game.

Originally from unmediated, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

If we can have video on demand, pizza on demand, why not events on demand. Business 2 Blog reports that EVDB-powered Eventful is launching a new service where consumers can create a groundswell for certain concerts and events from performers.

The idea is to use the Web to aggregate demand for different kinds of events—anything from rock concerts to book readings. So someone in Omaha who really wants U2 to play there could start a campaign on Eventful, and if enough people join and demand that U2 plays there, the tour manager would probably be wise to add an Omaha date to the tour.

This is a good idea particularly for smaller bands. I wonder what is the “monetization strategy.” I had recently met with a company which was working on developing a technology that would allow people watch live concerts using the IM networks for a small fee. Again a nifty idea with a business model. How big these things could be? Who knows… clearly, broadband is working its magic in unusual ways don’t you think?

Originally from unmediated, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

FeedYes is a new service that creates RSS feeds for sites that don't have any. Type in the URL of any page on the web, and FeedYes.com generates a valid feed in less than a minute, the company asserts. FeedYes is from the same Netherlands company that created FeedXS, which allows people to create feeds absent a blog or other web site. (Tech Crunch post here.) Business model? The service is free. But developer Jeroen Bertrams tells us that "if the service does attract enough users, we imagine asking a small fee for the service in the future for heavy users, e.g. people who create 50 or more feeds using our service. Most of the service will surely remain free however.'' Seems to us there are other players in the space already, no?...

Originally posted by Michael Bazeley from SiliconBeat, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

Gmail is down across the Mercury News right now. Google's site says it is a "server error." Anyone else out there experiencing this? Just add this to the list....

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

Now that the furor over the GDrive leak has died down, Paul Kedrosky has posted a link to the original Google analyst day Powerpoint presentation, complete with the notes about "infinite storage."...

Originally posted by Michael Bazeley from SiliconBeat, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

Intel showed off a new design for powerful, energy-efficient processors that it hopes will help it gain back lost market share.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

Google advised investors to disregard an internal financial forecast that was mistakenly posted on its Web site.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 8, 2006 11:42 PM

The food chain has become tremendously popular among Americans who like to be entertained and educated by what they eat, as well as nourished by it.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 8, 2006 11:41 PM

New York City's health department is cracking down on a French cooking method that the city says has not been approved.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 8, 2006 11:41 PM

Peak oil predictions for the next decade by Michael Ventura (published in the Austin Chronicle)

Originally posted by kennis.koldewyn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 11:37 PM

nice community proj

Originally posted by anselm from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 11:37 PM

Originally posted by ezrakilty from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 11:37 PM

Originally posted by ezrakilty from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 11:37 PM

"The highlight is about three minutes in, when State Senator Bill Napoli describes— in explicit sadistic detail— how "bad" a virgin would have to be raped in order for him to "make an exception.""

Originally from jill/txt, on March 8, 2006 12:10 PM

This company is falling apart at the seams. Or maybe Google is just proving to be the playpen it has always tried so hard to be. Lately there's been several bungles where the company has released data when it was not supposed to, and public comments that it has to send out a press releases to correct. But this latest one (free registration) seems to take the cake: Google accidentally released financial details about its business operations on its Web site last Thursday, during an analyst meeting where company executives defended the company's practice of not releasing such information. According to documents filed Tuesday afternoon with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Mountain View-based Internet titan inadvertently posted speaker notes that had been prepared a few months earlier for an internal presentation on product strategy. The notes, which were posted on Google's investor relations Web site, described the company's core Internet advertising business as ``healthy and growing'' and ``on a strong trajectory.'' The notes said the business was ``projected to grow from $6 billion this year to $9.5 billion next year based purely on trends in traffic and monetization growth.'' We reported on the GDrive thing Monday. Finally, more oozes out about Google's calendar. Mike gets the details, even though he says Googlers and other testers of the so-called CL2 project are under strict orders not to divulge anything to outsiders. And this is all happening at a company worth $100 billion -- though even that figure is something the company is playing with us about (scroll down)....

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 8, 2006 12:10 PM

Wanting to take a truly long-term view of real estate values, a Dutch professor studied the price of real-estate transactions over four centuries on the Herengracht canal, and discovered that, adjusted for inflation, real property values rose only 0.2 percent per year. "It's true that economic and social conditions were different back then. But major crises do happen, and we can't necessarily predict them. Will bird flu be a major disaster? Will there be more hurricanes? I don't know. Nobody knows." Piet Eichholtz, a professor of real-estate finance at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. (thanks, jjg!)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 8, 2006 12:10 PM

Affordable by Design. Some examples of sustainable and affordable single-family homes. (via)

Originally from Social Design Notes, on March 8, 2006 12:10 PM

Report from Etech on Jeff Han's demo of a "multi-touch user interface". Be sure to watch the videos linked to at the end...it's the interface from Minority Report in action.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 8, 2006 12:10 PM

Mobilicio.us is a "mashup" that combines the del.icio.us online bookmarking service with Google Mobile. This allows you to browse through "mobilized" versions of your del.icio.us bookmarks from your phone browser or other limited-display browsers." via m-Trends who tested entering his del.icio.us login information and could easily acces his bookmarks.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 8, 2006 12:09 PM

Ten memorable Saturday Night Live musical moments.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 8, 2006 12:09 PM

The Guardian on spam poetry. I featured the work of noted spam poet Gary Milano (webm@yahoo.com) a couple of years ago. See also Outside the Inbox, a compilation of songs inspired by spam subject lines.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 8, 2006 12:09 PM

Daniel Dennett’s been at it again, this time in a juicy online Prospect debate with Richard Swinburne (pictured right), Emeritus Nolloth professor of the Philosophy of the Christian religion at the University of Oxford. In the debate Swinburne suggests science can’t begin to study religion without first acknowledging that God exists. Dennett argues that religions might well be a nice way of explaining what’s happened so far, but they’re not useful for furthering our understanding of the natural world because they don’t make any meaningful, testable predictions. But according to Swinburne that’s not what science is all about. Hmm…

A few excerpts:

Swinburne: “So why are the most general laws of the multiverse as they are? Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining. I've got a good theory which explains it [God]; you haven't”.

Dennett: “From my perspective, your imaginative attempt at an inference to the best explanation is telling for the one thing it lacks: a single striking prediction. That's why it can't be taken seriously as a contender against a purely secular and materialist theory of cosmic and biological and cultural evolution”.

Swinburne: “I don't think that it is in any way important that science should make predictions”.

Link to earlier post about science explaining religion.
Link to earlier post about Prospect debate on whether science can explain mental illness.
Link to event at At-Bristol Imax next Weds, where Dennett, Swinburne and others will be debating science and religion.
Make a real day of it and check out their Your Amazing Brain exhibition while you're there.

Originally from Mind Hacks, on March 8, 2006 12:08 PM

According to new research, we spend whole year of our lives looking for lost keys and other belongings, such as mobile phones. Life Style Extra reports. "An average 20 minutes a day is wasted searching for items such as TV remotes and missing mobiles -- the same as five days a year or a whole year over a a lifetime of 72 years. Car keys and door keys are the most misplaced items, with 45 per cent of people saying losing keys was the number one reason for running late. Next is mobile phones with one in three saying they lost their phone more often than anything else. The TV remote control was rated the most annoying thing to lose. iPod music players were the thing people said they would least like to lose. And the above leads to a new gizmo unveiled today at the Ideal Home Show in the UK, the Loc8tor, designed to keep track of up to 24 items at once. The device locates special tags, the size of ten pen pieces, which can be attached to keys, phones and other vital objects." The makers say it will track down lost objects or alert the owner if he leaves one behind somewhere."

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 8, 2006 12:08 PM

Reuters has a story about China shutting down two bloggers who are critical of the government. Looks like this is happening now because the national parliament is meeting.

Originally from BusinessWeek Online - Blogspotting, on March 8, 2006 12:08 PM

Ever since I heard that Greg Anthony was a Young Republican during his UNLV days, I have wondered about the political leanings of NBA figures.

I just ran across a website called NewsMeat whose mission is to report political donations. They have a sports Hall of Fame, which includes plenty of NBA figures.

Tons of fun to be had looking through these numbers. For instance, as part of the William Wesley investigation, we have heard several times that Bill and Hillary Clinton were enthusiastic about the Chicago Bulls in their heyday. Looks like the Bulls were enthusiastic about Democrats, too. That team's owner, coach, and star have all given noteworthy amounts to Democrats.

And don't talk politics at the Buss family Thanksgiving. Papa gives mainly to the GOP, but daughter Jeanie and her beau Phil Jackson prefer Democrats.

Of course, most of these donations are not big enough to make these figures real political players. But check out the commish! David Stern is a biggie for Democrats. Newsmeat reports that 98% of that eye-popping figure went straight to the Democrats, 0% went to Republicans, and 2% went to special interests.

And Magic Owner/Amway Tycoon Richard DeVos has reportedly given close to $3 million, most of which is for special interests, and none of which is for Democrats. $2 million of it reportedly went straight to the conservative Progress for America Voter Fund in September 2004. That group has paid for Kerry attack ads, and more recently ads promoting the war in Iraq. (One of them, which recently aired in Minnesota, seems to shamelessly connect Iraq to 9/11.)

Without further adieu, the list (or read the whole thing):

Exclusively Democratic Giving
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar $1,000
Charles Barkley $2,000
Jeanie Buss $5,000
Phil Jackson $5,455
Michael Jordan $18,000
Alonzo Mourning $25,000
Gregg Popovich $2,000
Pat Riley $4,754
David Stern $781,780
Isiah Thomas $5,000

Majority Democratic Giving
George Karl $7,000
Jerry Reinsdorf $346,278
Julius 'Dr. J' Erving $2,300

Playing the Middle
Mark Cuban $7,000

Majority Republican Giving
Jerry Buss $23,550

Exclusively Republican Giving
Richard DeVos $2,866,88 (76% to special interests--24% to Republicans)
Clyde Drexler $2,000
Karl Malone $10,000

UPDATE: Thanks for the heads up: Says here Vlade Divac gave $10,000 to the DNC in 2000. If anyone finds more, e-mail me and I'll add them.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 8, 2006 12:07 PM

Fantastic visualization of IRC participation at etech.

Originally from unmediated, on March 8, 2006 12:07 PM

The other big API news to start the week comes from MapQuest with their announcement of the MapQuest OpenAPI. They’re an established player in online mapping but a latecomer to the open API party. It looks like they’re going try and play off their strengths which include high-quality maps and good routing. Here’s the first new MapQuest mashup: mapzierge.

The API itself is a JavaScript-based API that provides:

• Routing - Integrate MapQuest’s ultra-accurate driving directions to show your users exactly how to get there.
• Mapping - Plot multiple locations on a single map. Choose one of our map styles to create a truly integrated look-and-feel with your website.
• Active Point Markers - Add up to 100 active point markers to a single map. You can also add events, like a pop-up box with key information displayed when users click on or roll over the marker.

The limits? Free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day.

MapQuest’s Anthony Pegg is presenting a session on this tomorrow by at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego.

And lastly, to go along with the launch of these APIs, they’ve announced a Developers Challenge:

The winning entry will push the mashup genre beyond merely plotting locations on a map, demonstrate some real usefulness to a broader, non commercial community and leverage the full set of tools available in OpenAPI with an emphasis on routing.

March 31st. This has now been added to the ProgrammableWeb /contests page.

Originally from unmediated, on March 8, 2006 12:07 PM

Originally from hustler of culture, on March 8, 2006 11:46 AM

Zebra
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

Boy do I love this picture Adriana took on 5th Avenue in Portland this past Sunday.

We were driving around when Adriana exclaimed "WOW!" and started snapping away.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 8, 2006 1:31 AM

My New Blog: YouMeiTI 有媒体
Originally uploaded by triciawang.

Q: Tricia what have you been doing lately?
A: I've been obssesively working on my new blog: YouMeiTI 有媒体. That's probably why I am 2 weeks behind on e-mails.

Q: What does YouMeiTI stand for?
A: 青年 Youth ｜ 媒体 Media ｜ 科技 Technology ｜ 信息 Information

Q: What is YouMeiTI about?
A: Exploring the nexus of Chinese Youth culture, Media, Technology and Information within a global context.

Q: What else have you been up to lately?
A: I live in NYC and my life is Netnewswire and Ecto - funny huh? But I am not depressed at all - I am totally happy! If I were doing this in Sacramento - then I would be depressed.

Q: Tricia are you really excited ahout this blog?
A: Oh yes - I've been planning it for the last year, and kenyatta helped me a few weeks ago to set it all up! this is the kind of stuff i really really love and want to study.

Q: How is your NetNewswire addiction?
A: It's a bit better now - but my accupressurist says that my mousing hand is all fucked up. It's from browsing Newnewswire! I have my thumb on my mouse pad as I scroll down through each post -

Originally from Hi Tricia!, on March 8, 2006 12:57 AM

-- i got 'em."

4th person i met in beacon. no, we didn't meet. but he's currently standing on the street below our apartment.

Originally from serenalarogers, on March 8, 2006 12:56 AM

Sina just posted a story about China's Ministries of Information Industry draft report on how they will restructure foreign usage of codec standards - specifically for MPEG-4 and H.264. The report specifically warns Chinese IPTV companies that the new fees for using MPEG-4 and H.264 will be very expensive with future problems. Therefore, they are encouraging the use of Chinese made IPTV standard--AVS.

I am not a codex expert at all. I am a user-simplicity advocate, meaning I hate how there are so many different codexes for different players, operating systems and etc. In my dream world everyone would agree to one standard and build applications on top of that.

So I did a little of poking around, because I didn't completely understand why China would warn operators about the expensiveness of using MPEG-4 and H.264. In my selfish world it certainly would make my life easier if China would just stick with the most dominant system.

So I found another blogger, Billsdue, on my source roll who framed it in terms of China being "anti-market" and " trying to push a lot of homegrown standards these days." "Pushy" insinuates that China is being a big selfish pain in the ass by not using US codecs - which is exactly what I thought when I first learned about this. So in my confusion I asked for insight from media expert, Kenyatta Cheese, who runs Unmediated. And he responded with:

Tricia,
Traditionally, America, Japan, Korea, and Europe have set the rules as far as codecs and standards go. Standards like MPEG4 and CDMA are standards developed in the US, so anyone who makes a product that uses these standards (DVD players, cell phones and such) has to pay royalties to American companies. From their perspective, it's like they're being taxed from overseas. And we all know what that feels like. ;)

esn't want to be beholden to US patent holders, so they developed their own codecs (AVS) and standards (TD-SCDMA) for use in Chinese devices. They believe that they have big enough of a market that manufacturers will want to develop devices that are compatible in China, allowing them to set the rules for their own country and not the US. By placing an actual "tax" on manufacturers that make devices using the American codecs, they discourage use of the American MPEG4 and encourage the use of the Chinese AVS standard in domestic devices.

Any argument that calls this "anti-free market" rings false to me. Royalty payments to a foreign company is imperial taxation in 20th century dress. Meanwhile, we address any Western attempt to rid itself on dependence on foreign resources -- say, oil -- as a proud "self determination."
-kc.

p>

Thanks kenyatta for that explanation. I guess I should reformulate my dream world: one standard API, creative commons, royalty free, open source -used by every living being in the universe.
Until then, I will agree to whatever new standards China deploys and I will download whatever new media player application that will support it - so where is the next AVS player?

Originally from YouMeiTI 有媒体, on March 8, 2006 12:56 AM

Originally posted by sudama from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 12:55 AM

Originally posted by djacobs from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 8, 2006 12:55 AM

a real-time view of the conversations happening in the #etech IRC channel at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. a software bot observes events in the channel, publishes them as a web-service via XML & JSON, & makes them available to an aesthetic data visualization applet.
the system pulls the most recent 500 “events” (messages, action, people joining or leaving the channel) into the client, which displays all users in a circle, with a graphic indication of their participation by each name. users who have spoken within a half-minute of one another are linked by threads, showing approximate conversational subgroups at any given time. a stream of events is displayed across the top of the screen, with a slider that allows users to check out the state of the conversation at any moment over the previous 3 hours. see also gnom & schemaball.
[stamen.com]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 8, 2006 12:55 AM

A tutorial on how I did the dashboard effect on endo's screenshots page.

Originally from chaotic intransient prose bursts, on March 7, 2006 10:28 PM

Christopher Blizzard thinks Mozilla's millions are not an issue, but the lack of transparency suggests otherwise. If you don't want us spreading rumors (I heard $30M, but that was a while ago), tell us what the real numbers are.

Originally from Hack the Planet, on March 7, 2006 10:28 PM

Amiri and Amina Baraka
Originally uploaded by triciawang.

Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Amiri and Amina Baraka are the first people I saw perform when I moved to Brooklyn - He signed my copy of his poem book. It was at the Bowery Poetry Club and it was post 9-11 and has just written that inflammatory poem that pissed everyone off and resulted in NJ stripping him of his Poet Laurete status. I don't agree with all his statements - especially those about Jewish people - but he aptly catpures a lot of the anger that people have with the system and makes a lot of great points about society and government - his antics are a bit old school but you still gotta give it to him speaking up still.

Originally from Hi Tricia!, on March 7, 2006 10:28 PM

I was really sad to miss Simon Willison’s Javascript tutorial at ETech this week, but happily he’s posted all his slides and detailed notes. Thanks, Simon! Definitely gonna brush up on the Javascript with this.

My ETech JavaScript tutorial [Simon Willison]

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Spun, on March 7, 2006 10:27 PM

Now that most phone calls at the office are official, not private, I’ve been practising answering my office phone with a serious, deep-voiced “Jill Walker” rather than my habitual, informal “Hei det er Jill!” I forgot last Wednesday though. The man on the other end had to ask me: “Jill Walker?” Yes, I told him. “This is Sigmund Grønmo,” he said. “You might know who I am?” Uh, yes. He’s our university’s rektor, the top boss of Bergen academia. We’re quite a large university, with 16000 students and over 2000 employees, so I’ve never actually met our current rektor, though I briefly met the previous one. The rektor doesn’t ring you every day.

“I’ve got great news for you,” he said. “You’ve won one of the Meltzer Foundation’s prizes for excellence in research dissemination!”

I yelped a TAZ DINGO (or words to that effect) and then fell silent.

“Are you sure this is really Sigmund Grønmo?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not some Nigeria spammer?”
“No, you can ring me back if you want to check,” he said with a chuckle in his voice.
“No, no, I believe you! But you’re really sure about this prize?”
“Yes! And there’s a hundred thousand kroner for you and we want you to come to the dinner, of course, next Wednesday. You’re not busy? I don’t supposed you’ve been to the Meltzer dinner before, have you?”
“No…”
“All the professors go. And of course we’ll want you there. Oh, and don’t tell anyone until the press release is out!”
“OK… And, my goodness, thank you!”

The internal university newspaper announced it this morning, so I guess he must have been telling the truth.

I’ve been very ambivalent about blogging in the last months. I suppose this sounds a little, well, obvious, but seeing that the university officially, publically and financially are saying that this blogging is great stuff and we’re glad you’ve been doing it, well, that’s astounding. It’s incredibly motivating and validating. And while I’m still not exactly sure how a somewhat established, young, female, head-of-small-department academic in new media blogs, I’m sure I’ll find a way I’m comfortable with and that’s mine. I had the PhD student blog, the newbie university teacher and the brand new head-of-small-department blog down pat, after all).

And hey, you know, if I’d had a pseudonymous academic blog like my almost daily reads Bitch PhD, See Jane Compute, Dr. Crazy, See Jane in the Academy, Profgrrrrl, Learning Curves or Confessions of a Community College Dean (the thought of which has appealed more and more to me) I couldn’t blog this! And would that blog be mine if I couldn’t blog something like this?

Somebody must have nominated me for this prize. If they’re reading this: thank you. I had absolutely no idea, and sudden official university recognition of research blogging as important for the university as a whole is amazing and just extremely motivating.

(Also, I have this sudden urge to email Ivan Tribble, who famously claimed in The Chronicle of Higher Education that blogging would guarantee you not getting an academic job, and tell him the news. Heh.)

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 7, 2006 8:34 PM

With regards to recent storytelling techniques on 24, Amy and ADM have some opposing viewpoints... Amy says: Last night's 2 episodes of 24 were like a breath of fresh, bloody air. People got shot! Tortured! Gassed! Did the plot...

Originally posted by Amy from Amy's Robot, on March 7, 2006 8:33 PM

(jess uses this in her class on wired lit)

Originally from jill/txt, on March 7, 2006 8:33 PM

Finally! I’ve been dreaming of this since I was a child! Go on, the story’s even better than the result! (Unfortunately, via Satirewire)

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 7, 2006 8:33 PM

matt webb's text adventure game that runs locally on a mac, with web api awareness (go west into the gallery room to look up flickr images)

Originally posted by mathowie from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 8:32 PM

Renders of a Ratnerized skyline.

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 8:02 PM

Fantastic visualization of IRC participation

Originally posted by djacobs from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 8:02 PM

Trailer, X-Men 3. Why am I so excited for this?

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 7, 2006 6:49 PM

Jupiter is growing another big red spot. The gas giant has been told by solar system pals to "keep an eye on it" and "have it checked out" if it gets any bigger.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 7, 2006 6:48 PM

where's the RSS feed. I Care!

Originally posted by fruminator from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 5:00 PM

"Creating great display intermediaries and visualizations that get widespread use has lots of potential as a business, even if untested territory. You can always make money from infrastructure, once it’s been adopted."

Originally posted by stamen from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 5:00 PM

Melody Nelson is organizing a Gainsbourg tribute in early April. Not to be missed! I first heard "Je t'aime moi non plus" in Israel on Galgalatz. Formidable.

Originally posted by axt from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 5:00 PM

March 5: Anil Dash: Reinventing Copy and Paste.
March 7: Ray Ozzie: Rewiring the Web (Clipboard Live).

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 7, 2006 2:31 PM

d2_lostcoast0128 
Originally uploaded by streaky.

Eyeball it and weep.

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on March 7, 2006 11:05 AM

In my conversation on ESPN.com with Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, I argued that many NBA General Managers--especially Isiah Thomas of the Knicks--could do a better job if they abandoned any pretense at all about exercising their own judgement. It would make more sense, I wrote, simply to draft or trade for players who attended either Duke or the University of Connecticut.

Here's part of the argument:

Let's say I'm so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second best players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What's my team? It's some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill -- which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn't get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let's say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 -- so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here -- that doesn't require knowing much about basketball -- can leave you looking pretty smart.

A reader points out that I neglected to mention one of the very best UConn players--Ray Allen.  And given that, I think I was mistaken to say that an all-Duke/UConn team wouldn't be the best in the league.  Think of it (assuming you could put together all those players). Okafor at center. Brand, Maggette and Battier at forward. Some combination of Grant Hill and Rip Hamilton and Ben Gordon and Ray Allen in the backcourt. Is there a better team in the league than that?

In defending the knowing-less-is-more position, I cited research by the psychologist Dan Goldstein. The relevant paper is here. It's definitely worth a read.

Goldstein's blog is here.

If you're interested in this line of research, Goldstein is part of a really fascinating band of psychologists interested in heuristics--that is, mental shortcuts that have the effect of helping us better navigate the world. Take a look here, for more.

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on March 7, 2006 11:05 AM

Sometimes I feel a lot like this:

An excellent photo from HOGBARD, and proof that we do read that giant sprawling FlickrBlog recommendations thread in FlickrCentral.

Originally from FlickrBlog, on March 7, 2006 11:04 AM

nycexposed discovers the last page revs wrote before he was caught

.

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 7, 2006 11:03 AM

Jill Walker’s excellent jill/txt blog about electronic literature, social networking and, well, blogging, has won an award from the Meltzer Foundation at the University of Bergen. She will receive NOK 100 000 (approx EUR 12 000) in recognition of her “excellence in research dissemination”. This is exciting, as it reflects an official recognition of the potential of blogs to create and disseminate knowledge. Read Jill’s blog post for more info, and her publications page for more of her work.

Congratulations, Jill, keep up the frontier work!

Apropos: If you are hip blogging scientish, you should have a look at the Hard Bloggin’ Scientist manifesto. It provides operating guidelines for a new movement. While a bit tongue-in-cheek, it’s got some valid points.

They even have sticker images (in pink!) that you can put on your blog to represent the blogging massive. What better way to feel like a part of something important…

Originally posted by watz from Generator.x: Generative strategies in art & design, on March 7, 2006 11:03 AM

Thought the last Flickr mash up rocked your world? Well you aint seen nuffin yet. Brevity has written a programme that blends 50 different Flickr images into one. Very nice

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 7, 2006 11:03 AM

Last week in Brooklyn, Thoroughfare, a terrific show opened featuring the work of Leon Reid (Darius Jones), Andrew Poneros, and Alex Holden. If you missed the opening, the show will be up at the RIVIERA GALLERY in Brooklyn until the 19th of this month. Check for more info after the jump:

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 7, 2006 11:02 AM

"...a categorized list of all of the AJAX image solutions I've been able to find that were of some use."

Originally from unmediated, on March 7, 2006 10:58 AM

This is fascinating..."sex might have evolved as a way to concentrate lots of harmful mutations into individual organisms so they could be easily weeded out by natural selection".

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 7, 2006 10:58 AM

Eliot Shepard has some advice for those entering a photography competition...or really, on how you might go about taking a good photo.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 7, 2006 10:58 AM

We use email and web pages, blogs and instant messenger regularly to stay in touch. Still we don't have a solid shared calendar system.

I've been watching the Open Source Applications Foundation eagerly for years now, as they develop an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office and Exchange.

Groups need to share calendars, so they can see where people are, when the important meetings are, when their associates are available. After years of philanthropic bootstrapping, an early beta of an open-source alternative was released!

It's called Chandler; here's a link to a free Windows/OSX/Linux download. You might try running it if you don't have any other calendar program on your computer!

To use Chandler for group calendaring, you need to be running Cosmo which is only on version 0.2.6 which is why I haven't emailed Marientina suggesting we use it for the IMD. It's probably just too early!

But some day, probably shortly after I graduate, the Division will be able to use something cross-platform and free, like this, to organize events, concerts and meetings. Yee hah!

Originally from just in teractive, on March 7, 2006 10:57 AM

"Pearl Jam is pleased to offer their new single World Wide Suicide as a completely free and unrestricted download." 256kbps mp3 file

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 10:55 AM

NOTE TO STEWART from Michael Parenti : just give this guy some money and incorporate the feature on flickr... its damn hot

Originally posted by exiledsurfer from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 10:54 AM

Useful.

Originally posted by finn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 7, 2006 10:54 AM

DSC_3070.NEF
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

I am sucker for mirror shots, so here's one Adriana took as we were driving out of Portland on Sunday night.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 7, 2006 5:31 AM

"The latest version supports an event driven plugin architecture, which opens up a world of decentralized publishing possibilities, breaking away from the traditionally closed route of the CMS. The relationship between this and the bio cellular themes may not be immediately obvious, but it's important."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 6, 2006 10:57 PM

This map (via gmapsmania) is a great example of mashup journalism. It's not a tool, it's a story about an issue that's important to a community.

Originally posted by Rick Burnes from Mashalist, on March 6, 2006 10:56 PM

Originally from Off the Hoof, on March 6, 2006 10:56 PM

Publish and Prosper | Blogging for Your Business

DL Byron, one of the co-founders of the Blog Business Summit, has used this site as an example at the Summit.

Now, he and his co-organizers are wrapping up a book for Peachpit Press laying out what they've learned building blogs with and for Boeing, Clip-n-Seal, and Connexion, and from hosting their conferences.

If you're looking for more hands-on advice on starting and running a business blog, there's a pre-publication deal where you can get the book for 35% off with free shipping by ordering through the web and using the promotion code: PP-234P-LKMS.

Originally from Tour de France 2006, on March 6, 2006 7:04 PM

Originally from gimme! coffee, on March 6, 2006 6:03 PM

Courtesy of Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York
Detail of "PTG.32 APUS," or "Painting No. 32, Art Project United States," a collective "portrait" of 24 military personnel in Iraq.

via NYTimes:
Close Reading
Military Maneuvers With Computer and Color
By HILARIE M. SHEETS
Published: March 5, 2006

From the day when Eric Chan and Heather Schatz switched seats in a figure drawing class as undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, and finished each others' compositions, they have engaged in a back and forth that underpins all of their art. Producing work under the name ChanSchatz since graduating in 1990, the two artists (who are husband and wife) have since expanded their collaboration to include an ever-widening pool of guests as they explore how different ideas and groups of people intersect in contemporary life.

ChanSchatz invites friends, artists, students, local merchants and, most recently, members of the American military based in Iraq, to choose from colors, text phrases and forms culled from the artists' vast drawing archive. Their selections become the springboard for large-scale silk-screen works that are abstract yet still reflect the participants.

Next weekend, "PTG.32 APUS" (short for "Painting No. 32, Art Project United States"), a collective "portrait" of 24 military men and women, from an Army private to a Marine Corps captain, goes on view in "Here and There," an exhibition of ChanSchatz's work at Massimo Audiello in Chelsea.

The starting point for the artists was a realization that while the troops' presence in Iraq was woven into daily American culture, they did not personally know any of the soldiers. The artists connected with military personnel through groups like the Freedom Calls, a foundation that keeps members of the military in touch with family through communication stations in Iraq.

Using an interactive Web page featuring 12 phrases, 28 color combinations and 32 motifs by the artists that they refer to as characters, participants selected elements they liked. To represent each individual, ChanSchatz used that person's chosen motif and colors; the selected phrase of text governed how each element acted within the work. The artists were struck by how receptive the troops were to collaborating, given that the New York art world could seem as distant to them as the war seemed to the artists.

More than half the troops chose the phrase "globally linked," which directed how ChanSchatz organized a 14-foot-long panoramic composition. The work reads as a vista, with a push between the two dark areas at either end and a bright, explosive expanse in between. It's hard to tell which terrain is getting the upper hand. [read on...]

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on March 6, 2006 6:03 PM

If you were listening to our show on Saturday night you heard us break what I'm calling the KRSgate story, as reports came into our chatroom about KRS One having some sort of meltdown at Stanford University, threatening to physically assault Adisa Banjoko and just generally acting a fool and turning everyone in the room against him. I held back...

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com, on March 6, 2006 6:02 PM

"We also believe that based on this photo alone, the Nintendo remote control games console will be A HUGE SUCCESS WITH TILDA SWINTON."

Originally posted by markpasc from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 1:42 PM

Originally posted by sudama from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 1:42 PM

Nice guide to setting up a good Ubuntu desktop.

Originally posted by finn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 1:42 PM

A look into the future of adidas sneaker technology. Check out the wishbone suspension in a shoe.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 6, 2006 1:42 PM

Along with last night's Academy Awards comes a lot of big parties attended by all kinds of celebrities with varying cultural relevance, surgical enhancement, and visible indicators of drug abuse. See if you can guess who this tragic-looking figure arriving...

Originally posted by Amy from Amy's Robot, on March 6, 2006 12:34 PM

I bet a lot of your are thinking about building your own web app. But how do you get started if you have no idea what it’s going to cost you? How can you budget for the unknown?

I recently did a talk at The Future of Web Apps in London (one of our Carson Workshops events), focusing specifically on this issue. The feedback I received was very positive, so I’ve decided to share it with you all.

You can also listen to the MP3 and grab the notes, but for those of you who don’t have time to listen to the 45 minute talk, I’m going to summarise here.

What does it actually cost?

When we built DropSend, it was our first enterprise level web app and I had no way to predict how much it would cost to build. Frustratingly, no one would share their figures with me either. So we had to learn the hard way. Yuck.

In order to help you avoid this pain, I’m going to walk you through, step-by-step, the costs involved in building an enterprise web app, on a budget. I’m going to be 100% honest about what we spent so you’ll have a good idea of what kind of budget you’ll need to set.

What’s the big deal?

Why is it only recently that small companies (Carson Systems is only two full time employees and a set of 3 part-time freelancers) are able to build large scale web apps? Here’s why:

1. Broadband is widespread so your potential audience is larger
2. Average people are comfortable with web apps (Gmail, Online banking, etc)
3. Hardware is dirt cheap
4. Open source platforms are virtually free

Definition of the terms

As I’m talking about "Building enterprise web apps on a budget", I need to define two things:

1. "Enterprise" - This is debatable, but I’d define it as a mass market product for 1,000+ users
2. "On a budget" - Under £30,000

I’ve heard some comments about my £30K figure not being "on a budget". Please keep in mind that this article is aimed at small companies, not freelancers. Most small companies will be able to allocate £30K, over a period of time. It may be possible to bring an enterprise web app to market for less than this, but it will probably be lacking in quality.

DropSend - Enterprise and on a budget

I’d better know what I’m talking about, if I’m offering advice, right?! Well, all of this advice is based on us building DropSend, a truly enterprise level web app that was built on a budget: Here’s a bit about it:

• Used for sending and storing large files that you can’t email
• 13,083 worldwide users (March 6, 2006) and growing
• 6 servers at 365 Main
• Desktop apps which use our API
• Built using PHP, AJAX, MySQL and Linux

The most important thing

Before you get started, the most important thing is to make sure your idea is financially viable. How can you do this?

1. Use common sense. Would you actually get out your credit card and pay for it?
2. Be cautious about your projections and then cut by a further 45%. Are you still in business?
3. Don’t rely on being acquired. It’s unwise to base your financial future on something you have zero control over. (In other words, it’s stupid.)

What we actually spent

• Branding and UI design: £5,000 - We worked with Ryan Shelton on this. He’s amazing.
  
• Development: £8,500 - We worked with Plum Digital Media, who are crazy talented developers.
  
• Mac and PC desktop apps: £2,750
  
• XHTML and CSS: £1,600
  
• Misc hardware: £500
  
• Hosting and maintenance: £900 per month - We work with BitPusher for all of our hardware infrastructure and maintenance. I can’t recommend them enough. They helped us define the hardware architecture, procure the boxes, install, and set everything up. Now that we’re up and running, they do all our hardware maintenance.
  
• Legal fees: £2,630
  
• Accounting: £500
  
• Linux specialist to setup the dev box: £500
  
• Misc: £1,950
  
• Trademark: £250
  
• Merchant Account: £200
  
• Payment Processor: £500 - We use Secure Trading - they’re fab!
  
• Total: £25,780 (Approx $45,000 USD)

Yikes. £25,780?

If you’re a small company and £26K sounds like a lot of money, don’t despair. You will be able to spread these costs out over many months. If you don’t have that kind of cash right now, don’t feel bad. It took us almost a year to get the financial stability and save the cash for DropSend.

How to build your team on a budget

One of the most expensive parts to building a web app is the team. Here are some of our tips for keeping your costs down:

1. Don’t go for rock stars - go for quiet talent. They’re cheaper, more fun to work with, and they’ll actually listen to you.
2. If someone is too expensive, but you really want to work with them, offer them 2 - 5% of the product equity in exchange for a cheaper price.
3. Ask your friends to recommend people they trust. If you pick a bad apple, it will cost you time and money.
4. Outsource. We tried India initially, and it proved to be a disaster. I think this was because I had never managed a project long-distance before. If you already feel comfortable with this, it can save you tons of money.

Scalability on a budget

One of the trickiest parts of building an enterprise web app on a budget, is scaling. How can you start with a little bit of hardware/capacity/CPU/backup and scale infinitely?

Here’s what I’d recommend: Don’t start worrying about that until you have to. If you throw a bunch of money at the problem and your app fails, you might as well have burned the cash at the race track.

For DropSend, we almost bought a bunch of IBM Blades and hooked them up to SAN storage. I’m SO glad we didn’t go this route.

So here are three basic tips regarding scalability on a budget:

1. Buy just enough hardware to launch
2. Build your app so it easily scales. DropSend is a great example of this. When we need more diskspace, we just add a line to the config file, plug in another box, re-deploy, and BAM, we’ve got more diskspace.
3. Plan for scaling, but don’t obsess

Next time …

In Part 2 of this article, I’ll be covering:

1. Tips for staying on budget
2. The importance of pessimism
3. Budgets for legal costs
4. How to save money with free tools
5. How to do marketing for free
6. Why venture capital doesn’t usually make sense for web apps

Thanks for reading. I hope we’ve saved you some of the pain and suffering we went through when we built DropSend. On a side note, I’ve just finished 37signals new book Getting Real, and it’s got some more excellent ideas on how to build on a budget.

As always, feel free to agree or disagree below. See you next time!

Originally from Signal vs. Noise, on March 6, 2006 12:34 PM

From one of our favorite websites, Fecal Face, comes a link to METABIOTICS which showcases the art of Alexandre Orion in Brazil. The most interesting thing is that his art is no t the stencils themselves, but rather the photographs that he shoots of people as they pass them by. Good stuff indeed

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 6, 2006 10:33 AM

Mike, Erika and I will be attending SXSWi this year. If you'd like to have a beer with us in Austin, e-mail me your mailing address and we'll send you one of our wooden nickels, good for one free beer.

E-mail addresses to katie[at]muledesign[dot]com.

Originally from Off the Hoof, on March 6, 2006 10:31 AM

Digits, cities, originally uploaded by Ti.mo.

Gave my talk this morning at Lift06. Felt horrible from the stage - rushed through interesting stuff and dwelt on the wrong things. Luckily people still wanted to talk afterwards and got a lot of what I was trying to say about play and mobility.

Whether they thought it was right is another thing of course.

Personal highlight was being heckled by Bruce Sterling, after forgetting Olafur Eliasson’s name.

Timo took a picture a slide that I put in at the last minute, which looking back on it, basically sums up and communicates everything I’m interested in, or ever been interested in or think is important at the moment - my own personal aleph.

So I guess I’m done!

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on March 6, 2006 10:28 AM

click here and here for enoweb
;

Originally from Happy Famous Artists , on March 6, 2006 10:27 AM

Here's a quick transcript of the meeting with my new boss.

Me: Great to meet you. Hey, what'd you do before this Google thing came along?

Her, paraphrased: Just some work on various projects...

• (item 1)
• (item 2)
• I invented servlets...
• (item 3)

Me: Cool, that's- Holy- Snuh?

Here's a short (and woefully incomplete) list of things that co-workers have invented or had a major hand in inventing outside of their Google work:

• Python
• Java Collections API
• Servlets
• awk
• lex
• GIMP
• UTF-8
• Plan 9
• Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• RDF and RSS (really!)
• Open Directory Project
• Macintosh Operating System
• TCP/IP

this one's my favorite:

• The Internet

There's more at the papers written by Googlers page.

Originally from massless, on March 6, 2006 10:27 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 10:25 AM

Two passages on math from The Nothing That Is, by Robert Kaplan. First, on the yearning for generalization: [W]e always...

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on March 6, 2006 10:12 AM

"He gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. . ." [Wikipedia, in reference...

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on March 6, 2006 10:12 AM

The most realistic re-rendering of Google Earth city/buildings data yet comes from Zetterstrom, posted to the SourceForge forums:

this is very very cool; I am hoping that we get some more really nice looking cityscape stuff. All these nice re-renderings only give more more incentive to add texture-capture to OGLE so that the same can be done for video game characters.

Originally from OGLE: OpenGLExtractor by Eyebeam R&D blogs, on March 6, 2006 10:11 AM

finally, data visualization for the masses: 'clear & easy-to-read' GDA (Guideline Daily Amount) bar charts that help people estimate the approximate amount of calories & key nutrients required for a balanced diet, & show how much any McDonald's menu item or (super-sized) meal contributes to that.
[mcdonaldsmenu.info]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

any article that mentions "Data Analysis Cosby" is a good one  

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

I've been studying PowerPoint; I've shared some of my notes here before. Now from Howard, links to a new kind of presentation:

Integrated Flickr slideshows, Creative Commons remixes of images found on Flickr, with a slideshow or outline that makes the topic accessible to the web audience. Considering that many people at most technology conferences attend lectures with laptops in their laps, if you're not making a big play for a show-stopping handwaver of a lecture, you might as well understand the audience will be be attending the present and future of your published outline online.

Here's a good sample Online Outline, which was turned into a Flickr Slideshow. Increasing outreach - appropriate for their topic "Knowledge Sharing with Distributed Networking Tools."

Saturday March 11 I'm giving a talk at South by Southwest; part of their "Screenburn" celebration of video games. More details to follow - now I will continue work on my slides.

Originally from just in teractive, on March 6, 2006 10:10 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 6, 2006 10:09 AM

Here are the slides for today’s Ajax Tutorial at ETech. The demos are available in a separate tarball.

I’ll publish my slides for the Comet talk sometime on Wed.

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on March 6, 2006 10:07 AM

Don't blame the keeper for missing a spinning soccer ball, or a baseball hitter missing a swerving pitch - our brains just can't deal with them.

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 6, 2006 10:02 AM

An experimental container aboard the disintegrating shuttle endured temperatures in excess of 175°C, yet one type of bacteria thrived

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 6, 2006 10:01 AM

This is an unbelievably exhaustive list. Most of the villains are surprisingly enough, either atheists or agnostics.

The emphasis of this page is on fictional characters who originated as comic book characters. Of course real-life people such as Pope John Paul II, St. Francis of Assisi, and Mother Teresa have been depicted in comic books (Marvel published one-shot comics about these prominent Catholics), but such people are not listed here. This page focuses on fictional comic book characters -- mostly from Marvel and DC -- who are adherents of real-world (not purely fictional) religions.

We want this page to be as accurate as possible, backed up by objective, published information and not based on conjecture. We do not want this listing to be slanted toward any particular denominational or religious viewpoint. It is intended to accurately report the composition of comic book character religiosity.

(via Linkfilter)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on March 6, 2006 9:58 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 6, 2006 9:53 AM

T-Mobile USA has announced a new offer for its cell phone subscribers - free WiFi access at T-Mobile hotspots on weekends. [via http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=2137&source=HOME\ "While T-Mobile lists this offer as being for a limited time only, the company has not announced an end date for free WiFi weekends. ... T-Mobile USA has over 6500 WiFi hotspots across the nation, including many located at places such as Starbucks coffeehouse, Borders Books, and FedEx Kinko's office centers."

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 6, 2006 9:46 AM

Professional authors are turning out strategy guides for video games that can sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 6, 2006 9:44 AM

A new technology called audio spotlight functions a little like a flashlight; only those in its "sound envelope" hear its message.

Originally from NYT > Technology, on March 6, 2006 9:44 AM

Whitney Biennial 2006, through May 28 in NYC. NY Times review. Momus describes his first day as a performance artist at the Biennial.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 6, 2006 9:36 AM

What to learn how to be a doctor? Check out these surgery videos on Google Video.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 6, 2006 9:36 AM

Real Estate special at the NYtimes Sunday Magazine. Après Le Deluge, Moi. Club Med for the $$$ set Mortgage-Interest Deduction?...

Originally from Archinect.com Feed, on March 6, 2006 9:35 AM

The pied-à-terre, once the province of moguls, now lures middle-aged suburbanites to New York.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 6, 2006 9:34 AM

In a stunning twist, the motion picture academy turned its back on "Brokeback Mountain," awarding the Oscar for best picture to "Crash."

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 6, 2006 9:33 AM