randomwalks/dj

"I once sat next to a kid in grade school who collected his boogers on a piece of paper. At the end of each week he would take it out and draw a circle around the significant ones.

I don't think I ever learned what their significance was."

This is not just a random story shared by Kenyatta but in response to the post below.

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on March 24, 2006 1:06 PM

Stanford is the secret sauce of Silicon Valley, our colleague Mike Langberg explains in this piece (free registration). Nothing too surprising, perhaps. But he doesn't talk much about what Stanford means for venture capitalists. And why Foundation Capital -- a well-known venture firm here in Silicon Valley -- will announce today that Stanford University has joined as an investor in Foundation's latest $525 million venture fund. Remember, it was John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, who walked the halls at Stanford and invested in Sun Microsystems, and angle investor Ram Shriram who stumbled upon the Google co-founders when he was visiting a Stanford professor....

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 24, 2006 1:04 PM

Many people have sent this article to me and thanks so much. I love Barack Obama. It has been a long time since I have said so. Let me remind y'all again.

I love how this article begins:

MOST politicians spend their careers working to overcome flaws. Then there are politicians like Barack Obama.

at his greatest challenge has been trying to play down expectations during his first Senate term, Mr. Obama's enviable plight was neatly underlined at a black-tie dinner here last weekend, as President Bush facetiously tried to roast him.

"Senator Obama, I want to do a joke on you," the president told the audience at the annual Gridiron dinner, an event where politicians and the press mingle to make fun of one another. "But doing a joke on you is like doing a joke on the pope. Give me something to work with. Mispronounce something."

Keep in mind that President Bush had no idea who Obama was before his famous Democratic Convention speech in 2004. I remember a journalist asking him a question about Obama and Bush looking almost pale thinking the journalist said Osama. Barack must get that a lot.

What I find interesting about this article is what is not being said. It seems strange that the writer did not address race. In some ways, I can understand why she did not. Barack is a beloved by everyone and that has nothing to do with race really. He is intelligent. He has integrity. He is straightforward. I for one really miss the days of having politicians we can be proud of. As a person who has just travelled abroad, I can say that people in other countries hate Bush. Hate him. And I sick of people telling me so.

I do think the fact that Obama is black is something to mention though. Many people are looking for a voice that is not a 50-70 year old white male in office. It is why so many people have so much hope in Obama. Obama as "The Great Black Hope" is something that might later be his downfall. Addressing that fact would have made this article a bit more complex.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on March 24, 2006 1:04 PM

I have to ask a question. Something I have been wondering about for most of my life.

It is cold here in New York. Yes, it is warmer than it has been (or so I've heard) but it is still cold. Cold I say. I know the sun is shining and this might be misleading but make no mistake. It is cold. And being New York, it will not be warm until late April, early May. Maybe. (As we all know, global warming changes everything.)

So, why, oh why, white people are you wearing sandals? Why are you wearing shorts?

Don't get me wrong. I like white people. Some of my best friends are white. But I just do not understand you. And I am not alone. I can speak for a large portion of the African-American community ( and probably most people of color but I will not speak for them) when I say that at times like these, we are laughing at you. Laughing at you.

White people, I am going to let you in on a secret. You know how sometimes a black person looks at you and then shakes their head. Or when you see two black people look at you and then look at each other trying not to laugh. Well, that has to do with your crazy choice to wear no jacket in 30 degree weather or open toed sandles or shorts! Black folks do not even have to exchange words about this. All we do is look at each other and shake our heads. This is code for: "White people. Who understands them."

Don't you feel cold? Don't you get sick? Can't you just wait until it is legitimately warm until you pull out the summer clothing? Or better yet, just go somewhere warm for a weekend or so and get all of this out of your system. Help me understand. Help us understand.

Thank you. I am done.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on March 24, 2006 1:03 PM

This is from indieWIRE:

Actor Randy Quaid has filed a lawsuit against Focus Features, claiming that he was misled about Brokeback Mountain being a small movie in what his lawyers are calling a "movie laundering scheme".

In court documents filed yesterday in Los Angeles (and published by AOL's TMZ.com), Quaid's lawsuit (seeking $10 millon in damages) reads:
Producers James Schamus and David Linde, by and through Focus Features, LLC, and Del Mar Productions, succeeded in obtaining Randy Quaid's performance in 'Brokeback Mountain' by falsely representing it as a low-budget, art-house film, with no prospect of making any money. Yet, from day one, defendents fully intended that the film would not be made on a low budget, would be given a worldwide release, and would be supported as the studio picture it always was secretly intended to be.

Additionally, the filing also contends that Quaid is "an instantly recognizable household name and much-admired actor on the world's stage". His legal representatives claim that he is responsible for a worldwide box office of "nearly $2 billion." The film was made for $14.9 million and has grossed more than $80 million in the U.S.

pdf and look at this! I think this lawsuit is really going to make an impact on independent film.

At first, I dismissed this lawsuit mainly because Randy Quaid was in this film for a hot minute. Plus, the document acts as if Randy Quaid is the kind of star that people go to movies specifically to see. However he does have a leg to stand on with this suit.

Producers were calling this film low-budget but it did cost 14.9 million dollars which is low but that low. What the film has made (which is 80 million dollars so far) is not really the issue because he did not ask for a back end deal so he is not supposed to see any portion of the profits. I do think it can be proven the Producers had a deal with Universal before the film was made. If this is the case, the film was then worth much more than 14.9 million dollars. The reason for this is that marketing is not included in that number and they spent a ton on this film.

Still the big question this suit brings up is: What is a low budget film? What is the cap on a film being seen as low budget? This question has been defined lately by big Hollywood stars who take pay "cuts" to be in these teeny movies that really are not teeny at all. But what I want are cold hard facts. What is the industry standard for a low budget narrative film. What is the cap on it? Where is this information? The lawsuit states that the cap is 7 million dollars but where did the lawyers get this information? SAGIndie, the Screen Actors Guild's indie film wing, creates low budget contract for actors. They work with projects with budgets of $0 to 2 million dollars. That seems a little low.

I am going to wait to read what some other news outlets have to say but as someone in this industry, I think this lawsuit could bring about a lot of dialogue.

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on March 24, 2006 1:03 PM

The Guardian has an interesting article by Banksy on the future of Melbourne's street art scene due to the Commonwealth games. London, he warns, could be next.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 24, 2006 11:47 AM

In this exclusive vidcast, Josh over at Cool Hunting has a conversation with Richard Linklater about his highly anticipated new film A Scanner Darkly. The acclaimed director of films such as Waking Life, The School of Rock, Before Sunset and Slacker discusses the challenges of transforming a live action film into an animated full length feature.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 24, 2006 11:46 AM

Finger breakdancing. Awesome.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 24, 2006 11:45 AM

edgrawes posted a photo:

This is cool.

Originally from bookmobile - Everyone's Tagged Photos, on March 24, 2006 9:02 AM

Check out Mihai Parparita’s Google Reader Tidbits, about how he used Google Reader hacks to do a bunch of clever feed splicing. The article is interesting, and I think Atom is going to enable a bunch of feed-mashup creativity that I’m not smart enough to invent. But I wanted to do a deep-dive on the actual Atom feed he generated, which is probably of interest only to obsessive Atom 1.0 fetishists...

Originally from ongoing, on March 24, 2006 9:02 AM

DaimlerChrysler expects its ailing Smart small-car brand to break even next year, according to the car maker's finance chief.

Smart has not made a profit since the brand made its debut in October 1998 with the quirky two-seat model that remains its best seller. But it has slashed staff, costs and its planned model line-up in a drive to end the losses by next year. (CNN)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed, on March 24, 2006 9:00 AM

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 24, 2006 8:59 AM

The New York Times' Larry Magid ventured into the unknown abyss that is independent, garage-based PC builders and got a hot-rod PC custom-built from recycled computer parts as well as new ones.

Most computer users would do just fine buying a pre-built system from Dell, but power users like gamers, audiophiles and people who want to hot-swap drives running XP and Vista might consider custom-building. If you go to the right builder, you can get a great product at a reasonable price with personal, fast customer service. Magid writes:

I've owned many computers over the last 25 years and I've never seen a Windows desktop as nicely built as this. The wiring is pristine. He cleverly tucked system reference manuals and CD's containing backups of required system software inside the case so they are always handy. He also loaded several open-source (free) programs on my machine and talked to me about a backup system. The innards are easily accessible, and everything worked initially.

But be prepared for snags:

But after a few hours of use, the power supply failed. Mine was the first Intel dual-core computer he had assembled, and the stock power supply unit he installed just wasn't powerful enough. I took the computer back and he replaced the power supply on the spot with a unit that has worked around the clock for weeks.

The article also provides some recommendations for reputable builders for those of you considering ditching Dell and going custom for your next system.

The Bespoke Computer [NYT]

 
Comment on this post
Related: Safely lay to rest your old computer

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 23, 2006 10:33 PM

Inspired by the call of Visual Resistance and John Unger, here’s an attempt at a few Guernica stencils:

Click on an image above for a printer-friendly PDF.

They could probably be simplified further, but here’s a first go.

Free to download and distrbute!

Originally from Social Design Notes, on March 23, 2006 10:32 PM

Paging Mena Trott!

I bought this second-hand [sporran purse] in Edinburgh three years ago, and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris. I gave up on the [Birkin] bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it. My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis.

Jane Birkin abandons the Birkin, via Agenda Inc.
Also of interest: Tom Cruise is "still in Theta." Mena's Corner is now no longer a dinosaur feed according to NetNewsWire. Stingy Bar and Scribbling.Net remain.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 23, 2006 10:31 PM

what did i do?
Originally uploaded by david.

What a wonderful world!

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 23, 2006 10:31 PM

According to favcol, the background of this text block is Flickr's favourite colour (as of 9:00 PM Pacific) -- a sort of medium, warmish taupe. How does it work? Every few minutes, favcol searches for new photos tagged with "favcol." Photos are then analyzed for the average colour, all the averages are averaged and voila, Flickr's favourite colour.

1051 photos tagged, 3/23, 12:28 Pacific.

Originally from FlickrBlog, on March 23, 2006 10:30 PM

Kotaku's video of the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Phantom Mirror for the DS, which was announced at GDC this afternoon by Nintendo's Satoru Iwata. Listen to the crowd go wild! update: You can see clean low and high-res versions of the video at British Gaming Blog. Phantom Mirror or Phantom Hourglass? I don't care, I just WANT.

Originally from cheesedip.com, on March 23, 2006 10:29 PM

Jane Birkin got tendonitis from carrying around her Birkin bag. The best part: she ditched it for a sporran, which is basically the old Scottish version of the fanny pack. [ via dj.riceweevil ]

Originally from cheesedip.com, on March 23, 2006 10:28 PM

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a great way to share files and access remote machines. Over at Computer Networking Help there is a tutorial that'll show you how to set one up.

I've had numerous members here email me about writing an article on setting up a secure, inexpensive, home VPN solution that they could use to share files between their home and office computers while they were at work. After speaking with many different people on the subject, I decided that most of them were running Windows XP for their operating systems and Linksys brand routers. That being said the following article is based on the above specifications and will involve no extra cost in setting up the VPN connection.

Configuring a free VPN solution in your home [Computer Networking Help]

 
Comment on this post

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 23, 2006 10:27 PM

"I think the best way to start learning math is to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day surfing in Wikipedia. It's filled with articles about thousands of little branches of mathematics. You start with pretty much any article that seems interesting (e.g. String theory, say, or the Fourier transform, or Tensors, anything that strikes your fancy. Start reading. If there's something you don't understand, click the link and read about it. Do this recursively until you get bored or tired."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 23, 2006 10:26 PM

"David Van Brink’s “amazingly useful in a pinch” command-line suite for working with QuickTime movies has been updated to include a new tool for creating a proofsheet image from the frames of a movie. I have used these tools from time to time for batch processing or creative hacking. I’m really happy to see that David is still working on them!"

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 23, 2006 10:26 PM

This special report on top emerging techologies from MIT Technology Review is not your average list. Sure, it contains some familiar technologies (nanomedicine, universal ID), but it also boasts what might be some new terms, including:

• Epigenetics, or early cancer detection through measuring subtle changes in DNA
• Diffusion tensor imaging, a new way to image and understand brain disorders
• Comparative interactomics, or developing new medicines based on the body's molecular interactions
• Cognitive radio, a technique allowing wireless devices to negotiate for space on the crowded radio spectrum

Originally from FutureWire - futurism and emerging technology, on March 23, 2006 10:26 PM

Legendary actor and singer Jane Birkin has ditched the Hermes Birkin bag, which she inspired, in favour of the Scots sporran after the world-famous accessory gave her tendonitis.

Launched over 20 years ago, the Birkin bag has become a cultural symbol of elitism, privilege and celebrity. But after complaining of pains in her arms, the singer and actress has replaced her four-figure namesake with a £10 kilt accessory.

Birkin said: "I bought this second-hand [sporran purse] in Edinburgh three years ago, and a more useful little thing one couldn't own. It's the envy of Paris. I gave up on the [Birkin] bag right away. That bloody thing. I told Hermes they were mad to make it. My one was always full and it ended up giving me tendonitis. (SCOTSMAN, SCOTLAND)

Originally from Agenda Inc. Live Feed, on March 23, 2006 10:17 AM

President Bush's suggestion that he may add a new senior figure to his team raised questions about Karl Rove.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 23, 2006 10:16 AM

The popularity of the websites that allow people to share short video snippets is leading to the rise of a clip culture, writes internet law professor Michael Geist.

Originally from unmediated, on March 23, 2006 10:15 AM

Starting in April, The Morning News becomes the sixth card in The Deck, our targeted ad network for creative, web and design professionals. The Deck is all about Cost Per Influence and adding one of the best written, most consistent and entertaining sites on the web extends that influence considerably, to Brooklyn and beyond. Limited advertising opportunites are currently available April through July.

Originally from Signal vs. Noise, on March 23, 2006 8:44 AM

It's a follow-up to this, and it's funny stuff.

Side note: Kareem's playing stand-up bass, but his left hand doesn't move at all. Either he's really good or that's really fake.

Originally from True Hoop, on March 23, 2006 8:44 AM

Our favorite english gentleman was on his way to becoming a living canvas.

Originally posted by tima from tima thinking outloud., on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

Here’s an interview I just did for Gizmodo on Ireland-based, French artist, Benjamin Gaulon. Ben does some really interesting hardware hacks such as the “Recycling Entertainment System” (pictured above) which connects up 6 NES controllers to a software synth to allow for collaborative music composition and his “Printball” project, which is a nice combination of a Paintball cannon and Ink-jet printer. Anyways, read up!

Originally from coin-operated, on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

"Mom always taught us to share and now we know why, because it's fun. As of tonight, Google Reader has the ability to share what you like to read with your friends. You can send a link to your starred items in Reader, or you can put a clip on your blog with recent items from your reading list."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

Outsourcing storage with 25 lines of Python and $0.15 per GB/month.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

Updated The latest start-up and tech news here in raging Silicon Valley: Yahoo Messenger -- As mentioned earlier, new Yahoo Messenger is out, with PC-to-phone calls. With music and other cool doodads. Though TechDirt mentions this is largely a launch that was already announced in December, in case you are wondering why it sounds familiar, and we agree that the promise of cheap pricing shouldn't really be the point. One little new nugget by Yahoo is its move on the music front. Om notices a little music icon. While separately, Yahoo says it has a Gadget where you can now listen to music right from your desktop, via widgets and sidebars. Yahoo Music...

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

I love Hanne-Lovise Skarstein’s interactive documentary from the F-train in New York. Hanne-Lovise has been working on interactive documentaries here in Bergen for a few years now, but moved to Brooklyn last year. Take the F-train is a beautiful little documentary which combines video of the place with audio interviews and animations of the characters in the piece. You put the characters you want to ride with into the train, and then you can listen to their stories by mousing over them while inside. Most of their stories are about being from elsewhere and yet being at home in New York City. At least most of the ones in languages I can understand were. I was particularly happy to find Hanne-Lovise herself as one of the characters in her own story. There’s an interview with her discussing the piece too, in Norwegian.

Her piece is part of Digitale Fortellinger, a series of new, Norwegian, digital stories sponsored by Norsk kulturråd, PNEK, BEK and NRK.

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 23, 2006 8:43 AM

If you're not yet familair with the work of Travis Millard, be sure to check out his website, Fudge Factory, which recent went through an overhaul with lots of new images, including Travis' new book, an epic, "Michael Jackson in Exile"

Originally from Wooster Collective, on March 23, 2006 8:42 AM

Originally posted by sudama from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 23, 2006 8:33 AM

Originally posted by miyagawa from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 23, 2006 8:33 AM

Madhur Jaffrey on the real benefit of the new US nuclear and trade pact with India: Mangoes. (via jch)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 23, 2006 8:31 AM

Go Grrrl News: In response to South Dakota's new law banning abortion, Cecilia Fire Thunder, President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, has announced that she plans to establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Whump's reaction is right: a move from tribal casinos to tribal medicine can only benefit everyone.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 23, 2006 8:31 AM

Um."Investment bank Bear Stearns has advised investors to start dumping airline and retail stocks in favour of blue-chip utilities as a hedge against bird flu." (via rw)

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 23, 2006 8:31 AM

That's my boy!

Yes, I know that the magazine is unfortunately named but it's a truly fantastic magazine and we're just going to have to suppress our giggles and be adults about this...

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on March 23, 2006 8:31 AM

Mena: Hey, did you see the pictures of Tom Cruise at Yahoo?
Ben: Yeah, why was he there?
Mena: Oh, you didn't hear? Yahoo bought him.
Mena: ... He's still in Theta, though.

Since I haven't posted in quite a while, I figured I should open with a little joke. Sure, I could have started with a lofty introduction about writer's block and the overwhelming expectation to deliver interesting content after such a lapse, but the Yahoo/Cruise joke works too. Life has been busy at Six Apart since my last post (in December!). I've been on the road a lot, speaking about blogs and Six Apart. Additionally, I've had the opportunity to do a lot more design work than I usually do, which is a nice change.

The company continues to grow, as the press we've received indicates. This month we closed a $12 million dollar financing round from Focus Ventures, Intel Capital and August Capital, which we believe will allow us to do a lot of the stuff that we've talked about in the past -- namely creating the sort of service that the proverbial mother will actually want to use. It's probably not a surprise that we've worked really hard to stay independent and grow. We've entered another new stage of the company and it feels good.

Another exciting development is Six Apart's acquisition of SplashBlog. Mobile blogging has always been incredibly important to us -- that's one of the reasons we took our initial funding out of Japan and we've worked closely with partners such as Nokia. With SplashBlog, we got a great team and great line of products. The strength of SplashBlog was further illustrated by the great feedback from webloggers. Look for better integration of mobile applications and our products in the near future.

So what have I've been personally been up to? I had the pleasure to participate and speak at TED 2006 which was really quite the best conference I have attended. Partly because I was able to speak about something I'm so passionate about: the personal side of blogging and why it will change the way we record our lives. I had people such as Al Gore and Tony Robbins tell me that they enjoyed my talk (and of course I documented meeting them)!

Equally exciting were the non-celebrities who came up to me after my talk and told me that they never considered starting a blog before hearing my talk. Or even better, a blogger who writes about politics and who never liked reading personal blogs before. He told me he actually changed his mind because of the examples I presented and the stories that they told.

Out of all the people at TED, the person that was most memorable was Julia Sweeney. She was just so nice in person and awesome onstage as she performed an excerpt from her one-woman show. I embarrassingly told her that I wanted to be her best friend -- she made that much of an impression on me. And, she has a great blog that she's maintained for years!

Speaking aside, I mentioned I've been doing some more design work -- specifically for Comet. Comet entered Alpha testing last month and we've been doing quick iterations based on our testers' experiences. I don't want to talk too much about it until we have something substantial to show the general public, but we've been very happy with the results so far. I've been posting a lot there, so one day you'll be able to see that I really do maintain a frequently updated blog. I said I'm all about personal blogging.

I fear that this post is becoming an epic, so on that note, I will save the rest of my updates for subsequent posts.

Originally from Mena’s Corner, on March 23, 2006 8:31 AM

He said he was shocked to discover that his executives were living from paycheck to paycheck, in houses that by normal criteria (i.e. pre-bubble standards) they probably couldn't afford.

Originally posted by dirtygreek from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

Posted by JimH on #mobitopia (irc.freenode.net)

Originally posted by mobibot from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

back to their roots with X.com  

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

These Pre-Pixellated T-Shirts are pretty cool - especially if you want to avoid getting sued before you try to jump in front of a live news camera. Interesting, tho the shirt above looks like Mario on crack.

Originally from coin-operated, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

Despite the ambitious plan, G.M. still has much more to do in its effort to rebuild itself as a smaller, more competitive automaker.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

There appears to be a bit of a problem with Yahoo's text ad program: you aren't allowed to show pages with Yahoo's ads on them to people outside of the US.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 23, 2006 8:30 AM

Ted Morgan from Skyhook Wireless pointed me: Loki is a beta version of a new toolbar the integrates location in web searches and allows users to share and tag locations:

Loki is the first application to combine the physical with the digital to make the Internet a truly personal and local experience. We let you harness the World Wide Web by automatically identifying your exact physical location and then making the web revolve around you.

click, instantly find the nearest jazz band, directions to the closest Thai restaurant, the cheapest gas prices in town… or even pinpoint your exact location on a map. You can even share that location with others

Why do I blog this? It’s actually a good interface between the physical and the virtual world. I’d be interested in seeing patterns of usage of this tool (moving beyond buddy-finder issues), the advantage of the “search” feature is obvious but will there be ways to use the system in rich collaborative ways? That is around the topic of my PhD. The thing here is that you don’t need gps/cell phone ID triangulation but WiFi hotspots.

Originally posted by Nicolas from pasta and vinegar, on March 23, 2006 8:25 AM

Setting Sun, originally uploaded by The Richards.

A fantastic picture from Porthcawl, the town that I grew up in - taken earlier this evening by Will.

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on March 23, 2006 8:24 AM

Hold New York down? Well yeah, as a NY hip-hopper I've often said to myself "these Dipset guys have really been holding us down." But I didn't mean it in exactly the same way.. Are you a Dipset fan? No doubt. I like the Diplomats’ swagger, man. Juelz, Cam’ron, Jim Jones—they bring a lot of swagger back to the game....

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com, on March 23, 2006 8:24 AM

The Wall Street Journal reports on new GPS features for mobile phones - as carriers struggle to meet new Federal Communications Commission regulations stating that cellphones must be geographically traceable, in case of emergency." This one caught my eye: -- Rave Wireless offers Rave Guardian which transforms a mobile phone into a personal alarm device, making colelge campuses safer. In their own words: When students feel unsafe, they simply activate the timer on Rave Guardian. If the student is unable to turn off the alarm when time expires or do not answer the resulting call from campus safety, Rave Guardian uses the 911 location system to immediately locate the student's phone. The location is then instantly presented to campus safety along with the students' safety profile information.

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on March 23, 2006 8:23 AM

Just a quick note to say that this morning we received a few emails regarding the post we put up yesterday about the adicolor advertisements.

While everyone who emailed us seems to agree that the adidas ads are very clever, a few have pointed out that the tags on the ads seem to be planted by the company. We actually saw this as well, but to be honest, it didn't really bother us very much.

Our feeling was that if the ad was not seeded (ie pre-loaded) with tags, the chance that it would be tagged by others was less likely, and thus the campaign would not have worked as well as they had planned. A white poster would not have made a compelling "reveal" at the end of the campaign. The fact that many of the tags are little adverts in different styles, was - for us - part of the campaign. Actually, we thought it was clever (although a bit cheeky) to have one of the tags, www.overkillshop.com, link to an online store that sells the adicolor shoes.

This is, after all, an advertisement for a product, not a public service announcement.

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

Development on Rails 1.1 has been going for a while, but so far I've just been looking at it from afar and biding time until the Release Candidates started flowing. Well, that time is now. And, since I use this site as a testbed for playing with Rails stuff, it's the first site I'm taking to 1.1. This should be fun! [link]

Originally from James Duncan Davidson, on March 22, 2006 8:27 AM

September 25, 1948 Today’s entry is by a very famous author not usually associated with the New Yorker: H. L. Mencken. Mencken, of course, was known as the “Sage of Baltimore,” spent most of his career at the Baltimore Sun, founded and edited the American Mercury, and wrote The American Language. (Wikipedia? Never heard of it.)

Mencken’s connection with the New Yorker is surprisingly strong; according to the CNY archive, he wrote 50 pieces for them between 1934 and 1949. Some of them look really fascinating: he looks at the Simplified Spelling movement, demonyms (e.g., Chicagoan), Anglicizations of European surnames, names for professions. Twenty-two of his entries are listed as “fiction,” and I have no idea what is up with that, whether Mencken had any talent for the art or what. (I think in the pre-Shawn era, the “Fiction” rubric was used rather loosely, but I’m not really certain of this.)

In the late 1940s the New Yorker gave him a rubric of his own, “Postscripts to the American Language,” to which, as the author of that work, only he was qualified to contribute. In this piece, Mencken takes up the word “Podunk,” and the result is remarkably engaging. Apparently, despite ample evidence to the contrary, lexicographers and newspaper editors alike insisted that there never was any such place as Podunk. Myths die hard: even after journalists discovered it, its status as fiction persisted. “Podunk” of course is associated with rubes, and you would think that the legendary derider of the “booboisie” would lay it on pretty thick. But while he does have a little fun at their expense, he manages to cut it both ways, lampooning the city slickers with equal vigor, particularly the well-lubricated reporters assigned to locate the place.

Toward the end of the article, Mencken explains that k-words are funny, listing the following towns as examples: Kankakee, Kalamazoo, Hoboken, Hohokus, Yonkers, Squeedunk, Stinktown (the original name of Chicago), and … Brooklyn! Attention Williamsburg hipsters: the place you live is a punchline.

Today the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.) lists the derivation of “Podunk,” accurately, as “the name of two New England towns.” Reason triumphs again (and Mencken too).

Note: If you don’t have the CNY and you would like to read some Mencken material from the New Yorker, the Google cache coughed up this reminiscence about Dreiser.

Originally posted by Martin from Between the Squibs, on March 22, 2006 8:26 AM

WordPress Multiuser
From the site:
WordPress MU is multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people wanting to offer a hosted version of WordPress.

This is what I should get up and running for MobVCasting.

Originally from unmediated, on March 22, 2006 8:24 AM

So I'm kvetching to a friend in IM how there aren't really any user-friendly tools out there for feed splicing (and how both the Bloglines and Newsgator APIs should break out of the feed-by-feed mode).  How is this remix cultcha supposed to happen without things that make it easy to remix?

And then literally less than an hour later I find out about the new "share" feature in Google Reader, which will output recent items from a labeled set of feeds (or your starred items) as a styled clip for your site, or as a feed itself.  Voila, user friendly feed splicing.

Originally posted by sip from this is sippey.typepad.com, on March 22, 2006 8:23 AM

Danah Boyd has written an excellent essay on why MySpace has succeeded where Friendster failed. In one paragraph: Basically, MySpace evolved with its users, building a trusting relationship, figuring out how to meet their needs and cultural desires, providing them...

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog, on March 22, 2006 8:23 AM

Trader Joe's OPENED last Friday the 17th - but I haven't been inside yet because of 1 hour lines, shoulder to shoulder aisles - hey sorta sounds like nyc streets during rush hour huh? My friend told me that with 1/2 hour line just to GET INTO the store, they are only letting 10 people in at a time!

this weekend Kenyatta and I drove 1 hour to go the TJ in Long Island's Valley Stream. Yup folks - if you have a car, or a friend who has a car - it's time to borrow it. Looks like the TJ Line is going to crazy for a while. Here are some pics below from folks that did get inside.

Trader Joe's Opening Update: Still Waiting [Curbed]

Trader Joe's Opening Update: We're Inside [Curbed]

Trader Joe's Opening: Dry As a Bone [Curbed]

Technorati Tags: grocery, NYC, union square, trader joes

Originally from Hi Tricia!, on March 21, 2006 11:12 PM

HA!

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri.
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur,
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)

(via del.icio.us/lectrick)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on March 21, 2006 11:10 PM

Like Burning Man, Emerging Technology, Where, Maker Faire, WebZine or South by Southwest: Interactive, the Game Developer's Conference can be a good place to track the contemporary conversations in Interactive Media. Even if you're in the giant San Jose convention center, it can be hard to maximize your stimulation. Fortunately, the web provides a fairly rich virtual GDC experience:

Some GDC veterans have started a GDC 2006 Wiki for posting attendee notes and comments.

isual records, check the gdc2006 tag on Flickr

You can download and play many of the Independent Game Festival entrants

many of the entries from the cutting edge Experimental Gameplay Workshop will be listed and maybe downloadable online.

If I find any other good GDC 2006 resources online, I'll post them here. Otherwise, add your own in the comments!

Originally from just in teractive, on March 21, 2006 11:09 PM

Sun also open-sourced their "Niagara" processor which is a somewhat unprecedented move. I remain skeptical of open hardware in general.

Originally from Hack the Planet, on March 21, 2006 11:05 PM

Sun finally launched their $1/CPU-hour retail grid. The manual has all the technical details.

Originally from Hack the Planet, on March 21, 2006 11:05 PM

Sam Walker joined the major league of rotisserie leagues, Tout Wars, to see whether statistics alone can predict a player's worth.

Originally from NYT > Arts, on March 21, 2006 11:04 PM

A list of the most-linked blogs from September 2000 (scroll for the notes at the end). Metalog and Metalog Ratings comprised the first weblog tracking/ranking system, predating most of the current crop by at least a year or two.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 21, 2006 11:04 PM

I've just announced the first release candidate for Rails 1.1. After three months of work, we're almost ready to deliver. What a great feeling.

When you live on Edge Rails, it's quick to forget just how much has changed since the last public release. And this time it's much worse than usual. Roughly five hundred new features, fixes, and other changes were recorded in the Rails change logs.

Naturally, it's easy to fall in love with the big ticket items. Our new Ruby-to-Javascript compiler, polymorphic and join associations, integration testing, and you should. There's lots to love.

But what I really like about Rails 1.1 are the hundreds of tiny patches. Wrinkles ironed out by software developers from all over the world. People who found something ugly and made it beautiful. The kind of deep polish you can only get when the barrier to entry for patching Rails is as low as it is and when you have such an incredible talent pool to draw the best insights from.

I am more proud than ever of what we have been able to accomplish together.

Originally from Loud Thinking, on March 21, 2006 11:04 PM

V for Vendetta (the movie): pretty much Hollywood crap as usual. [Spoilers coming.] The first half sailed along but after Evey is taken into custody by the Finger it took too many shortcuts and liberties with Alan Moore's story and stopped being believable. These mushy movie types were hurt that Moore repudiated the film but good for him! Am re-reading the comic to get the movie out of my brain. Will post some key differences as I read, so this blog entry will change.

In the comic, nuclear explosions have destroyed Europe and Africa. Fascism emerges in England after civil society devolves into chaos. Everyone is poor. Evey is a hooker-in-training and works in a match factory.

In the movie, people have nice TVs and computers, with slick interfaces. Evey is an aspiring actress who works at a TV station.

In the movie, V professes his love for Evey. (This is like a Tom Cruise movie--a heel learns the healing power of love.)

In the book, V talks to the Statue of Justice. Says he used to love her, but now he has a new love--Anarchy! Blows up the statue.

The whole "I will return in one year to blow up the Houses of Parliament" schtick is a movie plot contrivance. In the book V destroys Parliament in the first chapter.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on March 21, 2006 11:03 PM

I did some important investigatory journalism today: burgers at the Shake Shack on opening day. Journalism has never been so delicious.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 21, 2006 6:16 PM

Somewhat related to this, parallels between my living through two years of middle school and the two terms of the Bush presidency.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 21, 2006 6:16 PM

Finally China will make use of its homegrown CPU chip (Central Processing Unit), Godsen II, to build Dragon Dreams, affordable computers at 1,000yuan ($125).

After testing Godsen I and Godsen II for severals years, the Godsen II chip is equivalent to Pentium III and will be China's first 64-bit high-performance processor. Godsen II also supports Linux (yea!) and Windows X operating systems. Tax-control and server machines made by domestic companies have already started using the Godsen II chip since last year.
People may wonder why China would create another processor when there is already is Pentium III and Intel. This goes back to patents issues and is reminiscent of the reactions in early March when China highly encouraged the use of homegrown codec AVS instead of using MPEG-4 and H.264. Therefore not only is this China's first 64-bit unit, but Godsen II is China's first wholly owned intellectual property rights for a CPU chip, therefore their Dragon Dream PCS will not be held to US patent royalties. Get it? Ahhhh yes anti-US imperialism working its ways! That is why the development of Godsen II was funded heavily by various sectors, from government agencies, universities to private companies.
Now UN's Kofi Annan at the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) can contact China to roll those $100 computers out. Others have already noted how this affordable computer can now be used by the poor. Back in May 2005 the Director of Godsen II, Li Guojie, said that this will "enable 800 million Chinese peasants to afford PCs." So let's start working on rural education and development to make this quote come true. With recent funding directions announced at the China Development Forum 2006 and by the Premier, Wen Jiaoba, at the National People's Congress, it seems like we are at least heading in the right direction. The question is if Chinese peasants can afford these new PC's, what kind of information will they have access to online? In a top-down surveillanced world, these affordable PC's could be pre-built with monitoring devices that will track peasant's usage and control what websites can be accessed. Scary! The future of political activism may look like peasants learning how to hack into these Dragon Dream PC's to get around firewalls.
UPDATE: Dragon PC is already on trial and may be produced on a small scale by June.

Technorati Tags: china, chip, computer, CPU, dragon dream, Godsen II, intellectural property, IP, patent, processor

Originally from YouMeiTI 有媒体, on March 21, 2006 6:16 PM

view here and click here
;

Originally from Happy Famous Artists , on March 21, 2006 6:15 PM

A very nice Google maps mashup which visualises the route of any email and the Google map builder automates putting a customised Google map on your website.

via coin operated

Posted to Netart

Originally from Stunned, on March 21, 2006 6:15 PM

Originally from Tuberaider Video, on March 21, 2006 6:15 PM

Liz Robbins of the New York Times took a bus tour of Katrina's wreckage with Byron Scott, Speedy Claxton, Chris Paul, Aaron Williams, and David West, among others.

The most stirring sight for Speedy Claxton, the Hornets' veteran point guard, was the one word he saw spray-painted on the front of a desolate bungalow. "It said 'Help,' " Claxton said, shaking his head.

One day before the Hornets were to play their third and final game in New Orleans — having relocated for this season and next to Oklahoma City — four players, Coach Byron Scott and his wife, Anita, and a handful of Hornets employees took a tour of the New Orleans areas that were hit hardest by the floods from Hurricane Katrina.

They saw the dichotomy of their lives and the destroyed ones of their city's fans — scenes that made them question, uncomfortably, how basketball would ever have a place here. Suddenly, their eight-game losing streak did not seem as disconcerting.

"We're fortunate enough to be in a situation where we make good money, and there are some parts of the city where people are living in trailers, tents, parking lots of Wal-Mart," forward David West said. "You don't feel at ease with that situation.

"What we do in terms of our profession isn't that big of a deal when you got major life issues people are dealing with — it's quite a reality check."

Forward Aaron Williams took pictures with his phone to send to his wife as the bus returned to the team's luxury hotel in the French Quarter.

Obviously, I'm a big believer in the healing power of sports. But I wonder if something smaller scale, cheaper and more accessible to the public (high school and college sports, perhaps? Pickup ball? Streetball?) might be more in order for a city dealing with this kind of devestation. Something about bringing all that bling, security guards, and portable gaming systems tweaked to work in luxury hotels--right now that seems like a mismatch. Maybe it will all be a little better by this coming fall. I hope so.

 

Originally from True Hoop, on March 21, 2006 10:40 AM

American Idol fans can submit :10 second commercials on why they love AmericanIdol.com and the top five spots will air on Fox in May. "This is a great chance for our fans to grab a little fame for themselves and help promote Americanidol.com," said Jeff King, VP Fox Interactive Media. Press release follows below...PRESS RELEASE -- Los Angeles, Calif. - March 20, 2006 - Americanidol.com, the official online community for American Idol fans, today unveiled "Video Chance for Fame," a user-generated video competition that invites fans to create and submit a ten second commercial on why they love Americanidol.com the website. The top five commercials, as voted on by the Americanidol.com online community, will air in May during an American Idol telecast, with the winning commercial airing during the highly anticipated finale on May 24 on FOX.

"Americanidol.com is the online home for the millions of American Idol fans, and in true American Idol spirit, we wanted to give them an opportunity to have their voices heard," said Jeff King, VP Fox Interactive Media. "This is a great chance for our fans to grab a little fame for themselves and help promote Americanidol.com."

Americanidol.com offers fans exclusive online content including hundreds of original videos, thousands of behind-the-scenes photos, downloads, original music, style columns, dynamic games, contests, blogs, and personal photo galleries.

According to ComScore Media Metrix, Americanidol.com is the internet's most highly trafficked single television-driven show website with an estimated 6.4 million unique visitors for the month of February. This number is forecasted to rise to over 10 million unique visitors for March.

Video Chance for Fame Rules

Video length must be ten seconds in length, no more, no less, and focus on Americanidol.com the website. Videos touting the website cannot show favoritism for one contestant more than any other. Use of copyrighted music is prohibited. Only videos on MiniDV, DVD or BetaSP will be accepted. Deadline for submission is May 15. Send to: American Idol Video Submissions c/o Fox Interactive Media, PO Box 5533, Beverly Hills, CA 90209.

Originally from unmediated, on March 21, 2006 10:40 AM

Type a stock symbol into a Google search box and a new option appears for more information: Google Finance.

Set to compete with Yahoo! Finance, MarketWatch and TheStreet, Google Finance includes dynamic, draggable and zoomable stock charts with pinpoints to news stories that broke about the company at certain points in time. A stock's Google Finance page also includes company information, blog posts and Google Group discussion items. Take a gander at the GOOG page to see Google Finance in all its glory.

Google Finance
Google to launch its own financial site [CNET]

Comment on this post
Related: StockDigg

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 21, 2006 10:39 AM

This is adapted from my talk of the same name at ETech 2006. The talk’s sections were entitled Why?, How?, What?, and Lessons?; I’ve left out What?, the description of what Atom is, since we’ve had plenty of that around here. That leaves Why we built it, How we built it, and what Lessons you might want take away from the experience...

Originally from ongoing, on March 21, 2006 8:37 AM

Later this week Sun unveil the Sun Grid Compute Utility. If you have the cash, and a web browser, you can have serious processing power at your fingertips.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 21, 2006 8:37 AM

GirlHacker investigates the worldwide banana shortage....

Originally from A Full Belly, on March 21, 2006 8:37 AM

Recently, American banks and wireless companies began developing mobile payment products that would allow consumers to pay for goods via cellphone.

Originally from NYT > Home Page, on March 21, 2006 8:36 AM

Las Vegas is testing out some high-tech gadgets, including fully-automated gaming tables with no chips, cards, or dealer. Doesn't sound like much fun...

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 21, 2006 8:36 AM

(Google vs. Yahoo) We broke the news last August that Google Finance was coming. Well here it is: http://finance.google.com Here are excerpts from our story tomorrow. The site provides stock charts, news and chat rooms. It makes several improvements on the most popular finance site on the Web, Yahoo Finance. "It is definitely an improvement,'' said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research. However, the improvements over Yahoo aren't radical enough to confuse people who are already familiar with the way Yahoo Finance works, she said. ""It's not a mind-blowing improvement,'' she said, ""which is actually an advantage. You already know how to use it." Indeed, the trick for Google is being just good enough to force users people to try it out. While Google has begun to pull away from Yahoo as the dominant force in Web search, Google Finance is the latest product to compete with Yahoo's personalized offerings. For example, Yahoo has long provided a way for people to customize Yahoo Finance, so they can organize stock listings in a private portfolio and subscribe to financial news alerts. Millions of people already are comfortable using Yahoo Finance and other services such as Reuters, and many of them are unlikely to move no matter how stellar Google makes its service, analysts say. But the battle in finance is similar to others the two companies have waged in the past. They both offer an e-mail platform, an instant messaging service and personalized local news. Yahoo has been pushing a social networking strategy, providing people ways to share photos with Flickr, or to ""tag'' favorite pages with Delicious, for example. Google Finance appears to mimmick Yahoo's social networking strategy even closer … by providing a way for people to communicate with each other in chat forums about individual stocks. Google...

Originally posted by Matt Marshall from SiliconBeat, on March 21, 2006 1:16 AM

With SARS a threat of the past, The Rolling Stones will play their first concert in Shanghai, China on April 8th. After 40 decades of trying to get Chinese censors to allow them to play, they were finally granted a concert 3 years ago, but it was thwarted twice when SARS kicked into full swing. Ticket prices of the Rolling Stone's 2006 April Shanghai concert range from 300 yuan ($37.50) to 3,000 yuan ($375). 3,000yuan is a on the high end of a monthly middle income salary in Beijing.

The band is not supposed to perform the following songs (links to lyrics): Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Women, Beast of Burden, and Let's Spend the Night Together. I am trying to figure out why these particular songs are problematic, considering there are plenty of other Rolling Stones songs that could be labeled as inflammatory. Here are my guesses for the "raciest" words that rendered each song banned for their concert performance.

• Brown Sugar: I bet your mama was a tent show queen, Had all the boyfriends at sweet sixteen
• Honky Tonk Women: I played a divorcee in New York City,
• Beast of Burden: Ooh! Ooh! Please
• Let's Spend the Night Together: Let's spend the night together

Technorati Tags: band, china, concert, rolling stones, shanghai, youth

Originally from YouMeiTI 有媒体, on March 21, 2006 1:16 AM

Reading 2.0 slipped under my radar, but I guess that was the idea: to let people from O’Reilly, Los Alamos National Labs, OCLC, The Internet Archive, Adobe, Yahoo, Harvard and Elsevier hobnob away from prying eyes. I haven’t seen any audio/video for the event but Tim O’Reilly has a nice fly on the wall summary of what went on.

It’s refreshing to see library technologies/concepts such as OpenURL, OCOinS, OAI-PMH, FRBR, METS and Dublin Core starting to be talked about in the context of a larger information environment. For example I had no idea that Yahoo is harvesting data from the Internet Archive using the OAI-PMH protocol. And I didn’t know Yahoo is starting to leverage microformats, but should’ve guessed considering the recent news about Flickr starting to use hCard.

All in all these are exciting “lowercase semantic web” times we’re living in. And it’s interesting to watch some of the things people you know have worked on starting to catch on. Hopefully Reading 2.0 was just the start of this ongoing collaboration. Case in point, I just heard Robert Sanderson say in #code4lib that he’s visiting the a9 folks to talk about opensearch and sru. This is just the sort of cross-fertilization we need going on in library land.

Originally posted by ed from inkdroid, on March 20, 2006 9:43 PM

Were you wondering why the 2.0.2 announcement suddenly reappeared on your dashboard? This is why.

‘Lack of communication’, apparently. It’s amazing how some people can code PHP yet struggle with email.

Originally posted by wank from wordpress wank, on March 20, 2006 9:42 PM

an alternative reincarnation of the original treemap concept, which itself is a widely used compact visualization of directory tree structure in a space-filling way. here, rectangles are replaced by circles. it has the advantage that zooming in on directories is efficient because the layout does not need to be recalculated, & that the aspect ratio of nodes stays constant, although the circular areas do not tend to fill the available space as effectively. see also voronoi treemap & color project.
[lip.sourceforge.net]

Originally posted by infosthetics from information aesthetics, on March 20, 2006 9:41 PM

Why is bread in Paris better than that in the US? Good discussion in the comments.

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 20, 2006 9:41 PM

Brian Coleman, author of Rakim Told Me, tells The Story of X-Clan's classic first album. Rest In Power, Professor X. Davey D and Wendy Day's tributes are here.

One side note: In recent months, Brother J has reformed X-Clan and been on the road with Damian Marley. Brother J is now based in Los Angeles, as is the group. Although Brother J and Professor X stayed in touch over the years, Professor X was not part of the new group.

UPDATE: Here's the official X-Clan statement on Professor X's passing...

On March 17, 2006 hip-hop culture lost a pioneer and a front line general. Lumumba Carson, aka Professor X of the X-Clan/ founder of the Blackwatch Movement, passed away from spinal meningitis in Brooklyn, NY. For those not in the know, X-Clan’s mission was always to spread and influence pride in Black culture by fusing the freedom fighter mentality of the Black Nationalist Movement with the power of hip-hop. And while X-Clan – consisting of rapper Brother J, DJ Sugar Shaft and producers/elders Professor X and Grand Architect Paradise – released only two albums, both To The East, Blackwards (1990) and Xodus (1992) are considered hip-hop classics.

With the passing of Professor X, Grand Verbalizer Funkinlesson "Brother J" and X-Clan, consisting of Ultraman Ra Hanna, ACL, DJ FatJack, Kumu M. Haynes, Master China and Grand Arkutect Paradise, will carry forward the message into the next generation of X-Clan.

“With regret, Professor X’s appearance was not previously recorded to include his energy on the project, but the blueprint to resurrect the efforts of the Blackwatch Movement of this millennium will be carried out,” emphasized Brother J. “We of the X- Clan sincerely hope that the efforts of Professor X will not be overlooked as the history of the original X-Clan has been.”

Professor X’s history in hip-hop reaches back further than the X-Clan messenger group. PX has been responsible for show promotion and management for many groups in Hip Hop’s golden era, including Whodini. His Blackwatch Movement was and is a powerful influence to many of the musicians, poets and producers that use hip-hop and the freedom of speech wisely. The signature phrase of Professor X is truly legendary in hip-hop history; “Vanglorious! this is protected by the Red, the Black and the Green with a key sissiieeeeeeeee!”

Our prayers go out to Lumumba’s family; he has done much work for the upliftment of oppressed people worldwide. We salute the life of our Brother Eternally.

Originally from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on March 20, 2006 9:41 PM

Hello, Typepad: What is the best way to create a secure password?

Izzle Pfaff!: Nurture it, and while being firm, treat it with respect. Most insecure passwords are the result of neglect or maltreatment. Healthy, robust passwords have a strong, loving carer behind them: be that carer, and your password will never betray you.

Originally from hello, typepad, on March 20, 2006 9:31 PM

Before I leave, I want to go against the grain just this once and dump a few subversive tips for doing the exact opposite of lifehacking -- something I call lifeslacking. In other words, you read this site for months and months and you pick up a ton of tips and shortcuts but every so often you need a break. Every diet allows for a "go nuts!" day, and lifeslacking is it. So far I've come up with a few lifeslacks:

1. The Two Hour Lunch - Perhaps you have annoying coworkers, a distracting office environment, or the boss from hell. Sometimes, you need a little me time and the 2 hour lunch lifeslack is the way to do it. This only works if you have an office culture that allows everyone to take lunch whenever they please, but also that most people eat from noon to 1 PM. It's dead simple: you stay at your desk and work from noon-1pm, when most people in your office are out to lunch. It's likely that few people are around and you can probably do whatever you want. Read blogs, play on flickr, or just read a book -- spend the time not doing work. At 1pm, when your annoying coworkers start to straggle in, take off to lunch from 1-2pm. Come back at 2, and now you only have a few hours before you can take off for the weekend. You essentially got away from your coworkers from noon until 2pm, and 5pm is closer than ever.

A few more, after the jump...

2. Flickr Slacks -- There's an entire book devoted to Flickr Hacks, but I've found when I'm bored with work, Flickr's "recent photos from your contacts" is just the thing to pass the time. Follow Thomas Hawk's advice here and try to get about 250 users in your contacts list. With that many contacts, you can pretty much refresh the recent photos page every couple minutes to constantly see a stream of new stuff. You'd be surprised how much time can be wasted constantly checking this.

3. Del.icio.us Slacks -- Pretty much the same thing as the Flickr Slack, just add about 100 people to your contacts and reload your inbox page (http://del.icio.us/inbox/your-username) every few hours to pass the time.

4. Youtube and Google Video, the new idiot box -- If you have a job where you can get away with headphones and watching video without anyone catching you, cruising through the various "most popular" pages at YouTube and Google Video can pass an amazing amount of time. Don't forget to blog and email all your friends your favorites, which also adds some time.

5. RSS (really simple screwing around) -- You've no doubt heard of RSS right? Subscribe to 500 feeds, then sit at your desk and read them all. For many new media jobs, this might count as work and almost everyone can get away with it.

I'm too lazy to think of any more to write up, but if you have any good ideas how to take a break from lifehacking and pass the time goofing off, be sure to leave your ideas in the comments. (of course, it's worth mentioning that doing any combination of the above could get you fired so only reserve it for times when you need a real break) — Matt Haughey

 
Comment on this post
Related: Google Video RSS feeds

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 20, 2006 4:31 PM

"In aviation, the Big Sky Theory is that two randomly flying bodies will likely never collide, as the three dimensional space is so large relative to the bodies." (via rir)

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 20, 2006 1:03 PM

"Openomy is an online file system. You can store files on Openomy and access them from any computer. Openomy organizes files and users via tags (as opposed to folders). You can choose to keep your files guarded by Openomy, or allow certain outside applications (of your choice) to do new and interesting things with your data."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 20, 2006 1:03 PM

"No software architecture can truly withstand implementation. REST is really great, but on the web, there is plenty of detail work to be cleared out, like push, containership, encoding, side-effected GETs, curse-of-popularity, queuing, 2 versus 4 methods, universal format junk, and authentication, among others. I could go on, it's messy out there."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 20, 2006 1:03 PM

interesting to hear Takahashi was coerced into making the Katamari sequel [via] 

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 20, 2006 1:02 PM

Originally from Lifeblog, on March 20, 2006 1:01 PM

What the Web was Made For: Home Hygiene/Home Routines.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on March 20, 2006 1:00 PM

Originally from Lifeblog, on March 20, 2006 1:00 PM

We have a room with a door where we squeeze a few engineers that get to work on feed-related stuff for Google. Like anyone living in close quarters we're prone to passing viruses, colds, and a few days ago this Ryan vs. Dorkman video we saw linked from Zawodny's blog. The keyboard clatter stopped and several Emacs and Vi instances awaited their next command, idling without input.

Jerrrremmmy? Where's the sportsmanship? Esprit de corps? When the 9th Marquess of Queensberry returned noisily from a Tennyson play to give us his conflict commandments didn't he declare no funny stuff?

All I'm saying is - I see Yahoo!'s secret plan now. "We'll keep posting mind-blowing, well-choreographed amateur lightsaber duels until they're too distracted to code." I can sadly confirm that this is pretty much an excellent plan.

Originally from massless, on March 20, 2006 12:57 PM

Threadless is having a $10 sale which means it's a good time to order your Piece of Meat, by Ross Zietz....

Originally from A Full Belly, on March 20, 2006 12:56 PM

seantubridy posted a photo:

Let the library come to you! Taken up in Northern Minnesota (or maybe it was North Dakota - don't remember). Cross processed kodak ektachrome.

Originally from bookmobile - Everyone's Tagged Photos, on March 20, 2006 12:56 PM

Previoulsy-blogged Saxton Moore recently held a competition inviting participants to draw their own versions of the Fat Albert characters. He has posted all the entrants’ creations and they’re all great!

Originally posted by Johnny from Drawn! The Illustration Blog, on March 20, 2006 12:56 PM

I've been toying with some concepts about tags, shared tags and the ability to uses tags as an engine for various things...trying to find any sort of emergent behaviour that may mesh well with my various interests. While it's easy through del.icio.us to see the crowd, I'm wondering how I can dig up the wisdom (see also, Clive's Slate article and his recent pong post).


So I tossed together an experiment in processing, using some of the parsing code I had from Shrunq, and a java library called Classifier4J. It grabs each and every URL available from my del.icio.us feed, and parses and classifies each. The result is a 3D representation of my tags, where their Z-location is based upon the "ranking" of the tag -- much like a tag cloud -- with the actual terms used for classification pulsing behind. Once it's loaded you can click to have it grab pages to test, to see how well random webpages match up to the classification that we've created.


I've already written about this, so I'll do an incredibly silly thing, and quote myself:

I've started to amass a bunch of links in my del.icio.us account. It's not just a bunch of random junk, but it's stuff that I made a point of noting that I had to remember -- at least enough to go to del.icio.us to post it. Tag clouds are cool, and it's a nice way to quickly see the tags, and thus, topics that are most interesting to me.

now more about each tag, to know more about what's under each: What makes that topic more important to me than that topic? How are my tags interrelated? Are there things that connect seemingly disperate topics -- such as "buddhism" and "J2ME" and "wifi"? That is, other than me?

There. I make a lousy quote. See the applet in action, read more, or watch the thrilling video. There are certainly some next steps to this -- just not sure exactly what.

If you'd like to check out a cloud brain based on your tags, let me know, I can build it from my laptop. I've thought about building it out so that people can request it online, and my server will automatically queue and create the necessary data files -- but I'll only write that if enough people are interested...

Originally from gravity monkey, on March 20, 2006 12:56 PM

Originally from Modern Art Notes, on March 20, 2006 12:56 PM

Later this week Sun unveil the Sun Grid Compute Utility. If you have the cash, and a web browser, you can have serious processing power at your fingertips.

Originally from Protein Feed, on March 20, 2006 12:55 PM

TheCodingMonkeys—the mad geniuses behind SubEthaEdit—now have a company weblog. And a feed.

Originally from ranchero.com, on March 20, 2006 12:55 PM

Popular social bookmarking site Del.icio.us has added a private saving for those times that you just don't feel that social about your bookmarks.

Because many of you have asked for it, we have just rolled-out a beta of our private saving feature. To try it out, go to “settings” and click on “private saving” to activate; you’ll then see the new option whenever you save a page.

As the Del.icio.us people are quick to point out, for a site whose primary function is to share, this is a function that users will hopefully use sparingly. But this is good news for anyone who's wanted to bookmark a web page but didn't feel quite right about making their interest public.

Private saving ryan [Del.icio.us blog]

 
Comment on this post
Related: Life Slacking: Take a break from all this efficiency
Related: Get (more) URL info at del.icio.us

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 20, 2006 12:50 PM

Spirit's front-right wheel grinds to a halt, just as it is needed to reach a north-facing slope to maximise the sunlight falling on the vehicle's solar arrays

Originally from New Scientist - Latest Headlines, on March 20, 2006 12:11 PM

I really need to figure out how to do diffs, since the patch I did yesterday against inconsistent application of ids in edit-form-advanced.php was on my RC1 install and stuff may have changed since then.

The bug is this: some of the widgets on the post page have ids, some don’t. There doesn’t appear to be any particular rationale behind which ones do and which ones don’t, it’s just random sloppiness that only people as anal as myself are ever going to notice. The reason it matters to me is that I WANT MY BASIC POST PAGE BACK DAMNIT. No passwords. No authors. No comments, even. (I gave up fighting the spam wars months ago.)

If they have IDs, I can hide them with CSS. If they don’t, I can’t. It’s that simple.

Originally posted by wank from wordpress wank, on March 20, 2006 12:10 PM

Slate takes a look at, "[t]he dark secrets of the organic-food movement" with Is Whole Foods Wholesome? As a regular Whole Foods shopper, I am often irritated by what's available in their produce section (apples from the west coast, or even farther) vs. what's available a few hundred yards away at the Union Square greenmarket (apples from update New York). Ideally I'd like to eat local and organic, but often I'll take local over organic, if I can get it. The article sums up why quite nicely:

Let's say you live in New York City and want to buy a pound of tomatoes in season. Say you can choose between conventionally grown New Jersey tomatoes or organic ones grown in Chile. Of course, the New Jersey tomatoes will be cheaper. They will also almost certainly be fresher, having traveled a fraction of the distance. But which is the more eco-conscious choice? In terms of energy savings, there's no contest: Just think of the fossil fuels expended getting those organic tomatoes from Chile.

Now that spring is nearly here, I'll be shopping at the greenmarket more often. I'm looking forward to a summer full of local and organic veggies. And a summer of meeting the people who grow my food.

Originally from megnut, on March 20, 2006 12:10 PM

Marathoner Brandon Seils puts together a great guide to becoming an avid runner.

I've always thought runners the ultimate masochists, because any time I try to get into running I wind up face down on the carpet clutching my legs wondering why anyone would ever subject themselves to that much pain voluntarily. But Brandon says to become a runner, you have to break through a wall:

For most runners, there’s a wall at the three mile mark. This goes for the most beginner runners up to and probably including the long-time marathoners. The first three miles of any run are the most difficult and painful to get through. After this point, however, it’s easy to “just keep going.” Back when I was training for the Boston Marathon, and would go out for 2+ hours on a 20 mile run, the hardest miles were the first three. It’s also these first three miles that make it difficult for running to become habit. You really have to struggle past this, in order to develop a tolerance for the sport.

The health benefits of the sport and tall tales of endorphin-induced "Runner's High" keep me trying to get past that three mile mark using Coolrunning's Couch to 5K program. Any new or seasoned runners out there have more advice for newbie runners? Do share.

Learning how to run [Diatribe]

 
Comment on this post

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 20, 2006 12:10 PM

ETech has been over for a week, and one presentation is still nagging at me on a regular basis. Amazon has a Web Service called Mechanical Turk (named after this Mechanical Turk), and Felipe Cabrera from Amazon spent 15 minutes or so talking about MTurk during one of the ETech morning talks.

The talk focused on the idea that artificial intelligence hasn't materialized, and there are still some tasks that are easy for humans but impossible for computers. For example, a human can look at a picture of a chair and answer the question: Is this a picture of a chair or a table? A computer would have a tough time with that.

MTurk farms out these sorts of questions to real live humans and wraps their decisions (or HITs in MTurk parlance) into a Web Services API so they can be used in computer programs. Cabrera called this process of tapping humans to make decisions for machines Intelligence Augmentation (IA) as apposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The talk was good, and MTurk is definitely a clever hack, but the idea has been bothering me.

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet MTurk will eventually gather data about how many HITs someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I'd be foolish not to.

I guess this idea of people being managed and controlled by machines is nothing new, and it was the bread and butter of science fiction books I read as a kid. But MTurk puts this dystopia in a new, immediate context. Machines are smarter than ever, and control of human decision-making could be highly organized.

MTurk is only a few months old, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But I can't stop projecting the ideas behind the system ahead a few years, and that's what's bothering me. I can't even fully articulate why it's bothering me. I don't have any conclusions, or even concrete hypotheticals of MTurk gone awry—so I'm just using my blog as therapy. Obviously my computer didn't ask me to write this.

Originally from onfocus.com, on March 19, 2006 10:45 PM

i forgot, until we cleaned for houseguests, about the little bag of scraps my mother-in-law slipped me from the carolina attic. she has no recollection of her mother's blue creation.

there's a bean-shaped white footstool outside an antiques store. it's been outside for a month. it's full of what's outside. restuffing it for inside, with what would i stuff it. cotton, lavender, jelly, shamrock seeds. old letters. then cover it in blue velvet. a footstool is a place to rest your feet.

see my cable access television show on channel 21, for more incoherence.

Originally from serenalarogers, on March 19, 2006 10:44 PM

If you've lived in the same city for a while and feel like you've done everything, or even if you're new in town and want to see all the sights your new home offers, you can always count on Flickr. This tip is simple: find the global public tag page for your city name (like Portland, or NYC, or Des Moines), and subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of the page.

Now every time you open your reader, you'll be greeted with some photos of your town. Sometimes you'll get a ton of boring vacation photos from a stranger, but often (especially in small towns) you'll find some surprises, like a bird watching park you didn't know was on the outskirts of town or a behind-the-scenes tour of a local attraction you've enjoyed for years. My tiny town gets hits only once a week or so, but it is always a delight when someone passes through, takes some photos of their adventures, and uploads them to flickr to share. — Matt Haughey

Flickr tags page

 
Comment on this post
Related: Life Slacking: Take a break from all this efficiency

Originally from Lifehacker, on March 19, 2006 10:44 PM

brian_d_foy writes "Several O’Reilly Perl authors will be at Powell's Technical Books (the one at 33 NW Park Avenue) in Portland, Oregon this Saturday for a book signing and Q & A session. Come meet: Allison Randall (Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials) Randal Schwartz (Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, Perls of Wisdom, Effective Perl Programming), Tom Phoenix (Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl) brian d foy (Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl) chromatic (Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, Extreme Programming Pocket Guide) Curtis Poe (Perl Hacks, out May 1). If you don't have these books already, you can buy them at Powell's! There may be other ad hoc goings on afterwards, too."

Originally posted by brian_d_foy from use Perl, on March 19, 2006 10:44 PM

One look at David’s new PEBL and I had to have one.

I’ve been a smartphone fan ever since the Treo 270. I’d follow the development of the new Treo months before it was released. Then I’d pay full retail just to have one the day it came out. Then when I tired of the Treo I switched to Nokia’s high end smartphones including the 6682 and most recently the N70. And I’ve eagerly been awaiting the new N80. I really do love Nokia’s latest industrial design work and I think the Series 60 is a nice platform.

The thing is, I’d be sick of the latest smartphone in a couple of weeks (and I’m not the only one). The day I’d get it I’d load a whole bunch of software on it. Show friends how I could IM on it or pull up a mini terminal window and make some changes on our server over the phone. But after a few weeks I just found myself using it as a phone. And smartphones are usually too bulky and clumsy for that.

I convinced myself I needed a smartphone when I really didn’t. What I really needed was Less Phone. A phone that made calls, picked up a strong signal, supported simple text messaging, and offered a dead simple calendar.

I’ve been longing for a simple design. A smooth design. Something small and comfortable and light. Something that worked really well as a phone. Something with buttons that were big enough to press. A phone first and a gadget a distant second.

And I found it in the PEBL.

It’s rounded, opens with one hand, has a beautiful and functional mini monochrome LCD on the front, and is sheathed in a tactile rubber that makes it satisfying to hold and easy to grip. I’m glad Motorola realized that phones don’t need to be made of hard slippery plastic.

Yeah, the Moto UI is a little clunky, but I’ve yet to meet a phone that has a nice UI (Nokia’s Series 60 is probably the best I’ve seen). Although we’re not doing any more web design work for clients, we’d take on a phone UI job in a second. Someone has to simplify these UIs. And fast. They are a mess. All of them. The phones are getting better on the outside but worse on the inside. If anyone is listening: 37signals would love to design a phone UI from scratch.

But in the end, the overall functional simplicity and beautiful industrial design of the PEBL won me over. I’m sold. Highly recommended.

Originally from Signal vs. Noise, on March 19, 2006 10:44 PM

Photos of crazily overloaded vehicles. (via bb)

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 19, 2006 10:43 PM

Originally from Stupidfool.org, on March 19, 2006 10:43 PM

Open source software and Web 2.O are changing computer and software economics. Tight, centralized control of intellectual property is under attack. Free, self-service access to code, content, and communities helps build new platforms, products, and services. Is rapid, free and open the future? Tim O'Reilly, Mitchell Baker, and Jonathan Schwartz discuss how open source innovation is changing the world.

Originally from ITC: All Programs, on March 19, 2006 10:43 PM

Originally from hustler of culture, on March 19, 2006 10:42 PM

Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski has declared that all state agencies will be powered entirely by renewable energy by 2010:

"Kulongoski had previously set the mark at 100 percent by 2025, before deciding to ramp up the schedule as a way to create jobs and set an example in responsible energy consumption.

to shorten our timetable by 15 years. I want to do it by 2010, and I think we can do this if we set the bar and say we are going to move toward this target,' he said in prepared remarks to the Oregon Sustainability Board on Friday."

(good grab, Dave!)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 01:32 PM)

Originally posted by Alex Steffen from WorldChanging: Another World Is Here, on March 19, 2006 10:41 PM

If you care about the future we're building, you ought to own a copy of Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises

Now, I'm biased. Co-author Cameron Sinclair is not only a WorldChanging contributor, he's also a close friend. Cameron's been a buddy, an ally, and sometimes a teacher.

But if I'd never met Cameron, Design Like You Give a Damn would convince me that I ought to know him. This book should sit on the desk of every designer, architect and engineer who believes that changing the world is part of her job.

Much of the book centers (as one might expect) on housing and shelter, but other fields (sanitation, planning, etc.) are covered as well, with overviews of illustrative design innovations in each field.

Many of the ideas here will be familiar to WC readers. Barefoot solar engineers, land mine detecting flowers, Hexayurt, Roundabout's PlayPump, the Mine Wolf, Watercone, Anti-Malarial Bednets. But there's plenty of material I'd never before encountered here, and, as an overall resource, it's indespensible.

Indeed, I am more and more convinced that 2006 is going to be the year when worldchanging approaches break big. More and more smart, dedicated people (in a number of fields) are turning their passion, skill and experience to bear on solving our biggest problems. Nothing could be more exciting, or more needed, but one of the challenges we all face now is keeping up with the best work being done in each field. That makes resources like this one all the more critical. Design Like You Give a Damn is worldchanging.

(Posted by Alex Steffen in A Newly Electric Green – Sustainable Energy, Resources and Design at 01:52 PM)

Originally posted by Alex Steffen from WorldChanging: Another World Is Here, on March 19, 2006 10:40 PM

OS X specific customization/functions/templates for zsh

Originally posted by finn from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:40 PM

dude plays the super mario theme on two guitars at the same time

Originally posted by mokin from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:39 PM

Former CC Executive Director Neeru Paharia (now working on a PhD at Harvard Business School) writes in:

I'm entering this business plan contest that is focused on poverty alleviation: http://www.bidnetwork.org. They are dragging me through a CC license choice for my business plan! I admit, I never would have thought of it unless they made me go through this. I guess things have come full circle now...

Bid Network business plan licensing screenshot.

Check out Neeru's business plan for Save Artists' Global Environment!

Originally posted by Mike Linksvayer from Creative Commons Blog, on March 19, 2006 1:48 PM

I don't know if it's telling tales out of school, but Stewart recently canvassed the team for our favourite colours. In a rather surprising turn of events (or at least, surprising to me), green was the winner.

Given that we've just passed green's favourite holiday, St. Patrick's Day, you might want to consider sharing your greenest photos with Green is Beautiful.

Photos from 天曉得, ruurmo, papillon. and Bruno Girin, found in the Green is Beautiful Group Pool.

Originally from FlickrBlog, on March 19, 2006 1:48 PM

I spent the afternoon at the Steamwheedle Faire, a big role-playing event on our World of Warcraft server that I’d really been looking forward too. I’d got a dress for my troll warrior, to make her look festive rather than warlike, since the Faire was a cross-faction event, and in our guild we’d discussed how we’d role-play the event. But when I actually got there, I was overwhelmed, and found myself less participatory than I’d imagined and more interested in how such an event shows what doesn’t work in World of Warcraft.

I think the main problem is that the interface is not at all optimised for role-playing. The visual and gestural interface works well for fighting and exploring, but is very limited for interpersonal communication other than attacking each other. With huge numbers of people present - there must have been more than a hundred - the visuals become close to useless, and you rely almost solely on the text chat for figuring out what’s going on.

World of Warcraft uses basic commands similarly to MUDs and MOOs, so I can type “/say I’m so excited” and other players near me will see the text “Zarastra says “I’m so excited” in chat window and a talk bubble over my head with the words I just said. (That’s a made up character name, I don’t think I want my troll too easily connected to her player.) In a text-only world this works quite well. Either you’re in the room or you’re not, and so /say can work even if there are a lot of people present. In a graphical world, though, proximity matters. I want to stand next to my friends, and I want to remark on how people look or on what they’re doing. At the Faire, everyone lined up for drinks and raffle tickets. I saw a friend from the guild, and so I tried to talk to him - but since the chat window was rolling past so fast with all the conversation, he didn’t notice, or if he did, he didn’t connect my “hi” in text chat with my being right next to him. He couldn’t see the talk bubble over my head because I was just behind him in the line. Roleplaying is supposed to happen in /say and in emotes like /wave or /me taps Nalia on the shoulder, but those things weren’t working because there were too many of us. Add in the lag I was getting as my computer struggled to render a hundred odd humans and dwarves and trolls and it was quite a frustrating experience.

What also worked well were events that play to the visual. The Mithril Guard had a parade, which looked great - a bunch of dwarves wearing blue all in very strict formation. We couldn’t understand them though, and when they seemed to stop very abruptly, just dispersing without taking a bow (you can bow in WoW) we wondered whether we’d offended them somehow, or what had happened. The lining up was sort of confusing but looked good from a distance. There’s also a certain pleasure in the fireworks and dancing.

What I enjoyed most, though, was crossing the high level zones in a huge long procession escorted by high level guild masters. I think this worked so well because this is one of the things the interface is designed for: exploring and moving around a varied landscape. We were running along so there was no real need for much conversation. And we were doing something together, with excitement. Looking forward to the event was great fun too. It was a good excuse for talking with other players (”Are you going to the Faire next Sunday?”), and having decided I needed a dress to wear to the Faire gave me nice little self-motivated “quest”.

I love that people organise events like this - Stomina Teacup, the guildmistress of Kaboom! Inc, a gnome guild, is the main mastermind, and along with The Mithril Guard, Kaboom is clearly the most active roleplaying guild on the server. At any rate, they organise most events. Hopefully, in time, we’ll have graphical interfaces where communication and role-playing are as well-supported as fighting and exploring.

[Edit: Esther also posted about the Faire, with some really thoughtful points on roleplaying in WoW.]

Originally posted by Jill from jill/txt, on March 19, 2006 1:48 PM

"We are all aware of the diversity of culture in New York and the common ground that sports presents to so many groups," said the Knicks vp of marketing. (I expect to see red black and green next February and a special Chinese New Year's edition in 2007.)

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 1:48 PM

ETech has been over for a week, and one presentation is still nagging at me on a regular basis. Amazon has a Web Service called Mechanical Turk (named after this Mechanical Turk), and Felipe Cabrera from Amazon spent 15 minutes or so talking about MTurk during one of the ETech morning talks.

The talk focused on the idea that artificial intelligence hasn't materialized, and there are still some tasks that are easy for humans but impossible for computers. For example, a human can look at a picture of a chair and answer the question: Is this a picture of a chair or a table? A computer would have a tough time with that.

MTurk farms out these sorts of questions to real live humans and wraps their decisions (or HITs in MTurk parlance) into a Web Services API so they can be used in computer programs. Cabrera called this process of tapping humans to make decisions for machines Intelligence Augmentation (IA) as apposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The talk was good, and MTurk is definitely a clever hack, but the idea has been bothering me.

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet MTurk will eventually gather data about how many HITs someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I'd be foolish not to.

I guess this idea of people being managed and controlled by machines is nothing new, and it was the bread and butter of science fiction books I read as a kid. But MTurk puts this dystopia in a new, immediate context. Machines are smarter than ever, and control of human decision-making could be highly organized.

MTurk is only a few months old, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. But I can't stop projecting the ideas behind the system ahead a few years, and that's what's bothering me. I can't even fully articulate why it's bothering me. I don't have any conclusions, or even concrete hypotheticals of MTurk gone awry—so I'm just using my blog as therapy. My computer didn't ask me to write this.

Originally from onfocus.com, on March 19, 2006 1:47 PM

Physicists from Austria and in the U.S. have built a system of three atoms of cesium leading to a new state of matter. In their experiments, two of these atoms couldn't even be assembled as pairs because of their weak attraction. But by adding a third atom, they formed a new stable form of matter similar to Borromean rings. In fact, these atoms behaved like three musketeers: all for one, one for all. Even if the physicists think this can open a new field in quantum mechanics, please remember that these experiments need extremely low temperatures to be successful, a billionth of a degree above absolute zero to be precise.

Originally from Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends, on March 19, 2006 1:47 PM

SF Chowhound's are tracking the arrival of Beard Papa in San Francisco. No word yet on an opening date....

Originally from A Full Belly, on March 19, 2006 10:49 AM

What follows is a janky hack. If you do not have the stomach for things that are useful in the real world, please stop reading here. “But it’s not standards compliant!” comments will receive no sympathy. Validatorians, you’ve been warned.

If you’re still reading, you’re probably aware of the crappy primitives that the W3C has bestowed us with for scripting arbitrary collections of nodes. Things like Microsoft’s HTC and Mozilla’s XBL allow for browser-specific markup-upgrade paths but these aren’t really feasible in the “real world” since they require lots of code branching and different semantics for attaching a behavior. Tools only succeed where they lower our costs. This is why Dojo and Behavior (and even netWindows, back in The Day) work so hard to provide a portable basis for applying behaviors.

Given that the W3C has f’d us in the ear and that the browser manufacturers can’t get it together enough to come up with one non-standard way to apply scripts to collections of nodes, we’re back to iteration. Updating the collection to which a behavior should be applied when a DOM is updated presents a particular challenge. IE doesn’t throw mutation events for DOM changes nor does it provide client-side XSLT. Both hands our tied behind our back.

So we need something else. document.getElementsByName() would work quite well if the browsers paid attention to name attributes for any element. Alas, they don’t. Which brings us back to the one fast query browsers will support on any element: document.getElementById(). With it we can build a fast, efficient query function for every browser but Safari:

function elementsById(id){
  var nodes = [];
  var tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  while(tmpNode){
    nodes.push(tmpNode);
    tmpNode.id = "";
    tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  }
  for(var x=0; x<nodes .length; x++){
    nodes[x].id = id;
  }
  return nodes;
}

A permutation of this that caches the results and does not set the IDs back to the original value allows re-runs of the function to determine if new elements have been added to the group and/or if a node should be removed:

var groupCache = {};
function elementsById(id){
  if(!groupCache[id]){
    groupCache[id] = [];
  }
  var nodes = groupCache[id];
  for(var x=0; x<nodes .length; x++){
    if(nodes[x].id != ""){
      nodes.splice(x, 1);
      x--;
    }
  }
  var tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  while(tmpNode){
    nodes.push(tmpNode);
    tmpNode.id = "";
    tmpNode = document.getElementById(id);
  }
  return nodes;
}

Obviously, getting a list of added/removed nodes from this function might be preferable to receiving the full list, but I’ll leave a better API for this as an exercise. Safari is the only browser which appears to not support this method of constructing queries, but we can fall back to iteration. It’s certainly not going to be any slower than current methods. The hack is also made somewhat less useful by the W3C’s bone-headed decision to limit elements to a single ID.

The jury is still out as to whether or not this is going to prove useful, but I can already imagine it being an optional optimization for Dojo users looking to make their apps go like hell on pages with complex DOMs.

If only it weren’t necessary.

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on March 19, 2006 10:47 AM

Michael Bierut: "the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else".

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on March 19, 2006 10:47 AM

The Criterion Collection: Dazed and Confused is now on the Criterion 'coming soon' page. Last I heard the release date is in June. Cool first look at the box art, though. I talked to Ron English (the designer) at the SXSW screening of A Scanner Darkly (more on that later), and he said that the box will have a die cut front with a pull out of Kozik's original premier poster. It's such a relief to escape Universal's branding and advertising 'art' after all these years!

Originally from News of the dead, on March 19, 2006 10:46 AM

"Mobile Phone + Flickr + Context = Meaning When you take a photo you are capturing an image of what you can see with your eyes. Merkity-Meaning enriches this image by automatically adding contextual information and allowing you to instantly share your picture; all with just one click."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on March 19, 2006 10:44 AM

+ = In the most recent edition of Innovation, the IDSA's magazine, an article(100K PDF) by James Conley got my interest. The subtitle is "Using Brand Identity to Reinforce Market Value," but the real point of the article is about how the basic elements of experience can be legally coralled and restricted as a form of competitive leverage. The importance of this is summarized in this key point: If used properly, marks, unlike patents or copyrights, never expire. Registered design elements that serve as a brand foundation are therefore indefinite forms of competitive advantage. Towards the end of the article he says: Without the proactive management of intellectual property, the innovator’s ability to build and/or sustain market value is compromised. Designers who know how to legally encode a unique product differentiation and/or cognitive touch-point will have a strong competitive advantage. This is all saying that our legal current system is so set up that ever-more specific sensory phenomena can become the property of organizations forever. And when "forever" and "property" are used in the same sentence, you know there's going to be trouble. My first thought about this related to an observation from a couple of years ago: digital...

Originally posted by mikek from Orange Cone, on March 19, 2006 10:43 AM

Update: The Rhizome Commissions call has been extended until 7 April.

Two call for proposals:

Rhizome Commissions Program: 2006-2007. Rhizome is pleased to announce that [..] between eight and eleven new Internet art projects will be commissioned in 2006. [..] The fee for each commission will range from $900 – $3,000.

Artists are invited to submit proposals for new works of Internet-based art. There is no required theme. The works can manifest offline, as long as the Internet is a primary vehicle in the creation of the work, and the final work is accessible online, whether through a web browser, software, or some other use of internet technologies.
Deadline: 1 April 2006
URL: http://www.rhizome.org/commissions/

enter. explorations in new technology art is the Arts Council England East’s strategy for performance work encompassing new technologies. enter invites national and international artists to submit proposals for three commissions that consider live interaction with audience and space. [..] BUDGET £15,000 for each commission (including artist fee, material & production costs, installation & documentation)
Deadline: 1 June 2006
URL: http://www.enternet.org.uk/

osting calls for proposals here on an experimental basis, and would like feedback on whether this is of interest to Generator.x readers. Calls posted will be relevant to the scope of this blog, and should comprise a low volume of posts. But if readers don’t find them useful I won’t continue to post them.

Originally posted by watz from Generator.x: Generative strategies in art & design, on March 19, 2006 10:42 AM

finally, a recommender web service! if it works, I expect this to be massively huge [via] 

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on March 19, 2006 10:42 AM

Originally posted by inkdroid from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:38 AM

another craigslist redesign. Closer to the original, just clean and cleared up

Originally posted by mathowie from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:37 AM

This piece examines the unpacking of a Nintendo game cartridge, decoding the program as a four-color image, revealing a beautiful soup of the thousands of individual elements that make up the game screen.

Originally posted by KingRufus from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:37 AM

Originally posted by pierce from del.icio.us/inbox/djacobs, on March 19, 2006 10:37 AM