randomwalks/dj

A wonderful article from The Economist on the not-so-near-future of cell phones. [via pasta and vinegar].

"What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?

A selection of some of the more entertaining predictions:

-- The chances are that phones will not only look very different—they may not even be seen. They may be hidden in jewellery or accessories, or even embedded in the body. They will undoubtedly have a host of additional features and novel uses, and users will probably interact with them in new ways, too.

-- According to Bruce Sterling, a science-fiction writer, phones will be “remote controls, house keys, Game Boys, flashlights, maps, compasses, flash drives, health monitors, microphones, recorders, laser pointers, passports, make-up kits, burglar alarms, handguns, handcuffs and slave bracelets.”

-- In a decade's time a typical phone will have enough storage capacity to be able to video its user's entire life.

-- Tiny projectors inside handsets could allow walls, tabletops or screens made of flexible materials to be used as displays while on the move, suggests Jeff Wacker, a futurist at EDS, a technology-services firm.

It is one thing to speculate about the technical possibilities of future phones, but quite another to imagine the social consequences. In the 1980s nobody foresaw that mobile phones would become anything more than executive playthings; and the runaway success of text-messaging took the entire industry by surprise.

No doubt much of this speculation about the future of the phone will prove to be as misguided as AT&T's vision of the Picturephone back in 1964".

Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Dec 2, 2006, 11:04AM

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on December 2, 2006 12:09 PM

I've been waiting for this hand-drawn video game for ages.

Originally from tecznotes links by Michal Migurski reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 10:00PM

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on December 2, 2006 9:29 AM

NEWSgrist will be on hiatus while it goes off to Miami next week. For thorough schedules and roundups, check out ARTINFO: Art Basle Miami Beach and Artnet: Miami Art Extra.

Originally from NEWSgrist - where spin is art by joy garnett reBlogged

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on December 2, 2006 9:27 AM

Originally from hustler of culture by souris reBlogged

Originally posted by souris from hustler of culture, on December 2, 2006 9:27 AM

I don't know exactly what the significance of this realization is to me, but I thought I'd share. The debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer about Microsoft and innovation, on the Wall Street Journal's website, is the best thing I think I've seen either of them write.

I've read a few of Dave's older long-form essays, but I've never seen Robert write anything of this length. (Or, perhaps, of this degree of focus.) And I don't actually read their blogs directly -- I find that links from, and discussion of, their sites leads me to reading the blogs of these two fellows pretty frequently without having to seek them out. For what it's worth, I'd definitely subscribe to their sites if this were the kind of content they regularly published. The quality of the debate stands out in comparison to the underwhelming discussion it's inspired so far.

And for what it's worth, I agree with the points that both of them make about Microsoft, too.

Originally from Anil Dash by Anil reBlogged

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on December 2, 2006 9:27 AM

The more I learn about the NBA, the more I realize how many smart and engaged people there are in every part of the league. People who read more than the sports section.

Given the big stage they have, it's surprisiing to me that more of them don't try to influence public thought more. Dave Zirin points out that plenty of athletes have indicated they are anti-war, for instance, yet for some reason they don't band together to throw their weight around:

Steve Nash, Etan Thomas, Josh Howard, Adam Morrison, Carlos Delgado, Martina Navratilova, Adonal Foyle, and even Ultimate Fighting Champion Jeff Monson, among others, have all raised their voice. They are also just the beginning. Stories circulate of teammates and coaches who share their views but don't want to go public. Even some referees whisper covert statements of support.

Three years ago, The Nation Magazine writers Peter Dreier & Kelly Candaele asked the question "Where are the Jocks for Justice?" My experience in the Sportsworld is that the "Jocks for Justice" are both everywhere and nowhere. Progressive athletes strain to be heard, but they act as individuals and the media responds with a smothering silence. This does not have to be.

Pro athletes hold claim to a unique and underutilized bully pulpit. Two middle fingers from Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick have sent sports radio and television into a tizzy. Chicago Bulls center Ben Wallace wants to wear a red headband in defiance of team rules and a raucous debate explodes about something last popularized by Olivia Newton-John. The furor over Barry Bonds' place in history has led to a more honest discussion about racism than anything we get in the mainstream press.

Anti-war athletes could use this platform if they just stopped operating in isolation from one another. If the people I cited called a joint press conference to announce a new organization: Athletes United Against War or - what the hell - Jocks for Justice, it would electrify the cultural landscape.

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 10:24AM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on December 1, 2006 9:53 PM

Using a geometric shape called a Reuleaux triangle, it's possible to drill square holes. Click through for all the exciting math!
Update: A video of a Reuleaux triangle rotating in a square. (thx, will)
Update: More on the Reuleaux triangle at MathWorld. (thx, nevan)
Update: The Reuleaux triangle is also the basis for the Wankel engine.. (thx, brian & adam)

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 10:24AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on December 1, 2006 9:53 PM

Today is December 1st, and you know what that means? It's the first day of my chocolate advent calendar! I couldn't resist picking one up last week when I spied them at the market. And I was so excited to get started with it this morning. Having a chocolate advent calendar is one of my favorite childhood memories. We never got to have candy, so getting a small chocolate each day for nearly a month was almost better than Christmas itself. One year, we got calendars that had an extra-large chocolate for the 24th. Each day I carefully opened the cardboard door to reveal the small chocolate inside, and savored it with my breakfast.

Every day, I edged closer and closer to the big one, until the morning of the 24th. I sat at the table with my calendar in hand, and as I attempted to pry open the door, I realized it had already been opened. Someone had opened it and then closed it again. And then I looked in shock: No Chocolate! My giant chocolate I'd been waiting a month for was gone! And who was the culprit? My brother, who'd eaten his entire chocolate advent calendar in one sitting on December 1st and couldn't resist eating mine as well. Honestly, I remember this as one of the most crushing disappointments of my childhood. Probably because my brother not only didn't get in trouble for eating his calendar, but he didn't get punished for eating mine either! And I, the patient older child who played by the rules, was just out one giant Santa-shaped chocolate. My calendar this year doesn't have an over-sized chocolate for the 24th. Nevertheless, I will be hyper-vigilant, lest my husband attempt a similar, nefarious trick to crush my chocolate advent spirit!

comments are open

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 10:23AM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on December 1, 2006 9:53 PM

Poets Walt Whitman Marianne Moore loved the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and so does Francis Morrone of the Sun. In a laudatory column about the facility today, he writes:

"The recently restored exterior terra-cotta work, and the interior plasterwork, are as fine as anything in the city. To attend a performance or to see a film at BAM, even to eat a burger at the BAM café is an exalting experience. The magnificent lobby, the sybaritic Howard Gilman Opera House, and the spaces expertly transformed into screening rooms have no peer in New York."

I don't know about the burgers (anyone tried 'em?), but the space is definitely my favorite place in the borough to see a performance or movie. It may have a run for its money if the gorgeous Loew's Kings on Flatbush is restored, though. Other historic theaters in Brooklyn have been turned into gyms, but are there any hidden favorites in your nabe?

Proud Music of the Academy [NY Sun]
Seeking a Champion for the Loew’s Kings [NY Times]

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Christy reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 9:46AM

Originally posted by Christy from Brooklyn Record, on December 1, 2006 9:53 PM

What if we got some of Toronto’s most exciting architects and designers to build gingerbread houses? The Toronto Star's got the amazing results from seven firms and the photos are great. A far cry from what I envision building. If you live in the Toronto area, you can see the houses on display at the Manulife Centre at 55 Bloor St. W. Very cool.

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 2:04PM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on December 1, 2006 9:52 PM

Leslie Harpold's 2006 Advent Calendar is up. Each day contains a link, a holiday memory, and something special. (Leslie is still looking for holiday memories to include—send yours in today.) Still one of the most delightful Web projects in existence. Bookmark it, and check back every day.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 1:36PM

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on December 1, 2006 9:52 PM

• David Thorpe really shows off his basketball knowledge in an in-depth analysis of Kobe Bryant's game. It's must-read. You could pick almost any paragraphs as insightful, for instance: "...trying to block his shot inside the paint is not a good idea. He can use teardrops, runners or floaters to get his shot off. It is better to work at cutting his angles off and blocking him out after he releases his shot. Most defenders fail at this disciplined approach, as Bryant always is among the league leaders in free throws per shot attempt. Without the ball in his hands, Bryant is not as dangerous as some other players. Only 31 percent of his 'close' baskets come on Lakers assists. (As a point of comparison, Carmelo Anthony's 'close' buckets are assisted 62 percent of the time.) So when Bryant is cutting or screening inside, he is not often the target of the action, unless he pops out to the perimeter."
• Rasheed Wallace does a pre-game Dwyane Wade impersonation.
• See Jack McCallum talk about his book Seven Seconds or Less for free in New York.
• The Onion sticks it to Bill Walton.
• Cool NBA-themed sneakers.
• Basketbawful on the Knicks: "...the crazy thing about their record is the fact that they're 5-5 on the road...and only 1-6 at home. The Knicks are one of only 10 teams so far this season to be at least .500 on the road, but they have the worst home record in the league. Simply put, this is because their fans hate them."
• Looks like Brian Davis and Christian Laettner will get their shot at buying the Grizzlies, as the minority owners reportedly won't take advantage of their right of first refusal.
• Lenny Wilkens is back in the fold with the Sonics. That gives the new owners a local face, which is smart.
• Wages of Wins isn't gaga for Adam Morrison.
• Brad Miller, comfortable in camo.
• Check out Jerry Powell, basketball trainer, on YouTube. Context to follow as I confirm some facts about Powell.

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 1:31PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on December 1, 2006 9:52 PM

Check out Chiara’s latest essay where she discusses what exactly gets information architects and user experience professionals so excited about tags.

Originally from Adaptive Path by Amanda Willoughby reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 1:30PM

Originally posted by Amanda Willoughby from Adaptive Path, on December 1, 2006 9:52 PM

Forgotten New York's latest entry explores the northern reaches of Fourth Avenue, one of the last Park Slope enclaves to resist gentrification. Developers are starting to take hold there, too, with several new high-rises in the works; in some ways it's prime territory for them because Fourth is an "extra-wide-load" avenue, FNY explains. The site's photo essay aims to capture the scene before the area changes permanently, and it provides some choice bits of neighborhood history along the way.

Going Fourth [Forgotten New York]

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Christy reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 11:41AM

Originally posted by Christy from Brooklyn Record, on December 1, 2006 9:52 PM

For the past few months, I've been helping Ed Levine and a small team get a new food website called Serious Eats off the ground. Though the site will officially launch on Monday, Megnut readers can get some special "friends and family" access starting right now. Simply visit http://preview.seriouseats.com. You will be prompted for a username ("serious") and a password ("eater") to enter, and then you can take a look around and create an account. We've got discussions, original content like features and video, and a whole lot more to come. This is just the beginning. I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to your feedback. We want to make it the best damn food site on the web. Well, second best, second to Megnut, of course! ;)

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 5:30PM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

Gothamist on how to score a Wii:

Elbow grease is necessary in order to eventually get Wii Elbow, so suck it up, dress appropriately and be nice to your fellow people in line because you never know when you'll need spot on line saved so you can run to a Starbucks for the bathroom.

The commenter who said "I just came from the Best Buy on 6th and 23rd -- they've been in limited supply, but they've got em." may be on to something, I've seen lines there the last few mornings, but I wasn't sure for what.

Originally from hello, nintendo by David Jacobs reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 4:21PM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, nintendo, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

Seriously, it's a dreadfully well put together high (low) light series of Portland's meltdown in the 2000 Western Conference Finals. As a Portland fan, I haven't watched anything like it for years, but watching it did remind me of several important points, namely that I blame: Damon Stoudamire's hair, Mike Dunleavy Jr.'s presence on the bench, Steve Smith's slow-footed D, and the really bizarre decision to tank the team offense for "four guys watching one guy playing one-on-two."

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 4:09PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

A short highlight reel of recent projects @ Eyebeam.

Click To Play

(thx Perry and Jerry!)

Originally from braintag reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 4:08PM

Originally from braintag, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

That's the Paris Metro, bien sur.

Excellent papercraft, monsieur Hubert, truly excellent.

(UPDATE: Title changed from Tie-Fighter. Which is worrying, because for me to get that wrong is like.. a brain haemorrhage. Which I can still spell, so something's up. Fear!)

Originally from Wonderland by Alice reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 3:16PM

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

It starts with Black Friday. It's followed by a tidal wave of news reports on how we're doing as a nation, and as a people based on our retail consumption over the next month. It continues with pans of people in line to buy Wii's and PS3's, and the trampling over of each other as the store doors open.

And then there's Leslie Harpold.

For the past 6 years Leslie has lovingly hand-crafted her Advent Calendar. Every year it's special and every year it manages to be the spark that reignites the hope for a happy holiday season by reminding us of the decency we are capable of as human beings.

Thanks for doing it again, Leslie.

And by the way; if you have a special holiday story to tell Leslie wants them.

Originally from Mule Design : Off the Hoof by Mike Monteiro reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 3:05PM

Originally posted by Mike Monteiro from Mule Design : Off the Hoof, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

It's even better, I say! We need less, not more these days and BuzzFeed filters and it filters well and entertainingly.

If you haven't yet checked out BuzzFeed consider today your lucky day!

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 2:54PM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on December 1, 2006 9:50 PM

I've upgraded the Drupal installation so we can use the OpenID module. A few things learned in the process:

• The Drupal upgrade path requires incremental steps; to go from one minor version to another two numbers way means upgrading through every intermediate minor version until reaching the target. Earlier versions fail to be useful in 'knowing' which data model version the system is at, so an upgrade meant importing / guessing / dropping and repeating the cycle until I hit on the right one, which in itself was not an easy state to assess.
• The module administration page loads every module, which can cause memory issues resulting in a blank page. Removing unnecessary, unused modules helps.
• The JanRain OpenID 1.2.0 pear installation fails to install itself properly, requiring the moving of directories post-install.
• The OpenID module does not respect settings on account creation. I wrote some code to fix this.

But we're now at the latest Drupal version; and more on OpenID later.

Originally from Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs blogs reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 9:15PM

Originally from Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs blogs, on December 1, 2006 9:46 PM

Very interesting study of what the Top 50 Magazines are doing online. (via Paid Content  who have links to the doc and to other comments about it. If you click through read on their site posts about Conde Nast restructuring to give individual mags control of their sites and a post about WSJ reporters focusing on blogs, podcasts, and inforaphics)

Originally from DefinitiveInk by joshua mack reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 6:40PM

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on December 1, 2006 9:46 PM

Talking about, among other things, saving a million lives in Africa, by getting testing kits to weed out tainted blood used in transfusions.

I was just talking about athletes getting political..

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 6:08PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on December 1, 2006 9:46 PM

Last week I was talking about perfectionists with Maciej, which he says are currently out of style, but will come back again. The current vogue for the kind of fail publicly, rapid iteration, folksonomic, messy data strategy -- I hear this again and again at conferences and it's something I've subscribed to for a long time myself. So I found this perfectionist idea intriguing.

He related the story of the typesetting issues on Donald Knuth's book The Art of Computer Programming that compelled him to write TeX; I told him about Robert Bringhurst, a poet who learned Haida-Gwaii

Originally from Caterina.net by noemail@noemail.org (caterina) reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 5:11PM

Originally posted by noemail@noemail.org (caterina) from Caterina.net, on December 1, 2006 9:46 PM

(Blah, Blah, Blah installation by Skewville)

As we get closer to the public opening of Wooster on Spring, we thought we'd give you a few more details about the project. Because of the nature of the project, we won't be giving away a lot of the specifics until just before the event.

So here are some answers to a few of the questions that we've been receiving...

1. Will the building be open to the public to view the artwork inside?

Yes. The current plan is to open the building for three days in mid--December as an open house with panel discussions, film screenings, djs, and private walk-throughs. Because of the logistics, we won't be publishing the exact days and times until just before the event.

2. Who are some of the artists that are painting inside the building?

Artists involved in the show include WK, Blek Le Rat, Shepard Fairey, JACE, Bo and Microbo, D*Face, Maya Hayuk, Lister, Prune, JR, RIPO, Thundercut, Skewville, Elboe-Toe, Jasmine Zimmerman, You Are Beautiful, Dan Witz, Judith Supine, Above, Rekal, Gore-B, FAILE, The London Police, Rene Gagnon, Gaetane Michaux, Darkclouds... and many, many other surprise guests.

3. Will the artwork stay up in the building and outside after the event?

No. In December and January, the new owners of the building will begin restoration and construction and all of the artwork will be destroyed. The only chance to see it will be during the three day event in December.

4. Are you (Wooster) and the artists working with the new owners of the building on this project?

Yes. A few weeks ago Sara and I met with Caroline Cummings, one of the new owners of 11 Spring. Caroline, who is a major supporter of the arts, wanted to let us know that she and her partners understood the rich history that the building has had, and they wanted to do something that celebrated the role the building has had in the neighborhood and with artists from all over the world. Sara and I suggested curating an art event in the building before construction began. Caroline and her partners agreed and the project began. Projects like this happen from time to time in Europe, but rarely in the United States, and never in the middle of one of the best neighborhoods in Manhattan.

4. Can anyone paint inside the building?

No, unfortunately not. All of the artwork inside the building is being organized and curated by the Wooster Collective. While we're adding new artists to the project each day, everyone involved has been part of the Wooster site over the last five years. Unfortunately, it's impossible to include all of the artists who we would like, but we're doing the best that we can. As we juggle space and access to the building, artists are being invited each day up until the actual event.

More information coming soon....

Originally from Wooster Collective reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 6:53AM

Originally from Wooster Collective, on December 1, 2006 9:44 AM

The Whine Colored Sea issues a challenge: which directors, musicians, artists, authors, etc. followed a masterpiece with a bomb. Spielberg's Schindler's List followed by Jurassic Park 2 is a good example. (Comment on this)

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 9:58AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on December 1, 2006 9:44 AM

I have now had two reasonable sized portions of Twilight Princess gameplay.  This hasn't gotten me tremendously far into the game, only about four hours, but I am starting to form some initial impressions.

As with pretty much everyone else who has written anything on the Internet about this game, I am rather into it.  It is great and I am happy and all that glory being heaped upon it is accurate and well-deserved.

This morning, however, I am at work and not playing Zelda, and that does not make me happy.  That makes me petulant and cranky and so I will turn my irritation into rationalization and point out all the things I've encountered so far about this game that aren't great.

Please be aware that after this point there are some minor spoilers about the first 4-5 hours of the game.

First, there's Midna.  Midna?  Sweetheart?  You're a bitch.  There's a particular personality archetype that Nintendo really seems to enjoy inflicting upon its players.  The smart-ass privileged know-it-all bitch shows up in many games and in the tradition of the Zora Princess from Ocarina of Time, it looks like once again it's up to poor Link to carry her around.  I hope there is some charming element of her personality buried deep under that giant mask of hers.

Generally speaking I am well-pleased by all the audio call-backs to previous Zeldas, but two in particular seem like they're going to really get under my skin.  First is the voice of the nearest bumpkin calling for your attention.  If one more tubby chucklehead comes running at me yelling "he-ey" I'm going to have to call Wayne Brady, and my man is going to have to choke a bitch.  I respect that this is ultimately a GameCube game so the voice acting is going to suck ass, but this particular clip makes me want to practice getting Deku Seeds stuck up his nostrils from the opposite end of his body.

The other noise irritating me, and I am actually in real life somewhat saddened by this fact, is the "secret revealed" jingle.  This is probably my favorite Zelda noise.  When I can't find my keys and I spend half an hour in the morning cursing in increasingly profane ways until I finally move aside the correct piece of paper from the living room coffee table, I play (in my head as I don't have a set of chimes handy for every occasion) everyone's favorite jingle.  The jingle itself hasn't changed, but it's being routed through the unfortunately crappy speaker from the remote.  Turning the remote volume down to two or three does reduce the suck quite significantly but not enough to prevent tiny bits of my childhood being ruthlessly daggered into submission every time it plays.  When did I become such a fidelity queen anyway?

Finally, I can't let any discussion of the first four hours of this game passing without remarking in some negative manner upon the amount of video and exposition.  Seriously Nintendo, it's time to look for a new story-telling device.  There hasn't yet been a time monopolizing drama blitz like the one from Ocarina where you first awaken as the Hero of Time, but given how much time has already been spent pressing the A button to inflict the next 30 seconds of cut scene on my watching family I can only anticipate its coming with fear and dread.

The Zelda series of games is probably my favorite.  They are extremely well executed and have never failed to live up to my expectations and hopes.  It is sort of like negative space.  On a plane that is otherwise filled with solid goodness, tiny specks of bad stick out and draw more attention than they are worth.  The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has all the signs of being an absolutely fantastic game just as its forebears did, and ultimatley the suffering caused by the strong anticipation of my next opportunity to play is probably the worst damn thing about this game.

Originally from hello, nintendo by Rob Drimmie reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 9:13AM

Originally posted by Rob Drimmie from hello, nintendo, on December 1, 2006 9:44 AM

Engadget's Peter Rojas on Rocketboom on the next big things for mobile phones.

And some personal insight:

- Peter has 7 laptops

- Prefers e-mail over voice calls

- His zune "has yet to lose his virginity - mate with another zune ( lonely Zune 15)" - so few people own Zunes - even in Manhattan

- Peter's apartments looks like the Samsung Experience

- - Engadget is getting ready for the Consumer Electronics Show in early January , the most hellish week of the year with 150 posts a day and 16 to 20 hour days, daily podcasts, video- a comprehensive coverage in real time.

- The most low-fi gadget he owns? A royal typewriter from the 30s given by his grandmother.

Originally from textually.org by emily reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 1:06PM

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, on December 1, 2006 9:40 AM

I learned something terrific yesterday: if you take a really cold but still liquid beer out of the freezer and open it, the beer will freeze within seconds. The freezing trick also works if instead of opening the beer, you give the unopened bottle a sharp rap. The reasons I've found online for why the trick works varies slightly for the two cases. According to Daryl Taylor's site for science teachers, opening the bottle changes the pressure in the bottle and thus lowers the temperature:

The sealed bottle's envoronment has a specific volume, pressure, and temperature. By changing one, you are necessarily affecting the others. The chilled liquid has a smaller temperature, esentially the same volume, thus a smaller smaler pressure. This is, of cousre, according to the basic gas-law, PVNERT. Better known as PV=nRT. Even though the internal pressure has decreased, it is still far greater than the pressure outside the container, namely one atmosphere. Upon opening, the pressure inside drastically plunges as it tries to equalize with the atmosphere. This rapid decrease in P corresponds to a rapid decrease in T, since the V is essentially the same. This rapid drop in temperature of a liquid that is NEAR freezing actually plunges the liquid into a frozen state.

Not sure I completely buy this...does the ideal gas law work for liquids? I can see that the small amount of gas in the neck of the bottle would decrease in pressure and thus decrease in temperature and that might be enough to spur the liquid into freezing. For a better answer for both cases, I consulted the internet's all-seeing oracle, Ask Metafilter. This comment gives a succinct answer:

The beer is below the freezing temperature, but there is not enough contamination for the ice to form. The bubbles of carbon dioxide released when the bottle is hit act as nuclei for ice crystal growth in the supercooled beer. Same thing happens in reverse when water is microwaved in a smooth container but won't boil until hit.

This more scientific discussion of unfreezable water provides more evidence of what may be going on: supercooling effects, the carbon dioxide in solution hindering freezing (osmotic depression of freezing point), and hydration factors. Anyway, wicked cool! Supercooled beer! (Digg this?)

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 11:46AM

Originally from kottke.org, on December 1, 2006 9:40 AM

From the press release: "Sun Microsystems, creator of the open source Solaris OS, announced the launch of The Big Mashup, a unique online experience examining how the world of entertainment and news gathering is rapidly changing as the network blurs the line between audience and entertainer, viewer and newscaster, fan and producer.

Chris Melissinos, Sun Microsystems' chief technology officer for Web 2.0 and a self-proclaimed video game addict, hosts the documentary video showcasing entertainment and media thought leaders such as Andrew Baron, founder, and Joanne Colan, host of Rocketboom; Gillian Caldwell, executive director of WITNESS; Joel Hyatt, Current TV's CEO and co-founder; Douglas Rushkoff, writer and lecturer on technology, pop culture and media; Paul D. Miller/DJ Spooky, artist, writer, musician and producer; and Martin Stiksel, Last.fm's CCO. These industry pundits will give their perception of how the network has changed for businesses and the way entertainers perform. "

LINK.

Originally from Dembot by Rocketboom reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 10:48AM

Originally posted by Rocketboom from Dembot, on December 1, 2006 9:40 AM

So we’re starting to do some more work for AOL - this timre utilizing their new AIM APIs.

We’re gonna bake it into PeopleAggregator and come up with some coolio Whimsicals (as they call Widgets.)  So I’ve been diving deep into these APIs.  Here’s some demos of WIM.

MY gutt told me one thing immediately:

- now that Yahoo has BB Auth, AOL needs to have AIM Auth

- just like Yahoo will enable us to enable our end-users to use their Yahoo ID as a log-in

- I think AOL should enable end-users to use their AIM screenname - for the same thing

- we’ll support both in our Identity Hub strategy

It’s Ted Leonsis’ ‘Magic Carpet’ finally come to life.

Lots of folks are focused on this stuff - and this is a great opportunity for AOL to join the party!

So shoutout to Stephen Benedict:

YOU DUDE - lets get AIM Auth happening!

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 12:59PM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on December 1, 2006 9:36 AM

a site tree visualization based on referrer data, showing how online users travel through a specific website. all traffic moves clockwise around the map, enters at the bottom of the page & exits at the top of the page. thicker lines mean more traffic, while the color of traffic leaving a page matches the color of the section it is going to & vice versa.

[link: designweenie.com|via knowingart.com]

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 10:40PM

Originally from information aesthetics, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

How to choose a good book to read, a tip from Marshall McLuhan: turn to page 69, read it, and if it's good, you've got a winner. (via snarkmarket)

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 5:26PM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

Rhizome's running our annual community campaign, right now. Please support our work & community. You can also pick up some great new media art!

Originally from del.icio.us/subscriptions/djacobs by marisaolson reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 4:56PM

Originally posted by marisaolson from del.icio.us/subscriptions/djacobs, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

Posted by Adam Bosworth, Vice President

At Google, we often get questions about what we're doing in the area of health. I have been interested in the issues of health care and health information for a while. It is now one of my main focuses here, and I've decided to start posting about it. I've been motivated in this field in part by my personal experiences helping to care for my mother, who recently died from cancer after a four-year battle. While the quality of the medical care my mother received was extraordinary, I saw firsthand how challenged the health care system was in supporting caregivers and communicating between different medical organizations. The system didn't fail completely, but struggled with these phases:

• What was wrong -- it took her doctors nine months to correctly identify an illness which had classic symptoms
• Who should treat her -- there was no easy way to figure out who were the best local physicians and caregivers, which ones were covered by her insurance, and how we could get them to agree to treat her
• Once she was treated, she had a chronic illness, and needed ongoing care and coordinated nursing and monitoring, particularly once her illness recurred

Once she had a correct diagnosis and we'd found the right doctor, her treatment was excellent. But before and after treatment, most people with serious illnesses have to live through these other phases and suffer similar problems. She was trying to get help from her caregivers in the family and it was incredibly challenging to get the right information and help her make the right decisions. Often the health care system isn't well set up to address these issues. I believe our industry can help resolve some of these problems and ameliorate others.

In the end, one key part of the solution to these problems is a better educated patient. If patients understand their diseases better -- the symptoms, the treatments, the drugs, and the side effects, they are likely to get better and quicker care -- before, during, and after treatment. We have already launched some improvements to web search that help patients more easily find the health information they are looking for. Using the Google Co-op platform, Google and the health community have labeled sites and pages across the web making it easier for users to refine their health queries and locate the medical information they need. Do a search on Google about a medical issue or treatment like diabetes or Lipitor and you'll see some choices for refining your query, such as "symptoms," "treatments," and so on. If you click on "treatment," your search results are refined and reordered so that sites that have been labeled as being about treatment by trusted health community contributors are boosted in the rankings. Note that how trusted a contributor is -– and thus how much they affect your search results -– is dependent both on Google's algorithms and on who the user decides they trust. For example, if my doctor is a Google Co-op contributor and I indicate to Google that I trust her, then when I search, the sites she has labeled as relevant will show up higher in my search results.

This is just the beginning of what our industry can do. People need the medical information that is out there and available to be organized and made accessible to all. Which happens to be our mission. Health information should be easier to access and organize, especially in ways that make it as simple as possible to find the information that is most relevant to a specific patient's needs.

Patients also need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily. Today it is much too difficult to get access to one's health records, for example, because of the substantial administrative obstacles people have to go through and the many places they have to go to collect it all. Compare this to financial information, which is much more available from the various institutions that help manage your financial "health." We believe our industry should help solve this problem.

As the Internet increasingly helps link communities of people, we also think there is an opportunity to connect people with similar health interests, concerns and problems. Today, people too often don't know that others like them even exist, let alone how to find them. The industry should help there, too.

These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. Your help is welcome and, of course, if you're an extraordinary engineer with a passion in this field, we'd love to hear from you. Write to us at health@google.com .

Originally from Official Google Blog by A Googler reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 4:19PM

Originally posted by A Googler from Official Google Blog, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

street talk. Photo by Dope on the Slope.
K-Dog Menu Expansion [Across the Park]
Answers on the Fulton Street Dig [Brownstoner]
Dutch Want New York Back, We Think [Curbed]
The Hungry Cabbie Eats the Outer Boroughs: Junior's [Gothamist]
Brooklyn Holiday Lights Viewing Guide [Gowanus Lounge]
Free Cinema This Weekend: Iraq For Sale [Planet PLG]

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Mike Dougherty reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 4:03PM

Originally posted by Mike Dougherty from Brooklyn Record, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

I recently let my membership to the ACM run out. This marks the end of a 10-year relationship that has been on the rocks for at least the past 5. I gave up on the CHI conference about 4 years ago and was mostly holding on for Interactions, the journal from SigCHI. But it has been a very long time since I was excited or eager for a new issue. Sure, Don Norman or Aaron Marcus usually have something interesting to say and everybody loves Ok/Cancel. But two short columns and a comic are not enough to carry a journal. The content has been getting less and less relevant to the ideas and problems of HCI practitioners, at least for me and folks I know.

Take the most recent issue for an example: Weights and Measures: Quantifying Usability. Does “usability” as it is commonly practiced really need to become more quantitative? Is anyone picking up a copy of Interactions, “the premier publication in HCI,” to learn basic statistics or hear yet another person attempt to answer the “how many participants is enough?” question. (The answer as always is “it depends.”) I don’t want to deride any of the authors in this issue. They are all clearly knowledgeable and do a good job of covering their subjects. But why were they brought together in the first place? Why was this topic chosen over more challenging or timely topics like qualitative research, embracing social science, or service design? Who is this publication written for?

Human-computer interaction as a field has expanded enormously in the last 2 decades and especially in the last 5-7 years. The core of the discipline has moved outside of computer science to include designers, social scientists, and others. Yet this publication still seems to be written primarily by and for computer scientists. Unlike many HCI practitioners and researchers these days, I actually have a computer science degree but that training has become less and less relevant as I’ve had to engage more and more of the human side of HCI. I have grown and changed a lot over the last 10 years and it seems that the ACM and I have grown apart. I’ve tried to make it work but a guy can only hold on for so long. Breaking up is hard to do but, baby, it’s not me, it’s you.

Originally from Adaptive Path by Todd W reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 2:19PM

Originally posted by Todd W from Adaptive Path, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

New invention watch: the wovel is a show shovel attached to a big wheel. It may make snow shoveling a lot easier, but it might also suffer from the Segway problem...i.e. you look like a big dork using it.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 2:03PM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on December 1, 2006 9:35 AM

A rich dish that comes from the Cajun cuisine tradition, classic Turducken is a created by deboning and layering a whole turkey, duck and chicken, then inserting layers of stuffing. Hannaford, a supermarket chain in the Northeastern US, is selling turducken for the holidays! If I had known, I could have picked up a turducken last week when I was at one of their stores. I've always wanted to try one.

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 9:17AM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on December 1, 2006 9:33 AM

• With December comes the Christmas Advent Calendar 2006:
  "Sharing ONE pic a day, we're making THE BEST Christmas Advent Calendar on Flickr while we wait for our presents! Submit your contribution in the thread of the current day, and at the end of the day, we'll vote one picture permanently into the advent calendar pool."
  To see last years contributions, check out The Christmas Advent Calendar 2005
• Christian Hall interviews Caterina at .net magazine
• The Tattered Coat interviews photojournalist (and Flickr member) Stuart Isett
• It's the return of the Santa Hats Campaign!

Photo from thejacksons.

Originally from FlickrBlog by Heather Champ reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 9:46PM

Originally posted by Heather Champ from FlickrBlog, on December 1, 2006 9:32 AM

Originally from jameswagner.com reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 8:43PM

Originally from jameswagner.com, on December 1, 2006 9:32 AM

Ross Harmes is a frontend engineer who works in the Yahoo! Small Business group. Ross recently released a YUI “bundle” for the Mac OS X code editor TextMate; the bundle provides syntax highlighting, code completion, and integrated documentation retrieval within TextMate. He stopped by the YUI team offices today to show us how it works, and he was kind enough to let us capture that information in the form of a short (~9 minute) screencast.

Related URLs:

• Ross’s blog post on Techfoolery.com with detailed instructions on downloading and using the YUI Bundle
• The TextMate website

Screencast:

For best results, download the 800×600 screencast (~13MB) and view it in your QuickTime Player. The embedded version below is scaled down to fit within the blog and loses picture quality as a result. If your system does not support QuickTime, a lower-resolution version of the screencast is available on Yahoo! Video.

Tags: yahoo, yui, screencast, rossharmes, textmate, techfoolery

Originally from Yahoo! User Interface Blog by Eric Miraglia reBlogged on Nov 30, 2006, 8:27PM

Originally posted by Eric Miraglia from Yahoo! User Interface Blog, on December 1, 2006 9:32 AM

Links from a recent trip around the World Wide Web.

• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, Competing with Google is Like the War in Iraq
• MetaFilter, Big Mountain
• Tom Raftery's I.T. views, Too much choice is not (always) a bad thing
• Google Blog Search: "google reader", 7 Google Reader Tips and Tricks
• Blogger Buzz, JSON on the new Blogger

My friends say some weird shit. See?

• phopkins said, "Also, just introduced Cait to playing Tetris DS online. Probably wasn't very nice of me to do right before bedtime." 40 minutes ago
  
  
• phopkins said, "Curious about being featured on Twitter's homepage." 41 minutes ago
  
  
• Stewart said, "Arrival USA. Now for the challenge leg: 11pm-6am wandering the halls of Newark airport. Lego Star Wars for PSP and a ple of email keps me warm. " about 2 hours ago
  
  
• Caterina said, "Dos Pesos chewing the stinkiest dog chew ever : repurposed bull penis" about 3 hours ago
  
  
• lane said, "Watching Courtney shoot a gin martini." about 3 hours ago
  
  
• Case said, "Listening to my buddha machine, love it! seriously- fm3.com.cn" about 3 hours ago
  
  
• Biz Stone said, "Waiting for the livster to pick me ups" about 3 hours ago
  
  

via Google Reader and Twitter...

Originally from massless by Chris Wetherell reBlogged

Originally posted by Chris Wetherell from massless, on December 1, 2006 9:32 AM

NYTimes: The 10 Best Books of 2006.

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 7:30AM

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on December 1, 2006 9:31 AM

Posted by Sheryl Sandberg, VP

You might have noticed from our homepage that today is World AIDS Day. We want to remember all those who have suffered from HIV/AIDS in the 25 years since it was first identified, and we want to support everyone working to eradicate this scourge: Today, there are about 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, and it is increasing in every region in the world. In Africa, it is the leading cause of death -- 5,500 Africans die each day from this insidious disease.

One effort that is making a difference is (RED), a company founded this year by Bono and Bobby Shriver. A percentage of the profits from each (RED) product sold is given to The Global Fund. We are supporting the (RED) effort by offering promotional support to (RED) and (RED) products on Google properties throughout the holiday season.

We hope you choose to support them with your purchases. Companies offering (RED) products have committed to contribute a portion of profits from the sales of that product into Global Fund-financed AIDS programmes in Africa.

Together, let's make a big difference. Read more at JoinRED.com or visit the (RED) blog.

Originally from Official Google Blog by A Googler reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 6:45AM

Originally posted by A Googler from Official Google Blog, on December 1, 2006 9:31 AM

So, this is a really late note, but if anyone's going to the Leopard Tech Talk in San Francisco tomorr today, and wants to meet up with a hobbyist Cocoa developer, it might be cool to have lunch or go to a couple sessions with someone else.

Send me an e-mail (see sidebar) or leave a comment, I'll be checking all day. I may have a cell phone to facilitate meeting up, but e-mail will be more reliable.

I hope that Apple isn't going to screw me over: I signed up for the San Francisco session the day sign-ups became available, but I never received a confirmation e-mail. I sent a request to the ADC workshops support e-mail, and received a response twice saying that they would send me a confirmation e-mail (implying that I do have a spot in the conference), but I still haven't received it. I just checked my junk mail folder, too, and I don't see the e-mail. So here's hoping I can still get in.

Originally from Technological Supernova reBlogged on Dec 1, 2006, 5:19AM

Originally from Technological Supernova, on December 1, 2006 9:31 AM

The week before Thanksgiving, Six Apart hosted its first ever public Movable Type Hackathon. We were delighted to have Jay Allen back in the offices to lend his considerable talent and expertise to all those who attended. As you might imagine, being the former Product Manager for Movable Type is an impressive position for anyone’s resume, but especially for a Professional Movable Type consultant and member of the Six Apart Professional Network. As a result Jay has been quite busy and has had very little opportunity to drop by and say "hi." So it was great to have the opportunity to sneak away with Jay during the Hackathon to catch up and chat about what he has been up to.

For the Movable Type Hackathon, Jay worked on enhancing the Cloner plugin. Jay added the ability for the Cloner plugin to allow MT administrators to clone not only blogs, but also templates, users and posts. In this podcast Jay and I talk about these enhancements as well ass NotifyWho, another invaluable plugin that Jay wrote that allows blog administrators to notify a list of recipients when new comments and Trackbacks are received, as well as when new posts are made to a blog. This has proved to be an essential plugin here at Six Apart as well as for a number of customers using Movable Type to manage work groups within their business and enterprise.

Oh yeah, and Jay shared with us some big news in his personal life. Listen to the podcast to learn what it is.

powered by ODEO

About Jay Allen

Since it's initial releases in 2001, Jay Allen has lived and breathed Movable Type. As lead author of the essential developer's manual, Hacking Movable Type and a developer involved in or behind a number of trailblazing plugins such as MT-Search, the award winning MT-Blacklist, Comment Challenge, RebuildQueue and more, Jay's passion for extending Movable Type is both boundless and well-documented.

During his two-year tenure as the Product Manager for Movable Type, Jay was instrumental in leading the development of Movable Type as a platform, and ultimately to the creation of the powerful and very successful Movable Type Enterprise.

These days, Jay is putting those many years of experience to good use as a Movable Type/MT Enterprise consultant, not to mention attempting to reverse the growth trend of his massive "Plugins, sites and products to create" list. He currently resides in San Francisco with his fianceé, Jenn, and their super-dog Stella.

Links from this Podcast

• Movable Type Hackathon
• Movable Type Enterprise
• Business Blogging
• Jay Allen's Homepage
• NotifyWho Plugin for Movable Type
• RebuildQueue Plugin for Movable Type
• Cloner Plugin for Movable Type
• Stella the super-dog

Originally from ProNet by Byrne Reese reBlogged

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from ProNet, on November 30, 2006 8:25 AM

HBO is developing a one-hour series based on the popular 1990s Vertigo comic series Preacher. Mark Steven Johnson, who directed the comic-book adaptations Daredevil and the upcoming Ghost Rider for the big screen, is writing the pilot. Howard Deutch (The Whole Ten Yards) is set to direct.

Originally from jwz by jwz@jwz.org reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 4:43AM

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on November 30, 2006 8:25 AM

Click on the photo album to see a few pictures of the wonderful parents who came to our Ninth Annual Parent Seminar. It was all about food, fun, talking about education, and talking about our fine students.

Originally from TeacherTalk by Erica Jacobs reBlogged

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on November 30, 2006 8:25 AM

His latest 700,000 words are on the hapless Eastern Conference. Here are some favorite points about the Knicks.

Not only is there a good chance that no Knicks player will finish with more than four assists a game, but two of the biggest ball hogs in recent NBA history (Nate Robinson and Jamal Crawford) might crack a combined 4,500 minutes this season without notching 350 assists combined. Did you know Robinson has played 16 games and 343 minutes and dished out 24 assists total? He's a point guard! He's 5-foot-7!!!! How is this possible????? And where is John Hollinger during all of this? Couldn't he break down the biggest ball hogs of all time with a convoluted minute/assist/field goal attempt/turnover ratio statistical amalgam?

(Paging John Hollinger ... John Hollinger, please report to the ESPN front desk ... )

He later adds:

(By the way, there should be a mandate that every positive article written about the Magic this season includes a reference to Isiah single-handedly turning their fortunes around by taking Steve Francis off their hands. I'd even consider voting him "Executive of the Year" if the Magic gets a top-three seed. Seriously, what exec had a bigger impact on a team than Isiah had on the Orlando Magic? Can you name one? Didn't think so.)

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 1:50PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on November 30, 2006 8:22 AM

I got the chance this past weekend to play the Wii at a friend's house for a few hours. Here are some rough initial thoughts:

0. It's fun. Really fun. Like "baby laughing hysterically for no reason other than he's a baby and he's alive" fun. I haven't enjoyed a gaming system this much since a certain plumber and his green-clad brother ba-da-bum-ba-da-bum-bummed their way into our hearts.

1. Not only do I want to play it again right now (so badly) despite having to stand up and move around and stuff, I want to play it again right now (so badly) because I want to stand up and move around and stuff. Reminds me of my 15yo self; all he wanted to do was play hours and hours of basketball in my driveway.

2. With the Wii Sports Pack, Nintendo has made it possible for those who are not physically gifted to nonetheless discover and explore their athletic gifts (like manual dexterity, quickness, timing, etc.). Even your gray-haired relatives can excel at bowling: "It was her 1st time ever playing video games and she has a high of 155 so far. Wii rocks!"

3. Possibly the best thing about the Wii is that you don't really need to be told how to use the controller. The boxing game has zero learning curve (just punch!).

4. Nintendo is betting the farm that just like megapixels don't matter as much nowadays when buying digital cameras as lens quality, camera features, etc., the number of polygons your console's processor spits out at what resolution matters less than how fun the games are. As someone who's nonplussed by fancy graphics in video games, I'll take that bet.

5. The menu interface is a little clunky. Did they not have time to get it right?

6. The day it's possible to buy NHL '94 through the Wii's Virtual Console, my life, such as it is, will be complete.

7. I'm curious how much fine control is possible with the Wiimote after a couple weeks of practice. With a conventional controller, very tiny adjustments are possible by pulsing or tapping the joypad or joystick...you can easily move Mario right to the edge of the staircase or subtly adjust your direction your kart is pointed on the track. But I found it difficult being that precise with the Wiimote while playing Super Monkey Ball.

Now all I need to do is get my own. :)

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 1:12PM

Originally from kottke.org, on November 30, 2006 8:22 AM

Ba Xuyen
4222 8th Ave. at 42nd St., Sunset Park, (718)633-6601.

"Ba Xuyên’s setup is pleasingly simple, as well as illiterate-friendly: Eight toasted [banh-mi] sandwich offerings are displayed via color transparencies, à la Burger King. My knees weaken for the No. 3, the shredded pork ($3). It offers tender, torn pork bits, a sandwich that could slide into a menu of a southern smokehouse. But the real whopper is the No. 4: the meatball ($3).

This is no rehashed Italian hero: Soft golf balls of pork and onion are topped with fresh ground pepper, then dressed with a dash of fish sauce. Order it extra-spicy (Ba Xuyên stints on jalapeños and chili sauce), then quench the burn with a fresh jackfruit milkshake ($2.50). They’ll occupy your stomach far better than the French did ’nam." [NY Press]

Photo by The Hungry Cabbie for Gothamist

After the jump: Patsy Grimaldi himself makes slices at Aviator; Queen reigns as Chowhounder's fave Brooklyn resto.

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Brooklyn Record reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 12:25PM

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on November 30, 2006 8:22 AM

I suspect that anyone who likes ongoing and isn’t already reading Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed ought to start. He’s really got a gift for the medium; it’s a rare day when he doesn’t run something that makes me want to write. Here are a few samples from this month: The New Venture Rules, Part XXIV: Get Big Cheap, Supreme Court Today on Patent Obviousness, and Comparing Reach Across Mobile and PC for Popular Sites. [Disclosure: Paul and I are both investors in Dabble DB.]

Originally from ongoing reBlogged

Originally from ongoing, on November 30, 2006 8:22 AM

Nice thread of people providing examples of gifts that aren't really gifts. "The ideal is one that does not insult upon opening, that, in fact, seems like a great gift until living with it for a couple months." Worst gift I've ever heard of anyone getting: a turtle as a housewarming gift. Who gives someone a turtle? Was the wine store closed?

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 2:59PM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on November 30, 2006 8:16 AM

Example application for Final Cut Pro, demonstrating communication using AppleEvents, project modification using XML, and media file identification us

Originally from Apple Developer Connection Apple Applications Headlines reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 3:00AM

Originally from Apple Developer Connection Apple Applications Headlines, on November 30, 2006 8:16 AM

These types of bills aren't about foie gras as much as they are about animal cruelty. Kate then asks some questions that we should consider when trying to legislate against animal cruelty. She exactly nails what bothers me about the recent spate of foie gras legislation.

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 4:53PM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on November 30, 2006 8:14 AM

a simple, dynamic clock made out of flickr images with user-specified tags.

see also amaztype & dotclock.

[link: hottoast.org]

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 9:17PM

Originally from information aesthetics, on November 29, 2006 1:11 PM

Originally from Wooster Collective reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 7:40AM

Originally from Wooster Collective, on November 29, 2006 1:11 PM

Scott Stevenson has posted the second part of his Intro to Quartz tutorial at Cocoa Dev Central.

The visual production of his tutorials is always really impressive, because he identifies (by instinct, I assume) the best graphical illustrations for any given point. This second Quartz tutorial is especially notable for the scope of techniques it covers, from simple paths to complex cutouts, transparent overlays, and drawing directly to an image. These concepts are covered by Apple’s documentation, but never with so much lush imagery as on Scott’s site.

Most of us just blog on a whim, with little attention to overall production value, but Scott’s articles on Cocoa Dev Central are clearly well-planned works of art. He’s accumulated quite a collection of articles that cover many of the basics, and some of the more advanced techniques involved in programming a Mac. Check them out!

Originally from Red Sweater Blog by Daniel Jalkut reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 10:31AM

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on November 29, 2006 1:01 PM

Google stops accepting questions over at Google Answers. They’ll stop accepting answers by the end of the year. Ten to one they roll out some freebie service a la Yahoo Answers or Askville within the next six months (I have heard through the rumor mill that it may be much sooner than that). Interesting discussion over on MetaFilter about it which briefly compares and contrasts some of the Ask services with library services. I was also interviewed for a short article about Google Answers today on ArsTechnica. It’s a weird sort of power law that if your site comes up high on a Google Search for a topic, and you’re contactable, you wind up talking to more reporters about it.

arstechnica, google, googleanswers, rip

Originally from librarian.net by jessamyn reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 10:10AM

Originally posted by jessamyn from librarian.net, on November 29, 2006 1:01 PM

Google Maps satellite view of where Marlo hangs out on The Wire. (thx, turbanhead)

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 9:21AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on November 29, 2006 1:01 PM

It's time to start thinking about holiday gift-giving. For the readers on your list, here are some book recommendations.

NYTimes: 100 Notable Books of the Year.

And these are the best books I read this year:

1. 1491, Charles C. Mann. This is the best book I've read in years.... [ my full review]
2. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark. Delightful. I thoroughly enjoyed both the style of the book and the humor. An impressive piece of writing.
3. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond. Clear, readable, and unbelievably interesting.... [ my full review ]
4. Plainsong, Kent Haruf. Earnest, beautiful, stylized, gorgeous, life-affirming, unforgettable.
5. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan. This is a great book: thoughtful, thought provoking, and well written.... [ my full review ]
6. Radio: An Illustrated Guide, Jessica Abel, Ira Glass. This book does exactly what it says: tell you how to plan, execute and broadcast a radio show. The technology is out of date, but I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in radio documentary or podcasting.
7. Don't Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff. This book really does make sense of the current political climate. I now better understand the right and the left.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee. Somehow, I never got around to reading this book before now. It is perfect. I'll read it again. I can't imagine a more compassionate depiction of childhood, small town life, the South, race in the United States, or humanity in general. Oh, and it's beautifully written. My nomination for the Great American Novel.
9. Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins. Smart, interesting, and right on the money. A little academic for most people's taste, but I agree with almost everything Dr. Jenkins has to say. A compelling and non-hyped vision of the future of our culture.
10. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age, Henry Jenkins. Just fantastic. Although it's much more academic, I enjoyed this book even more than Convergence Culture because it took me inside the world of fan communities, a world I've only barely glimpsed before now.... [ my full review]
11. And a tentative recommendation for Personal Finance for Dummies, Eric Tyson, which I am reading right now and finding surprisingly deep for a Dummies book. I read numerous personal finance books last year, and this one, so far, seems to at least equal the best of that bunch.

Update: Jordan Cooper posts his list of the 11 Best Books he read in 2006. If you post your own list, please ping me via trackback or add the link in comments. Non-blogging readers, please post your lists in comments, too. What were the best books you read this year?

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 10:59AM

Originally from Rebecca's Pocket, on November 29, 2006 1:01 PM

Geek Unit:

After only being released for around a week, the Wii's built in (and very neutered) Opera browser has been hacked to allow surfing to almost any website.

Originally from hello, nintendo by David Jacobs reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 12:15PM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, nintendo, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

A day after YouTube announced its limited deal with Verizon Wireless, rival video sharing site Revver has also announced a deal, also with VZW. One piece of info: VZW will be the exclusive wireless distributor of Revver content in the U.S. for the next 12 months.
Revver attaches ads to the end of its videos and then splits the revenue 50-50 with content creators. Because Revver videos carried by VZW won’t feature ads, Revver will pass on half of the revenue it receives from the wireless carrier to content creators. That’s more than you can say about YouTube.
Again, exclusive deals still don’t make sense....it might be that VZW plans to lock in many of the video sharing sites...at least the ones with any traction.

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 11:12AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

This is exactly what programmers should be doing: MTV networks is going deep into niches by developing 20+ websites. Each site focuses on a different audience - and each will have its own URL. In addition to several different music sites, there will be sites that focus on games, dance, entertainment and personal development. Local stations can learn from this. Rather than making people come to a “master site” and dig around, you should be developing micro-sites that focus on niche markets. As long as they are using and sharing your content, what do you care what the URL is? Make the content fun, useful and easy to find. Says Brian Graden, president of entertainment for the MTV Networks Music Group, “The one thing that we do know is that these do not represent television on the Web… It’s all about aggregating as many impressions and page views as you can in any numbers of ways.”

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 11:12AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

We're now officially tracking news and conversation in 51 US cities at outside.in, plus a bunch of smaller communities that our users have contributed. We created a new map that shows our overall coverage. In the next few days, we're going to have it updated so that it shows statistics for each city: most active neighborhoods, total number of posts, etc. Some version of this is likely to become integrated into the front door of the site, since I think it will do a much better job of pushing people towards areas where we have a lot of data.

reBlogged on Nov 19, 2006, 7:51AM
Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com

Originally from randomwalks/dj by David Jacobs

reBlogged

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 11:12AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

Agenda Inc.:
Fake chinese electronics selling better than originals: Chinese electronics pirates have been very busy, churning out excellent copies of LG’s Chocolate phone right down to the glowing touch-controlled keypad and smooth sliding action. LG took so long to get a Chinese version ready, that by the time they launched theirs into the market, the copied Chinese version had been on sale for so long that LG’s phone was seen as the fake item copying the ‘original’ Chinese version.

<!-- technorati tags start -->

Technorati Tags: copy, electronics, fake, lg chocolate , mobile, phone

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Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 11:12AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

Today, Opera Software introduced Opera Mini 3.0, the latest version of its mobile browser already used by eight million people worldwide.

New features in Opera Mini 3.0 include:

• Easy photo sharing
• RSS Feed Reader
• Secure banking/shopping
• Content folding
• Faster surfing

The upgrade, available today, introduces new features that enhance mobile social networking abilities with photo sharing, RSS feeds and secure connections.

Opera Mini is not tied to any single service, so it offers a personal Web experience that can be used to easily browse and upload pictures to all online community sites, including MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook and My Opera, as well as securely using popular webmail such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

It features secure connections, Opera Mini makes all Web transactions safe, including banking or shopping on eBay or Amazon.

Opera Mini is globally available free of charge and enables Web browsing on almost any mobile phone. Only an Internet data plan through your carrier/operator is needed to access the Internet.

Mashable likes it:

You can easily browse and upload pictures to social sites, including MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook and My Opera. When you click a link to upload photos to these sites, Opera Mini activates the phone’s camera, allowing you to take a picture and upload it right away. Flickr already provides email uploading, and services like Shozu offer mobile uploading to Flickr, Blogger, Webshots and other popular sites. That said, having all this within the browser is super-convenient.

Opera Mini is a free download, but you’ll need an Internet data plan to access it on your cell phone.

The Opera Browser is also included in the Nintendo Wii and DS which can use inexpensive WiFi connections.  Opera’s Widgets allow a high degree of customization.

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 11:12AM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

It takes a bit of practice to roll sushi perfectly, so don’t worry if you don’t get it right on the first try! A great guide to how to roll maki sushi. I made maki once at home and it was delicious, though my rolls were kind of deformed. I should try again. [via Lifehacker]

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 10:33AM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

Last year TypePad introduced a new feature called "TypePad Widgets." To accompany this feature we wanted to provide a way for 3rd parties to easily inject their widgets onto TypePad weblogs. We initially started down the path that everyone else did: by re-inventing some XML based protocol/schema for packaging and describing widgets. It didn't take us long to realize that the methodology we were devising was far too complicated for the vast majority of people. Then someone had the idea, "why not just let the person POST the widget via a web form?"

And we're happy to see others embracing these kinds of APIs as well -- Google recently deployed a similarly simple Widget API for their Blogger service. They now allow 3rd parties to post widgets into Blogger blogs via a simple HTML web form, and it should be pretty easy to reuse your TypePad widget work there as well.

Originally from ProNet by Byrne Reese reBlogged

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from ProNet, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

What happened was, very shortly before last month’s Startup Camp, they started cooking up this idea of selling Sun gear really cheap to startups. Someone asked “Can we announce it in conjunction with that camp?” and the answer was “Well, uh...”, so we did. So, we all of a sudden had a bunch of people wanting in, and our lawyers told us “You have to exercise due diligence to make sure they really are real startups” and someone had to cook up a process out of nowhere double-quick. It seems to be working; yesterday Adam Kalsey got approved and dumped the numbers. I saw it and thought “Hah, gotta blog that” but Jonathan beat me to it; damn he’s quick. Check those numbers; I’m no expert in our pricing but a couple that jump off the screen at me are the big Ultra 20 and the Thumper (X4500). How can this not be a good idea?

Originally from ongoing reBlogged

Originally from ongoing, on November 29, 2006 12:57 PM

• Bonfire of the Puggle -- New York Magazine
  Two forensic pathologists, an ex-con, and the hunt for one irresistible designer dog.
  (tags: puggles nyc)

Originally from kathryn yu dot com reBlogged on Nov 29, 2006, 12:20AM

Originally from kathryn yu dot com, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

Robert Scoble on HDTV: "Hey, I know he’s a billionaire. Owns the Dallas Mavericks. And invested in an HD movie company. I can still teach him something. Today he said that it’ll be a long time before your PC will connect to an HDTV because your PC doesn’t have the right connections. I say that’s poppycock."

I think Scoble is totally right on. Poppycock.

With fiber optics now avail in Long Island and expected to be in Manhattan next year along with the iTV from Apple in January, I'd say 2007 will see some sparks at least.

RSS media enclosures are ideal for this kind of transition. Rocketboom is recorded in 1080i and distributed in 720p. It looks beautiful. Better than local network news on the same TV. The demand for this file type is on the rise. We already have four points of iHD distribution.

Meanwhile, I was rooting for Dan Rather's come back, but his reports are only available a subscription and I'm usually busy at 7pm on Tuesdays. The network would probably do better if you could watch online too.

What's happening here is that Dan Rather has become a tool; now all of that work he puts into stories is stifled because the greater cause is driving traffic to Cuban's obscure business. Not that this is wrong, it's just sad because Dan Rather of all people should not be caged up like this.

It reminds me of Michael Eisner's show which debuted and crashed this year on NBC with an audience of only 95,000 (less than Rocketboom). The show probably would have made it if it were distributed online as well.

Originally from Dembot by Drew reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 11:14PM

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

he worked on the original site and has an interesting insider view of the original's failure  

Originally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 12:28PM

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

Next time someone writes you a rambling, repetitive, waste of time email, respond with just this link.

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 10:16AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

The future of Fulton Mall has been getting a lot of press lately, but a recent news segment on Brooklyn Independent TV digs a little deeper. Reporter Megan Donis talks to Vicki Weiner of the Pratt Center, whose research has uncovered a serious rift between perception and reality when it comes to the downtown shopping center. Weiner explains:

"Among the perceptions that really differed from the data we collected was about the financial status of shoppers. We were told that it was a really low-income shopping area and that very poor people shop here, but we actually found a pretty equal distribution of household incomes... We were also told that it's all chains — no original shops there, and that turned out to be untrue as well."

For example, Fulton Mall is home to Beat Street Records, an independent shop that's "known worldwide as one of the premiere places for hip hop." We were also surprised to learn that in 2006, an estimated 100,000 people visit the mall each day. To improve Fulton Mall, the Pratt Center recommends embracing old-meets-new-budiling designs, putting housing in the mall's upper floors, and promoting and enhancing the hip hop music and fashion themes in the mall.
Fulton Mall Segment [Brooklyn Independent TV
"Botoxing" Fulton Street Mall [Brooklyn Record]

Originally from Brooklyn Record by Brooklyn Record reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 10:11AM

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

Wired.com’s Listening Post blog touches on the back-asswards Zune player and its non-compatibility with Creative Commons licenses. The crux of the issue is that the Zune will apply DRM to any song that is shared (or, um, ‘squirted’) between Zunes via the wifi feature regardless of what license is applied to the song. Creative Commons is adding language to their licenses that will explicitly make it a violation of the license to do this.

Read the story (with comments) here.

It will be interesting to see if any lawsuits result because of this. Have there been any CC-related lawsuits yet?

Originally from MTAA Reference Resource by T.Whid reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 9:52AM

Originally posted by T.Whid from MTAA Reference Resource, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

What often happens is that I'm standing in a pizza line next to a big guy and two pizza slices come fresh out of the oven for us. The server takes a look at me and then at him and gives me the smaller piece and him the bigger piece.

JUST BECAUSE I'M THIN DOESN'T MEAN I LIKE SMALLER FOOD!!!!

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 9:43AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on November 29, 2006 12:32 AM

Cory Doctorow:
There's a new, faster, more efficient version of Democracy Player out today. Democracy is the free and open Internet video player that can subscribe to easily-published video feeds. It automatically fetches new videos using BitTorrent (so the video-maker's server is never overwhelmed by sudden popularity) and it plays it no matter what video format it's in.

Version 0.92, released today, fixes a ton of performance issues, mostly in the Windows version (Democracy is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux). If you've tried Democracy before and had problems with it, this is the version to get. Link

(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Board of Directors of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the charity that oversees Democracy)

Originally from unmediated by yatta reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 12:21PM

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on November 28, 2006 9:44 PM

In this interview with .net magazine, Flickr founder Caterina Fake likens building an online community to throwing a party:

According to Caterina: "The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well." When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. "After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. "People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It's always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.

I recall those early days of Flickr...Stewart and Caterina were everywhere, commenting on everything. A core group of people followed their example and began to do the same, including Heather Champ, who now manages Flickr's community in an official capacity. Matt did a similar thing with MetaFilter too...he spent a lot of time interacting with people on there, taking their coats, and before long others were pitching in.

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 2:33PM

Originally from kottke.org, on November 28, 2006 9:42 PM

via NYTimes:
Whitney's Expansion Plans Are Shifting South, to the Meatpacking District
By CAROL VOGEL
Published: November 28, 2006

A month after the Dia Art Foundation scrapped its plans to open a museum at the entrance to the High Line, the abandoned elevated railway line that the city is transforming into a public park, the Whitney Museum of American Art has signed on to take its place and build a satellite institution of its own downtown.

The Whitney recently reached a conditional agreement on Wednesday night with the city's Economic Development Corporation to buy the city-owned site, at Gansevoort and Washington streets, officials at the museum said yesterday. Plans call for the new museum to be at least twice the size of the Whitney's home on Madison Avenue at 75th Street, they said, and to be finished within the next five years.

The deal, which has still to go through a public review process before it is final, puts an end to the Whitney's plan to for a nine-story addition by the architect Renzo Piano that would connect to the museum's original 1966 Marcel Breuer building via a series of glass bridges. It will be the third time in 11 years that the museum has commissioned a celebrity architect to design a major expansion to its landmark building, only to pull out.

"This is a more prudent step to take," Leonard A. Lauder, chairman of the Whitney's board, said by telephone yesterday. "Yet it is an adventurous step. We think the new site will have a big enough impact so that it will become a destination."[read on...]

Originally from NEWSgrist - where spin is art by joy garnett reBlogged

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on November 28, 2006 9:42 PM

A few days ago, Michael McCann blogged about a growing number of tests of David Stern's influence. It was a post related to his new paper, that abstract of which reads, in part:

The core argument may be expressed as follows: required genetic testing of NBA players appears consistent with a broader and largely deleterious agenda by the NBA to control players. Since implementation of the rookie wage scale in 1995 through the recent imposition of a paternalistic player dress code, the NBA has increasingly usurped player autonomy. The NBA's capacity to do so largely rests in its adroit manipulation of the situational influences that influence fans and media. For instance, because of unappreciated cognitive biases, fans and media often embrace distorted views of player's maturity, arrest propensity, and collegiate experiences. As a result, NBA players tend to be wrongly identified as immature, out-of-control, and hopelessly uneducated. In turn, the NBA has designed policies that ostensibly remedy these feigned problems while less-detectably transferring autonomy from player to league. In short, the league sees that others often fail to see, and that enables it to surreptitiously control players.

When I first blogged about it, I responded that we needed to hear more from McCann in a podcast.

Here it is in MP3 form. It's about half an hour. Plenty of interesting stuff there.

And, for good measure, here too is a response to McCann's paper from the blog Michael Redd Your Boat Ashore:

McCann is best when describing how the NBA manipulates the fans and sports media to support the policies the league implements. According to McCann, certain social “knowledge structures” and “cognitive biases” oversimplify complicated issues and lead to the production of inaccurate systems of belief. These belief systems ultimately make it easier for the NBA to usurp player autonomy by disguising the league’s policies as common sense.

For example, we tend to see the collective bargaining agreements of the Players Association—such as those that led to the rookie wage scale in 1995—as serving the best interests of all NBA players. Yet, for McCann, our faith in collectively-bargained rules represents an “attribution error,” or a failure to analyze the more nuanced and less-observable aspects of the negotiation process. McCann wisely points out that the players often affected most by these agreements are those without voice in the bargaining process—namely, the soon-to-be rookies themselves. Furthermore, because of the absence of viable alternative basketball leagues, McCann suggests, even those players represented in bargaining agreements are more likely to capitulate to league demands.

That mini-essay has lots of interesting points, and is well worth the read. However, it wraps up with an idea that I totally disagree with:

I want only to express why I find it off-putting to employ the discourse of labor rights in a conversation about multi-million dollar athletes. I prefer to save the efficacy of that language for underpaid blue-collar laborers, undocumented immigrants, and sex workers—just to name a few.

There is not a rate of pay that makes exploitation OK. Wrong is wrong, and if it's wrong for an employer to test an employee's DNA, then it's wrong for the Bulls to test Eddy Curry's DNA, right? And, think about it this way: I have heard that plenty of NBA players are almost bankrupt, despite their high incomes. (Anyone who spends more than they make can have money trouble.) Hypothetically--I have no reason to believe Curry himself has money problems--what if Eddy Curry has already spent every penny he's ever going to earn and then some? What if he's destined to live on the street one day? Does he suddenly qualify for a right to DNA privacy?

Originally from True Hoop by Henry Abbott reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 6:03PM

Originally posted by Henry Abbott from True Hoop, on November 28, 2006 8:12 PM

del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.

Ed. note: At this point, the del.icio.us web server started singing "Daisy, Daisy" and soon after, Skynet achieved consciousness.

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 5:00PM

Originally from kottke.org, on November 28, 2006 8:12 PM

The Nintendo Wii is an amazing and magical device that, for the last week, has left my heart full of joy and my sad geeky arm sore and full of pain. But perhaps the most charming thing about this wee electronic device is the Help Cat.

As Cabel's video beautifully demonstrates, a small animation which makes an everyday function become a frustrating and mystifying experience can somehow entertain an entire roomful of adults. This, truly, is magic. I don't want to go on at too much length about my enjoyment of the Wii; It strains my relationships with my friends and coworkers who don't yet have one. Instead, I'd advocate checking in on Hello, Nintendo or checking out all the Wii action on Vox.

Originally from Anil Dash by Anil reBlogged

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on November 28, 2006 8:12 PM

As per usual, an awesome video from Japan. Makes me miss Japan even more but I'll be there soon enough - just one month to go!!

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 8:33AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on November 28, 2006 8:31 AM

Fred, the winner of our put MAKE on a Wii request sent in how you can get to websites on your Nintendo Wii... He writes:

Basically it's very easy but it didnt work until i restarted my computer. Most of the info was from here...

1. Install Simple DNS Plus
2. Go to Tools -> Edit DNS Records and Tools -> Quick Domain Wizard. Put oss.shop.wii.com for the domain and the comuter's ip for webserver ip.
3. Install Apache 2.2 with the computer's ip for both domains and admin@ip for the email
4. Install PHP 5.2 from http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.2.0-win32-installer.msi/from/a/mirror to the apache /conf
5. directory (make sure there's a popup asking if you want to change apache's configuration, un/reinstall if it doesnt)
6. Download WiiBrowse from http://kontek.net/mozy/wii/ or http://1337.lastunicorn.info/WiiBrowse.zip and extract to \htdocs in apache
7. Restart apache from the taskbar
8. Change the connection setting on the wii so that the primary DNS is your computer's ip
9. Launch the shop channel and you should see google. Done!

I think this only works when the wii is getting wifi through the computer. Pages on the wii are cutoff but people have fixed this by using frames and it cant browse pages with javascript (Gmail) or view flash.

Anyways it was fun, and thank you very much!

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Originally from MAKE: Blog by philliptorrone

reBlogged by Matthew Haughey on Nov 26, 2006, 4:48AM

Originally from mathowie reBlog feed by philliptorrone reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 1:33AM

Originally posted by philliptorrone from mathowie reBlog feed , on November 28, 2006 8:31 AM

Players of the Nintendo Wii are getting more exercise than they bargained for; reports of "Wii elbow" abound. Making the supreme sacrifice, one gamer is "vowing nightly 'Wii workouts' to get in better shape". What a trooper!

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 9:53AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on November 28, 2006 8:30 AM

Woah. Easy there tiger panda!

Watch mom's defensive hunchback and check out her "talk to the hand" that she does with her right hind paw.

Recommended viewing style: Over and over and over again. It's the only way to ensure "getting it".

Thanks to Sally/Sal Pal/Petal Pop for the link!

Originally from Andrea Harner by Andrea reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 9:05AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on November 28, 2006 8:30 AM

Hello, world! is an installation for the virtual globe of the software Google Earth (carried out by students from the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany):

A Semacode measuring 160 x 160 meters was mown into a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18 x 18 bright and dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”.
The project was realized in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture flight in the following month.

See the weblog of the project here.
Why do I blog this? I may be an old fart about this project but I found interesting to have a visual code (i.e. a connector between the first world and the second “virtual” world) of such dimensions.

Originally from pasta and vinegar by Nicolas reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 7:39AM

Originally posted by Nicolas from pasta and vinegar, on November 28, 2006 8:30 AM

Sadly it's that time of year again. At some point in the next few days, I'll be making my final trip of 2006 to the Shake Shack for my last Shack burger and black and white shake. With the weather being as warm as it is, perhaps they'll consider staying open longer? That could be a plus of global warming: a longer Shack Shake season.

Originally from Megnut by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 11:50AM

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on November 28, 2006 8:27 AM

Robert Price is a great guy who posted a while back on how to set up Movable Type to receive a post from Nokia Lifeblog. Indeed, he's been keeping an eye on Lifeblog and just upgraded to an N93. There, he found some new inconsistencies in the Lifeblog posting protocol.

If you use MT and Lifeblog*, then go read what he has to say (link below). He has the code and a drop in replacement for MT's AtomServer.pm.

Way to go, Rob.

Link: Robert Price - Nokia Lifeblog Posting Protocol Update.

Nokia seem to have updated their Atom upload protocol in recent versions of their phones.

I've just got hold of a Nokia N93 and tried posting to this blog using Lifeblog and the new Web Upload functionality in the Gallery with use the Atom protocol.

These postings were failing with a bad password error. I know my username and password are correct and they worked using my old phone.

As I had written my own blogging software, and it's Atom upload functionality I was able to debug the messages being sent from the phone to the server.

It turns out that newer versions of Nokia Lifeblog encrypt their passwords differently to older versions.

*Ok, so maybe Lifeblog isn't the hottest thing (if it ever was). But, I can tell you that the Lifeblog Posting Protocol is the same code used by the Web Uploader that now comes integrated into the Gallery on all recent (and, I expect, future) Nseries phones. So, if you want to have an Nseries phone post items to your server via Atom, then learn this posting protocol. TypePad does it (partly my doing). Flickr does it (partly my doing), but oddly (not my doing). Rob did it (all his doing). And Vox does it (all their doing).

Originally from Lifeblog by charlie reBlogged

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on November 28, 2006 8:25 AM

AOL has been generously hosting builds of the toolkit in their CDN for some time, but using these builds has always seemed scary. Configuring local and remote copies of the same thing hardly seems like fun. Also, lots of people ask us for a way to “just include one file to get Dojo”. It’s an obvious thing to do, and it turns out the cross-domain infrastructure that AOL donated is the perfect solution to both problems!

In response to Amit Green’s excellent suggestion, I’ve constructed a couple of very small “wrapper” files that will let you include the “Ajax” build of Dojo from various versions through the cross-domain loader. Including the latest stable Dojo couldn’t be simpler:

<script src="http://download.dojotoolkit.org/dojo_0.3.1.js"></script>

It’s also trivial to test out the latest 0.4.1 Release Candidate:

<script src="http://download.dojotoolkit.org/dojo_0.4.1rc2.js"></script>

That’s all there is to it!

From here on in, your pages can use the dojo.require() system to pull in anything that’s part of the “stock” distribution, and by following James’ detailed documentation and test page, you can also load your own custom packages while still loading the main system from a separate domain.

Originally from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency by alex reBlogged on Nov 28, 2006, 7:00AM

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on November 28, 2006 8:14 AM

*:first-child+html div.class { burger: medium-rare; }

And with that, Matt gave birth to Apperceptive's first (and definitely not last) IE7 hack.

Originally from hello, typepad by David Jacobs reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 2:06PM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on November 27, 2006 2:32 PM

I got a Wii on Friday evening.

The adventure (it is true that I live a somewhat boring life) starting Thursday night, when Jen (my wife) learned that our local Best Buy would be receiving a shipment of 30-some consoles.  She offered to go while I was at work and pick one up.

I drove by on my way to work that morning, and there were two lines extending around both sides of the building.  I learned both that the store was also acquiring some PS3s, which explained the second line, and that they had received 39 consoles.  The line was at least 60-people strong; the consoles had been claimed.

Somewhat crestfallen and certainly late to work, I stopped for some coffee then continued in to my place of employ.  Listlessly, I checked Best Buy's website, saw that inventory was at 0 at every store within 100km, and tried to do some of the things my employer pays me to do.

My wife (have I mentioned awesome?) did not give up so easily, and started searching various online sources.  Somewhere in Amazon's listings for the Wii she found someone in Toronto selling one for $800 (all dollar values in this post, like me, are Canadian), a bundle that also included an extra remote and nunchunk and Twilight Princess.

A few emails later she had talked the seller down a few hundred dollars to an price that was still a fair bit above the retail cost for the bundle, but easy enough to rationalize by telling ourselves we were paying other people to stand in long lines over cold nights for us.

My wife's birthday was on Sunday and we were having a party on Saturday and our house, never terribly organized to begin with, was in fairly dire straits after three months of chaos introduced by the birth of our son.  We'd started cleaning earlier in the week, but Friday's arrival meant we needed to pick up the pace somewhat, so even though we had the console we had little time to play.

We played Wii Sports for about an hour, and quite enjoyed ourselves. Bowling was an instant favorite.  The game itself probably doesn't have very strong legs.  We'll get a little bit of enjoyment from it, and as a tech demo it is fantastic, but I think I am not alone in saying that I don't expect it to be in our console all that often after the first couple of weeks.

I also played Zelda for an hour, and so far I am extremely pleased with it.  Swordplay controls are overly complicated I think, but I have only just reached the point in the game where I have been introduced to combat, so as I become more familiar I may change my tune.

I am well-pleased with the visuals, as was most everyone who saw the game.  Our television is some five years old, maybe even six I have not yet done the math.  It is a 27" CRT that is starting to warp slightly, so high definition is not at this point a concern for me, but I can understand how fans of what the 360 has been doing and the PS3's promise would not be so impressed at this point.  The graphics are pretty sharp, but they aren't at the level of detail of a Gears of War, say.

The Wii without question 100% proved itself on Saturday.  We had people of all ages there curious to play Wii Sports and after a few minutes without exception every single one of them was a competent bowler or baseball player or golfer.  Tennis and boxing were not quite as popular with the group, in part I think because they are the two most complex games, they feature direct head-to-head competition and unlike baseball are fairly fast-paced.

Nintendo seems to have nailed what I was hoping for, which probably means their marketing efforts managed my expectations quite well.  It is certainly not a perfect device but what flaws exist seem fairly minor so far.  I am very much looking forward to getting deeper into Zelda and learning if it can handle typical console fair as well as it does games specifically written for it.

I was surprised with how comfortable it is to use the nunchuck attachment.  Both the nunchuck itself and the generous length of cable offered.  For me, Nintendo has always had the best controllers, and I am one of those freaks who loves the hell out of the N64 controller (I have even complained about the GameCube controller).  The nunchuck to me feels sort of like they too the middle arm of the N64 controller, which is about as complimentary a thing I can say.

Jen and I created a couple of Miis to represent ourselves, and apparently she created a few more yesterday to represent some friends, but beyond that I haven't really explored the Wii Channels to any degree, and don't really know when I'll try the VC games.  Other than the original Zelda I don't much care for any of the titles they've made available so far, although I played Donkey Kong in an arcade a few weeks back and just might have to pick it up.

Before recommending that someone who isn't a committed Nintendo fan boy buy the console, I would definitely suggest they try it first.  It is a little bit different than what people think of when they think video games, but I can say that my 360-owning PS3-wanting brother-in-law was sold I think possibly from the very second that he picked up the remote. 

In terms of launch titles, there are a few that are somewhat compelling, but other than Zelda I think there's a good chance we'll rent before buying any of them.  Mario and Zelda are my two favorite series of games, and they typify the genres I enjoy playing as well. For someone with tastes like mine there's not a lot in the current swath of titles that's especially compelling, and to me that suggests that for many, waiting until there are more titles is a better option than overpaying or standing in line. 

I do have hopes that Nintendo and the third-party developers will start churning out the games, but in reality it will probably take another year before there's a serious library, just like with most every other console.

Originally from hello, nintendo by Rob Drimmie reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 11:31AM

Originally posted by Rob Drimmie from hello, nintendo, on November 27, 2006 11:39 AM

Jeff Chang writes:

From Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop, my man Danny Hoch and the back story on "Seinfeld", Seinfeld, Kramer and race--with a diversion into Tarantinoland.

Danny Hoch recounts meeting with the Seinfeld cast and encountering the "everyday" sort of racism that pervades our culture. In this context, Michael Richard's recent meltdown is revealed as a hair's breadth away from a much bolder sort of racism. Anil notes that the incident was a perfect storm of racial tension and disconnected cultures⁰.

I saw the World Premier of Jails, Hospitals and Hip-Hop on my first weekend in living in New York. At the time, I was convinced the movie I saw was going to change the world. The movie I saw never made the light of day - Rawkus, originally a co-producer on the film, pulled the music rights which forced a major re-edit of the film and (in my opinion) softened it's impact. Hoch's career (see youtube¹), still impressive, was never quite the same.

⁰: I want to call this a "miasma," but I can't quite get the sentence right.

¹: Dembot - "YouTube fills the role of that place to get prerecorded video in the same way CNN fills the role of live news... Google² knows the value of this entry point really well, proven again by their acquisition of YouTube."

²: Tricia Wang on how Google reveals stereotypes - "I performed the original google image search just on "Asian women," "American women," and "Asian American women" for a presentation on stereotypes and identities of Asian American Youth. I want to demonstrate the pervasive stereotypes of Asian women – just how hyper-hyper sexualized they are. And it’s interesting to show that when you Google image search – there is no hierarchies of approval that the images have to go through like for traditional media (newspapers, TV shows and etc, where images usually become racialized in the approval process."

Unrelated: Google Launches transit maps in Southern California.

Originally from hello, typepad by David Jacobs reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 8:50AM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on November 27, 2006 9:35 AM

Vox is the best place for Wii chatter, including finding friend codes, exploring Zelda's timeline, or just letting Wii fanatics do the news scouring for you.

Originally from hello, nintendo by David Jacobs reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 12:24AM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, nintendo, on November 27, 2006 12:32 AM

Two great Wii videos this weekend. Kid Icarus fans are praying for a sequel:
Someone is already much better at bowling than I'll ever be:


Thanks, Jason!

Originally from hello, nintendo by David Jacobs reBlogged on Nov 27, 2006, 12:19AM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, nintendo, on November 27, 2006 12:32 AM

incredible resource; you could spend weeks exploring any one of these projects  

Originally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 9:07PM

Originally from Waxy.org Links, on November 26, 2006 9:44 PM

Jürgen Schweizer, MacDevCenter.com: “A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me to write a Mac-based HTTP server for an intranet web service he was building. I hadn’t forgotten how Mac OS X was praised because of its Unix underpinnings, and the strong networking capabilities that come along with that. As a Cocoa developer, I was confident that I could find a nice Cocoa API that would do the hard work for me, so I accepted...”

Originally from ranchero.com by Brent Simmons reBlogged on Nov 14, 2006, 7:39PM

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on November 26, 2006 9:44 PM

Yesterday Anil and I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Steven Johnson for our podcast series at books.typepad.com.  As the kids say, [this is good].  Take a listen, and forgive us our bumper, as we forgive those who've bumpered against us.

Originally from this is sippey.typepad.com by Michael Sippey reBlogged

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on November 26, 2006 9:44 PM

I wrote a piece for the The New Yorker a few weeks ago about a group of people who have created a neural network that predicts (or tries to predict) the box office of movies from their scripts. (It's not up on my site yet, but will be soon).

The piece drew all kinds of interesting responses, a handful of which pointed out obvious imperfections in the system. Those criticisms were entirely accurate. But they were also, I think, in some way beside the point, because no decision rule or algorithm or prediction system is ever perfect. The test of these kinds of decision aids is simply whether--in most cases for most people--they improve the quality of decision-making. They can't be perfect. But they can be good.

In "Blink," for instance, I wrote about the use of a decision tree at Cook County Hospital in Chicago to help diagnose chest pain. Lee Goldman, the physican who devised the chest pain decision rule, says very clearly that he thinks that there are individual doctors here and there who can make better decisions without it. But nonetheless Goldman's work has saved lots and lot of lives and millions and miillions of dollars because it improves the quality of the average decision.

Is the average movie executive better off with a neural network for analyzing scripts than without it? My guess is yes. That's why I wrote the piece. I think that one of the most important changes we're going to see in lots of professions over the next few years is the emergence of tools that close the gap between the middle and the top--that allow the decision-making who is merely competent to avoid his errors to be reach the level of good.

I think the same perspective should be applied to the basketball algorithms I've been writing about. It is easy to point out the ways in which either Hollinger's system or Berri's system fail to completely reflect the reality of what happens on the basketball court. But of course they are imperfect: neither Berri or Hollinger would ever claim that they are not. The issue is--are we better off using them to assist decision-making that we are making entirely judgements about basketball players using conventional metrics? Here I think  the answer is a resounding yes. (Keep in mind that I live in New York City and have had to watch Mr. Thomas bungled his way toward disaster. I would think that.)

And the reason that lots of smart people, like Berri and Hollinger and others, spend so much time arguing back and forth about different variations on these algorithms, is that every little tweak raises the quality of decision-making in the middle part of the curve just a little bit higher. That's a pretty noble goal.

That said, here are the latest updates on the Hollinger-Berri back and forth. And remember. I don't think this is a question of one of them being wrong and the other right. They are both right. It's just that one of them may be a little more right than the other.

Here we go. First Hollinger's response, courtesy of truehoop.com, (an excellent site by the way.)

And then. Berri's response.

Originally from gladwell.com by malcolmgladwell reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 9:16PM

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on November 26, 2006 9:40 PM

    

    

See more of Michael Hughes' ongoing souvenir project.

Originally from FlickrBlog by Heather Champ reBlogged on Nov 14, 2006, 8:32PM

Originally posted by Heather Champ from FlickrBlog, on November 26, 2006 9:40 PM

chicagostyle
Originally uploaded by andrewc.

I'm still here and thinking, watching, reading, and eating food. And running.

I'm glad that Michael Ruhlman has found a blog home of his own. And yes, fat pigs taste gooood. I've checked. Praise the lard, indeed.

I finally ate at Zuni Cafe. I will not soon forget this beautiful plate of fries.

Originally from A Full Belly by Alaina Browne reBlogged

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from A Full Belly, on November 26, 2006 9:40 PM

For Thomas Dolby fans like us, there's a lot to look forward to right now. Along with the highly entertaining blog he's had for some time, TED's music director just released a beautifully produced podcast series with excerpts from his extraordinary tour earlier this year. He's also releasing a CD and DVD: "The Sole Inhabitant." For those in the Bay Area: The release party is this Thursday (Nov. 21) at San Francisco's Red Devil Lounge, where his national tour begins the following week.

Originally posted by June Cohen from TED Blog, on November 26, 2006 9:26 PM

We're now officially tracking news and conversation in 51 US cities at outside.in, plus a bunch of smaller communities that our users have contributed. We created a new map that shows our overall coverage. In the next few days, we're going to have it updated so that it shows statistics for each city: most active neighborhoods, total number of posts, etc. Some version of this is likely to become integrated into the front door of the site, since I think it will do a much better job of pushing people towards areas where we have a lot of data.

Originally from stevenberlinjohnson.com by stevenberlinjohnson reBlogged on Nov 19, 2006, 7:51AM

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on November 26, 2006 9:26 PM

Herewith, a breakdown of the cheeses that have passed through my kitchen over the last several days:

• Cheddar, muenster in omelettes
• Fontina, gorgonzola, pecorino, parmiggiano-reggiano, in fearsomely delicious four-cheese cream sauce served casserole-style over penne with bread crumbs (the P-R also appeared in salads, risotto, and the topping for the four-cheese business)
• Goat cheese, in salads
• Asiago and cream cheese, in and on bagels
• Brie, on toasty sourdough bread and/or crackers
• Feta, on exorbitantly tasty little Trader Joe’s “Pastry Bites” hors d’oeuvres, with caramelized onion on phyllo
• Something called Val D’Enza, among the more pedestrian cheeses on the Trader Joe’s pizzas that we may or may not get to what with the leftovers
• Mozzarella, which is still sitting by itself in my fridge, waiting for the call

Thirteen so far. Top that, I invite you.

Update: Fourteen! I forgot about those little cheese rounds that come wrapped in red wax, though we’re unable to figure out exactly what kind of cheese they are (further update: Edam). Tasty with olives.

Originally from bumppo.net by irons reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 7:51PM

Originally posted by irons from bumppo.net, on November 26, 2006 9:09 PM

Enterprise Rent-a-Car apparently has no plans to ever stop running their class-reunion TV spot. You've seen it—the guy is eager to impress the Class of 1994, so he pulls up in a rented Cadillac. Because, sure, you don't want to look like a failure at the all-important TWELVE-year reunion....

Originally from Stay Free! Daily by Jack Silbert reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 1:15AM

Originally posted by Jack Silbert from Stay Free! Daily, on November 26, 2006 2:02 PM

You could previously view Google Earth KML files in Google Maps, but, the Google Maps API Blog reports, you can now do a few more things with KML/KMZ files (e.g., image overlays) within the Google Maps interface....

Originally from The Map Room by Jonathan Crowe reBlogged on Nov 21, 2006, 10:33PM

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on November 26, 2006 2:02 PM

I've started writing a twice-a-week column for the Times Select site called Urban Planet, building on the urbanization themes of The Ghost Map. I've written two columns, but the first was more of an overview of the 1854 epidemic and why it mattered. But this second column, "Real America," posted a few minutes ago, is more of a broadside. Here are a few choice nuggets:

The problem with all the talk about Americans living in a country divided between red and blue states lies not in the idea of division itself. The problem lies in framing the whole issue around states. We do in fact live in a divided nation, but states are not the organizing principle we should use in thinking about the split. We are divided between the blue city and the red country...

City dwellers, we’re told, are not part of “real America.” No doubt this division made more sense in the early days of the republic, when the U.S. was more than 90% rural in its population. But today, only 20% of Americans live in rural areas. And whatever you think about the culture of urban life, it is an undeniable fact that the big cities are footing the bill for the residents of so-called “real America.” Blue states consistently pay more in taxes than they take in federal assistance; the opposite is true for the red states. Why? Because cities like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco, despite their welfare queens, are tremendous engines of wealth creation...

It’s one thing to celebrate the values of the American farmer and small-town civility. It’s another thing for city dwellers to be lectured about urban depravity and the “heartland” way of life, when cities are partially subsidizing that way of life...

Originally from stevenberlinjohnson.com by stevenberlinjohnson reBlogged on Nov 20, 2006, 9:25PM

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on November 26, 2006 2:02 PM

My most recent feature at work just went live!

Actually lots went live today, it was kind of crazy.

Originally from Laughing Meme reBlogged on Nov 20, 2006, 7:38PM

Originally from Laughing Meme, on November 26, 2006 2:02 PM

Over the past 4 months Six Apart has been working to help its developer and professional community to connect more with one another. That was the primary motivation behind starting the bi-weekly Professional Network phone calls (free to anyone to join in on), as well as why we wanted to host a Movable Type Hackathon here at the Six Apart offices.

It was a great success. Not only did we have a number of Six Apart engineers from the Rojo, Vox and TypePad teams with us, not only did we have several Six Apart partners with us like Socialtext and Technorati, but we had five ProNet members take time off of work to commit a whole day to the event. And then over the course of the rest of the week, other ProNet members were making announcements of the stuff they were working on remotely. What pleases me the most is that the Hackathon did not just produce a single day of hacking, for a single room full of people, but it inspired an even larger number of people to through out the week to do what they love: to build and contribute something to a community they belong to.

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, we will be profiling the people who participated, and highlighting the contributions they made during what turned out to be a week long Hackathon event through a series of blog posts and podcasts. So check back often, or subscribe to the ProNet blog to learn more about what we all produced, and to learn the answers to some of these burning questions:

• What is Jay Allen’s big news?
• What is Blog Cast?
• What is the best and worst freeway in Los Angeles?
• What new tools are being developed specifically designed for Movable Type developers?
• What’s the dealio with the “Hacking MT” web site?
• What cool new APIs is Socialtext making available to developers?
• If you threw a cell phone at a windshield, which do you think would break first?
• Who was the accidental tourist in Perl Programming Land?
• How will Movable Type and Socialtext be integrating more tightly in SuiteTwo?
• What new technology was Technorati working on while they were here?
• What are some really useful Movable Type plugins you may not have heard about?
• What were all the plugins and tools created during the Hackathon?
• And many many more…

Originally from ProNet by Byrne Reese reBlogged

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from ProNet, on November 26, 2006 2:02 PM

The Tofurky Disguise Kit. "You can print it in glorious full colour, or even in gritty black and white to create a mysterious Film Noir effect." Much as I dislike turkey, I despise fake meat so much more. This kit is so cute I'm tempted to print it out and stick it in all sorts of meats, even actual turkey. [ via Gothamist ]

Originally from cheesedip.com reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 8:27PM

Originally from cheesedip.com, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

By Chris Tuttle, Software Engineer

As we've mentioned before, the key to getting traffic from Google Base is providing rich and relevant attributes for every item. We've posted some suggestions to get you started with attribute names, but what's the best way to enter values for your attributes? Of course, there are several ways to ensure that you're entering relevant values, but the simplest and most important tip pertains to the use of abbreviations.

For example, is the gender supposed to be "female", "f", or "girl"? Should the job function be "sr. mgmt." or "management"? Is "sf" a good property type?

To quote from a famous physicist, "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" [1]. Use short and clear attribute values -- "female" and "management" are good examples -- and leave the abbreviations behind. People will have a better search experience, and your items can get more traffic.

[1] http://www.quotedb.com/quotes/1360

Originally from Official Google Base Blog by Google Base Blog reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 4:39PM

Originally posted by Google Base Blog from Official Google Base Blog, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

Brett Terpstra has released an update to his Backpack bundle. It is still a pre-release, but I have tested it, and it works for me :)

Here is his initial post about the bundle and for the uninitiated, Backpack is a web application from 37signals which has simple to-do lists, notes, and reminders.

Originally from TextMate Blog by Allan Odgaard reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 2:16PM

Originally posted by Allan Odgaard from TextMate Blog, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

Posted by Stephanie Hannon, Product Manager Transit

My previous trips to Southern California have required cars and involved a lot of traffic on the 405. Next time, however, I'll be using Google Transit to plan bus trips with Burbank Bus and the Orange County Transportation Authority. While they can't make the traffic disappear, I can relax as I travel between my favorite beaches or maybe from Bob Hope Airport to beautiful downtown Burbank.

The interest in open sharing and standards for transit data is growing. If you'd like your city to be a part of Google Transit, email us at labs-transit_content@google.com.

Originally from Official Google Blog by A Googler reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 1:44PM

Originally posted by A Googler from Official Google Blog, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

While I don't talk about my professional life on Capn Design very much (at least not anymore), I figured this was worth mentioning. I'm currently in the third week of a new job. I've left Jewish National Fund (amicably, of course) and moved on to a small web development shop by the name of Apperceptive. The majority of our business is in the blog world and that makes me very happy.

I've got more to say about the move, but I've decided to relegate my personal blogging to my vox blog. In fact, this will likely be a friends only post. So, if you're dying to read it, you better sign up for vox.

Originally from Capn Design reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 12:31PM

Originally from Capn Design, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

Unifying theme: none. Item: Excellent Rails-vs.-Django study. No axe to grind, apparently. No obvious winner, which is news given the Rails hype. Item: Dana Blankenhorn’s Means and ends in open source; very thought-provoking. My guess is that the immense licensing fees driving the bloated sales infrastructures at Oracle, SAP, and friends are small in relation to the whole software acquire/deploy/maintain monetary pie, so the size of the whole industry isn’t likely to change that much. Item: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, grand IBM technology poo-bah, speculates about the future of the 3-D Web in An Unusual Meeting. Speaking as one who’s made two concerted efforts to build a 3-D representation of the Web, I sure hope he’s right. Item: I can read Takashi’s cat’s mind. He’s 100% focused on how he can get in between Takashi and the computer. (Takashi’s amusing post is about “Engineer's 2.0 day-life in the midafternoon”.) Item: From Clay Shirky, Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr; a careful, level-headed thought piece on what it means to be an expert, in the context of Wikipedia and Citizendium. Item: From “jbischke” at Learn Out Loud, a handy list of The Top 10 Arguments Against DRM; we already knew most of this stuff, but it’s useful to have it pulled together, well-argued and in one place. Item: Everyone’s blogging Test your musical skills in 6 minutes!; I only got 72.2%, sigh.

Originally from ongoing reBlogged

Originally from ongoing, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

I performed the original google image search just on "Asian women," "American women," and "Asian American women" for a presentation on stereotypes and identities of Asian American Youth. I want to demonstrate the pervasive stereotypes of Asian women – just how hyper-hyper sexualized they are. And it’s interesting to show that when you Google image search – there is no hierarchies of approval that the images have to go through like for traditional media (newspapers, TV shows and etc, where images usually become racialized in the approval process. SO for Google searches – it’s just based on algorithms on what users are clicking through and page ranking based on how many sites point to the webpage - which all determines the relevancy of the answers to the search query.
But just a simple google search can show the stereotypes that exist out there – based on the distribution of what internet users are clicking, pointing and linking to.
There is not other “RACE” or groups that are as sexualized as the generic “Asian woman.” Latina comes the closest. You can see for “Arab women” you can plenty of images of the stereotypes veiled woman. Then other during the presentation prompted me to type in “Korean, Japanese, black, African American, and etc.” = and as you can see “Asian women” win the most sexualized google image search. When you perform the search based on more specific cultures – like “Dominican” - it’s not as sexualized as “Latina.” Same for when you search “Japanese” - it’s not as sexualized as “Asian.” Sometimes sweeping stereotypes are easier for mass groupings of people – differences can be dropped as common denominators can be promoted.

In the rest of my presentation - my goal was to show that Asian American youth are divided in terms of genders - where the males are depicted as either hypersexual gay toys or asexual book worms, and for women they are depicted as hyper-sexual submissive and dominating sex freaks or as the model minority book worm.
But as Asian American youth are developing their identities as Asian AND American - they are trying to get away from the two extremes of stereotypes. However this identification process has usually located Asian youth as super glorious study bugs who go off to universities OR Asian youth as creating their own enclaves/communities b.c they have been excluded from the dominant majority (white america). Well I think this depiction is bullshit. I don’t think this process is as clean and bipolar as it has been depicted. Their identity negotiation is an ongoing process, and in the backdrop is this resisting and processing of existing stereotypes – and it doesn’t’ always mean that Asian American youth DON’t ADOPT these stereotypes either. BUT I don’t like the way Asian American youth have been depicted – as strong resisters of assimilation, forging their own hybrid path in a dignified glorious way. Asian American youth don’t have a special smart or honoring their traditions gene – they like every other immigrant youth group after the 3rd/4th generation start showing many similar patterns of acculturation.
click on the set to see the other see the other google searches I referred - or try your own google image search!
www.flickr.com/photos/triciawang/sets/72157594387522349/

Originally from Hi Tricia! by Tricia Wang 王 圣 㨗 reBlogged

Originally posted by Tricia Wang 王 圣 㨗 from Hi Tricia!, on November 26, 2006 2:00 PM

Our friends at Bike Portland posted this weekend about the bustling bike industry in Portland. The topic is on the front page of the Oregonian and the Portland Development Commission is working to attract more bike-based business. This quote from Matt O’Rourke, Vice President Chris King Precision Components, says it all

Portland is a whole new day for us. Chris and I are so incredibly optimistic about the town, our new building, the new people that we have interviewed and hired, everything.

Seattle (and any City) should take note.

Originally from Bike Hugger by Byron reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 10:58AM

Originally posted by Byron from Bike Hugger, on November 26, 2006 1:58 PM

The FON Finland blog has been launched today (in Finnish).

A post in Finnish for readers in Finland:

Martin Varsavsky - FONin perustaja - ilmoitti tänään Tukholmassa, että kaikki Suomessa, Tanskassa ja Ruotsissa asuvat voivat tilata ilmaisen FON "la fonera" langattoman tukiaseman kotiinkuljetettuna 24.12.2006 asti!

Voit liittyä Foneroksi ja tilata ilmaisen "la fonera" tukiaseman helposti verkossa. Liittymällä FONiin ja tilaamalla ilmaisen "la fonera" tukiaseman sitoudut pitämään tukiasemasi päällä ja jakamaan langattoman kotiverkkosi muille foneroille.

Lue lisää FONista (englanniksi).

Originally from Ahtisaari by Marko Ahtisaari reBlogged

Originally posted by Marko Ahtisaari from Ahtisaari, on November 26, 2006 1:58 PM

André Lemos picked up on Nokia's prototype augmented reality phone... Usually I'm looking at my watch waiting for pizza, but they're suggesting user friendly ways for wayfinding and interaction with the urban environment, all in the mobile phone.

Originally from Space and Culture by Rob reBlogged on Nov 21, 2006, 1:38PM

Originally posted by Rob from Space and Culture, on November 26, 2006 10:56 AM

Click here for mp3. Place hand on your notebook batterypack or CPU to add a sense of heat and yell "Pedro!" to participate in the bedtime roundup of children back to homes.

Originally from Space and Culture by Rob reBlogged on Nov 23, 2006, 9:33AM

Originally posted by Rob from Space and Culture, on November 26, 2006 10:56 AM

…as just discussed with Russell in the Crown and Sceptre,

“World of Warcraft for those who can’t be bothered with all that elf crap and fighting, rendered in Haiku…”, “Part reality-tv, part improv, part microblogging”

It’s decidedly playful - with the constraints of the medium and the unashamed mundanity of most of the content only adding to the fun.

The explicit ‘reporting’ nature of it seems to make it more attractive to me than perhaps some other things that might be similarly classed as ’self-surveillance infotainment’ like Plazes or Jaiku.
Whilst it’s definitely ‘having a moment’ - it’ll be interesting to see whether it settles into a pattern of the same sustained interest and fun as Flickr, or move into the realms of YAZSNS (Yet Another Zombie Social Network Service) full of tiny 160 character ASCII tumbleweed…

Originally from Blackbeltjones/Work by Matt reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 4:00PM

Originally posted by Matt from Blackbeltjones/Work, on November 26, 2006 10:56 AM

This is one of my favorite photos:

It was taken by Josef Koudelka in Prague in 1968, just before the Soviet Union invaded and put a stop to The Prague Spring. To demonstrate the emptiness of the streets at noon, Koudelka stuck his wristwatch into the scene before shooting it. A simple, brilliant gesture that adds not only a temporal dimension to the photo but also a sense of solitary humanity in contrast to the empty streets.

Originally from kottke.org reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 11:37AM

Originally from kottke.org, on November 26, 2006 10:56 AM

Japanese Manhole Covers. A Flickr pool.

Originally from Social Design Notes reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 8:55AM

Originally from Social Design Notes, on November 26, 2006 10:56 AM

The NY Times Book Review's 100 notable books of 2006. Making the list are several kottke.org notable books: The Ghost Map, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Consider the Lobster, and The Blind Side.

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 25, 2006, 10:35AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on November 26, 2006 10:55 AM

The problem I previously posted about turned out to be super-simple. I made a novice pointer mistake. In EPAppleScript (the second portion of code), "errorDict = &globalErrorDict;" needs to be changed to "(*errorDict) = globalErrorDict". Instead of changing the contents of the pointer, I just masked the pointer-argument by overwriting it with a local pointer. Thanks Jeff and Peter!

I could've sworn I tried that at the beginning, but obviously I didn't closely look at that part of the code again when trying to figure out the problem.

Moral of the story: mind your pointers.

Originally from Technological Supernova reBlogged on Nov 25, 2006, 6:36AM

Originally from Technological Supernova, on November 26, 2006 10:55 AM

Most people would agree that Google employs a high number of very smart people. One of the ways they keep sharp is by giving the opportunity to some of their employees and to outsiders to speak at the company. They call the events "Google TechTalks" and the topics covered range from Javascript to brain science. You can find a full list of these talks here, but today we'd like to highlight a couple in particular: Stanford Experts on Climate Change and Carbon Trading with Thomas C. Heller and Stephen H. Schneider, and Biofuels: Think Outside the Barrel by Vinod Khosla (who we wrote about here and here). Both are over an hour long, so make sure you have some free time before taking the plunge. Via LifeHacker. See also: ::Google to Tackle Global Warming, ::Google Founders Invest in Nanosolar, ::Google Zeitgeist number 3: Tofurkey, ::Google Upgrades Coverage of Public Transportation, ::Google Ends Search For Corporate Alternative Energy Source

Originally from Treehugger

reBlogged by Matthew Haughey on Nov 25, 2006, 12:51AM

Originally from mathowie reBlog feed reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 11:51PM

Originally from mathowie reBlog feed , on November 26, 2006 10:55 AM

[Mapping and GIS News blog by Mapperz] Another High End Database (Oracle XE) potential is Oracle XE and Google Maps (though we haven't actually seen the map and data working yet - pre Alpha?)

<!--Google Map Editor - in Alpha (A GIS)-->

Originally from Geotags.org by admin reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 9:38PM

Originally posted by admin from Geotags.org, on November 26, 2006 10:55 AM

Matt Haughey's got a few photos of Flickr HQ from back when they had only 4 or 5 employees and were still in Vancouver. Includes a screenshot of Flickr at the time, when it was still "all chat and shoeboxes".

Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by jkottke reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 9:29AM

Originally posted by jkottke from kottke.org remaindered links, on November 26, 2006 10:54 AM

I can't have nice things.

I bought a no-name 4GB SD card for my Treo 700p, and it's really flaky: at somewhat random (but frequent) times, it makes the "you just ejected the card!" noise, and then I have to pop it out and back in again to get it to be recognised. I think maybe it only does this when it's not being accessed, e.g., as soon as I stop playing music and/or the device goes to sleep, it unmounts the card. I haven't had it do it while listening to music, but then as soon as I pause and the phone goes idle, blam.

The card seems to work fine when I plug it into a USB reader on my Mac. I also tried reformatting it. Some googling suggests that there are people out in the world successfully using 4GB FAT32 SD cards with the Treo 700p. Palm's site says they "have not tested" 4GB cards, though.

So is there some less sketchy 4GB card I should buy instead? Or does this trick just not work?

Originally from jwz by jwz@jwz.org reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 1:02AM

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on November 26, 2006 10:54 AM

Dear ALA’s Member Participation task force,

I am happy you have a blog. I am happy that its URL is fairly short. It’s very attractive. However I think one way that you could help members participate would be to make the links in some way distinct from the text that surrounds it. They are, on my monitor, the exact same color and boldness as the text around them. The underline only shows up when you hover over the link making using your blog an experiment in hide and seek. Usually links are indicated by a distinct color, an underline (not just a hover underline) or by being in bold when the surrounding text is plain. Using two out of three of these increases usability dramatically.

Two other smaller points which are more a matter of personal preference.

1. Usually titles of blog posts link to the post on a page by itself with the comments underneath, a permalink. The blogging software you use does not do this. This is not necessarily a problem, but it is non-standard and might confuse people. One of the great benefits of blogging is that it allows people to use a user interface that does not change much from blog to blog. You might want to consider configuring your blog to work the way most blogs work.
2. Linking to Word documents is a less than optimal way to get your message across. While I think allowing people to look at a Word document with “track changes” turned on is a neat way to show the evolution of a document, it relies on a proprietary piece of software that people may not have (or Open Office if they are savvy enough to use it) and makes the information contained in the linked document unavailable to search engines and posterity except for the pull-quote you provide. It also increases download times for people on dial-up which is a non-inconsiderate amount of ALA members. Consider making the text of documents you describe available in some way that is more findable and usable to the widest range of people. While I wish it were not the case, ALA member are not always the most tech savvy people around and anything we can do to encourage their participation is a good thing.

Sincerely,

Your friend
Jessamyn

ala, blogs, usability

Originally from librarian.net by jessamyn reBlogged on Nov 25, 2006, 2:58PM

Originally posted by jessamyn from librarian.net, on November 26, 2006 10:54 AM

Location: Albany's abandon buildings

stencils by, dwell, one unit and Mr. Prvrt

Originally from Wooster Collective reBlogged on Nov 25, 2006, 11:52AM

Originally from Wooster Collective, on November 26, 2006 10:54 AM

    Examiner column for November 27.

    The holiday season is always magical in schools as we look forward to days off and special holiday events.  But the most meaningful school-related holiday tradition is the return of former students to the halls they have outgrown.

    I am eager to welcome back former Senior Seminar students because their reports of the benefits of earning Advanced Placement credits are so convincing to current seniors.

    Chetin mentioned that his AP credits had allowed him to take four courses a semester at the University of Virginia, freeing up time to play club lacrosse and become involved in student government. Others have used AP credits to double major, or spend a semester abroad. I love these testimonials.

    But students don’t return to endorse the AP program. They return to measure their new selves against the memory of who were in high school.

    Do you remember how self-conscious you felt during those years? Whether the school president or the class computer geek, every single high school student feels out of place. It is a complete myth that high school constitutes “the best years of your life.”

    Returning to where you felt pretty crummy about yourself has the salutary effect of making you feel pretty good about having graduated. Often former students find it hard to believe they found high school difficult or threatening. “If only I knew then what I know now,” they often tell me.

    As they share their thoughts with current students, most keep up the pose of college as a recreational wonderland---full of parties, interesting classes, and diverse people.

    That stereotype is precisely what current students want to hear. Sleep-deprived from their 7 a.m. school start time, college sounds like some fantasy they don’t dare hope will ever come true. High school students currently spend seven hours a day in uncomfortable classrooms with sub-par ventilation, sitting at cramped desks.

    How is it possible, they think, that anyone can earn a bachelor’s degree attending classes fewer than fifteen hours a week? Will they really be granted a degree if they schedule no classes before noon?

    As with everything having to do with high school, returning is complicated. Former students feel nostalgia, yet rejoice in their freedom. They can’t believe they adhered to all those rules, yet agree the rules were necessary. Every one of them speaks of how well prepared they were compared to students from other regions of the country.

    Only Matt advised current seniors not to believe all the college “hype”: “I spent a whole year anticipating how great it would be to leave home, and now I can’t wait to come back. I love college, but I really miss the food and the comforts of home. Appreciate what you have while you’re still here.”

    Matt’s advice was an honest and refreshing counterpoint to the “carpe diem” philosophy of most returning students. His voice rang true, counter to stereotype.

    But whatever mixture of feelings these graduates express to current students, it’s especially sweet that their entrances and exits are not regulated by the harsh jangle of a school bell. Home is quite nice when you can come and go as you please.

Originally from TeacherTalk by Erica Jacobs reBlogged

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on November 26, 2006 10:54 AM

Next week nearly forty international artists and musicians will visit New York, many for the first time, to revive a defunct downtown bank with a treasure trove of 8-bit wonders. The Blip Festival is the world's largest-ever chiptune event, and will feature most of the field's major players, including Crazy Q (Stockholm), Nullsleep (NYC), YMCK (Tokyo), and others, each performing live music and visual on old Ataris, Commodore 64s, Game Boys, and other old school machinery. Nightly live concerts will be balanced by screenings and workshops, during the day, from November 30-December 3. The festival is co-organized by The Tank, a nonprofit whose Bent Festival of circuit-bending arts was a precursor to Blip, and 8-Bit Peoples, a New York-based collective of 'musicians and artists dedicated to exploring the audiovisual style of low-bit video games and home computers,' including some of the most active practitioners within this genre. The Blip Festival is a partner event in Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival of Art and Technology. We recommend reserving your tickets today. - Rhizome.org

http://www.blipfestival.org

Originally from Rhizome News reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 3:00AM

Originally from Rhizome News, on November 26, 2006 10:50 AM

The press release for xxxxx, a new book jointly published by the collective of that name and Mute, slyly drops just about every academic catch-phrase and flotsam of jargon tossed about in the last thirty years. What else would one expect from a new media reader inspired, at least in part, by the postmodern writings of Thomas Pynchon? The book draws on literature, psychogeography, and numerous strains of philiosophy, science, and mathematics to pose as a guide for a 'thought movement which is radically opposed to the contemporary entropic system,' complete with code reprints and screen shots. It features contributions by Shu Lea Chang, Florian Cramer, Simon Ford, Graham Harwood, Stewart Home, Friedrich Kittler, Armin Medosch, socialfiction.org, and many others, whose pieces focus on everything physical computing to porn, endophysics, and monadology. Chapter titles like 'final revelations for a holographic binding OS [VALIS],' 'melancholia [auto] destruction and fascism,' 'the computational revolution in art,' and 'the executable's song' hint at the authors' parodies and contributions to the genre of media manifesto. The aforementioned press release makes many promises. Above all, it is argued that xxxxx 'liberates software from the machinic, and questions the transparency of language, proposing a new world view, a sheer electromysticism....' If you'd like to ease into things, you can download a transcript of Otto Rossler's recent talk on 'Endonomadology,' in which he professes, 'we are living in the interface of consciousness.' That ought to be a bit more stimulating that the Sunday paper! - Irene Wu

http://www.1010.co.uk/xxxxx_publication.html

Originally from Rhizome News reBlogged on Nov 17, 2006, 3:00AM

Originally from Rhizome News, on November 26, 2006 10:50 AM

cyclingnews.com | Hamilton confirms 2007 contract with Tinkoff

Tyler Hamilton has confirmed his contract with Tinkoff Credit Systems.

The reigning Olympic time trial champion, banned for 2 years on suspicion of blood boosting, finished his suspension in September. His name was linked to Operación Puerto when Spanish media reported investigators found a doping log for Hamilton in the offices of Eufemiano Fuentes, but as with most other names implicated in the investigation, it appears Hamilton will face no further sanctions.

The most notable exception appears to be Jan Ullrich. Swiss anti-doping officials say they'll bring disciplinary action against Ullrich in early January.

Among Hamilton's new teammates will be Salvatore Commesso, Daniele Contrini, Danilo Hondo, and Evgeni Petrov. Hamilton told La Gazzetta dello Sport (in Italian) he is considering moving from Girona, Spain, to Calendasco, in northern Italy, where Tinkoff is headquartered.

Originally from Tour de France 2006 by Frank Steele reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 9:03AM

Originally posted by Frank Steele from Tour de France 2006, on November 26, 2006 10:48 AM

ESPN.com | Report: Anti-doping lab erred in Landis B sample report

IMG_1261,
originally uploaded by cjammet.

The Chatenay-Malabry lab that initiated doping findings against 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis admitted today (in Le Monde, in French) that its report on Landis's B-sample includes the wrong number for the sample tested.

Landis and his team have pointed out that the sample Landis provided was labeled 995474. In the report, the lab referred to the tested B sample as number 994474. The Landis team suggests this "has to make you wonder about the accuracy of the work."

The lab, for its part, says the sample tested was Floyd's.

"The error, of an administrative nature, does not mean the positive B sample was not that of the American," Le Monde said. "But it is being used today by his lawyers ... to contest his positive doping results."

Meanwhile, Landis spokesman Michael Henson says no one working for Landis was involved in the hacking of the lab's computers and clumsily forged e-mails questioning the lab's abilities.

Henson told Samuel Abt:

"We don't know who would perpetrate this ... We certainly don't know what the source of this incident is.

"We're following the news, but we haven't been contacted by any authorities," Henson continued. "We're not challenging the report, but we need to see details of the investigation."

Originally from Tour de France 2006 by Frank Steele reBlogged on Nov 15, 2006, 11:31AM

Originally posted by Frank Steele from Tour de France 2006, on November 26, 2006 10:48 AM

Yahoo! Sport | Landis aide suspected of piracy at French drugs lab

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Sunday, Floyd Landis did his first interview since the Tour with French media, appearing on the weekly sports program Stade 2. No real news there — he made the case he's been making in the U.S., but to the French people, and indirectly to the ASO, which will decide whether to strip his 2006 Tour title.

Then, less than 48 hours later, a story appears in L'Equipe (in French) (English story linked above) claiming computer systems at the Chatenay-Malabry lab that tested Tour de France samples this year have been hacked. On top of that, L'Equipe claims investigators are focusing on “an associate” of Landis in the investigation.

The incursion apparently occurred back in September, with e-mails "in poor French" being sent alongside lab documents chosen to make the facility look bad. Lab officials say the documents “were taken out of context,” which means they're not actually false. The head of the French anti-doping agency took the opportunity to lobby for more tax dollars to better hack-proof the lab's computers.

I suspect there's less story here than initially reported. I can't believe that anyone actually involved in the case would first hack into the system, then send badly forged e-mails that included files garnered by the hacking.

Also:

procyling | Landis link to French "hack attack"

Trust But Verify | Tuesday Roundup

TBV offers as much detail as anyone could want on the continuing Floyd farce.

Originally from Tour de France 2006 by Frank Steele reBlogged on Nov 15, 2006, 12:24AM

Originally posted by Frank Steele from Tour de France 2006, on November 26, 2006 10:48 AM

Changing the game 'til the Hall of Fame.

The Clash w/ Mikey Dread :: One More Anti-War Dub (Zentronix Edit)

An exclusive one-night mix just to give thanks.

Much respect to Mala, Digital Mystikz, Skream, and the dubstep massive for inspiration.

One.

Originally from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric by Jeff reBlogged on Nov 23, 2006, 2:18AM

Originally posted by Jeff from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on November 26, 2006 10:44 AM

From Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop, my man Danny Hoch and the back story on "Seinfeld", Seinfeld, Kramer and race--with a diversion into Tarantinoland.

KARMA LIKE A MUH...

Originally from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric by Jeff reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 2:01PM

Originally posted by Jeff from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on November 26, 2006 10:44 AM

From Variety:
BBC sells talent show format to China: International News: 'Just the Two of Us' sold to terrestrial web Hunan -- BBC Worldwide, the pubcaster's commercial arm, has made a rare breakthrough in the Chinese TV market by licensing talent show format, "Just the Two of Us," to terrestrial web Hunan Television.

<!-- technorati tags start -->

Technorati Tags: BBC, internet, just the two of us, license, online, web, puppy, television

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Originally from YouMeiTI 有媒体 reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 1:01AM

Originally from YouMeiTI 有媒体, on November 26, 2006 10:44 AM

Bob MacNeil (previously) has posted a descriptive, multi-step painting tutorial that you may find useful. He covers everything from the initial planning stages and composition to painting and software methods and tips.

Originally from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog by Johnny reBlogged on Nov 24, 2006, 4:26PM

Originally posted by Johnny from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on November 26, 2006 10:44 AM

Not many people have seen or used the Sugar interface supplied on the so-called $100 laptop (or One Laptop Per Child) project, but Harry Brignull has posted a video that provides a quick tour. His post is entitled Why...

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog reBlogged on Nov 26, 2006, 7:15AM

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog, on November 26, 2006 10:10 AM

Over at Slate, Paul Collins makes the reasonable point that lots of examples of plagiarism may well come to light as more old works are digitised for Google Book Search. I should hope so! What he doesn't point out is...

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog reBlogged on Nov 23, 2006, 7:20PM

Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog, on November 26, 2006 10:10 AM

Damn right it went up. You see what these fools be paying for Rickey-Lite? Rickey-Lite: half the calories, none of the Rickey. Get your head out your ass and take a look! Rickey’s right here! Right here! Rickey take your money just as quick as everyone else gettin’ paid. You pay Juan Pierre fifty million to run around L.A. like a chump? What’s up with that? So Juan Pierre got quoted by Jay-Z - Jay-Z don’t wanna mention Rickey in one of his raps. You know Jay-Z’s big old fake retirement and comeback? Jay-Z got that idea from Rickey. Hey Jay-Z! 48 is the new 20! Rickey outshines Jay-Z just by him saying the name. Saying “Rickey” is like shining one thousand spotlights on Rickey while Rickey’s wearing a diamond the size of home plate around his neck. Rickey don’t need bling-bling - Rickey is bling-bling. Rickey is his own source of bling, and everyone knows it but that clown in L.A. paying for five years of Juan Pierre making like Willie Mays Hays in that movie about the Brewers. Rickey does push-ups before he swings the bat, not after. Truth.

And what’s this stuff in Chicago about Alfonso Soriano getting paid for eight years? Back when Rickey was Rickey (which is all the time), you never gave out eight year contracts. Rickey wants to play, but Rickey also wants to stay hungry. That’s why Rickey likes the minor leagues. Rickey gets about 75 cents a day to eat. That ain’t much, but Rickey get by, because Rickey is frugal. Rickey don’t need no steak dinner like some Alfonso Soriano or Alex Rodriguez. Rickey don’t care about that fancy stuff. Give Rickey a few pieces of Bazooka bubble gum, and some grape drink, and Rickey’s good to play two. Rickey’s like the Energizer Bunny, but with skills. Alfonso Soriano’s like that Juan Samuel, but with legs like that Nicole Ritchie that’s not eating. Girl, let Rickey buy you a sandwich! Let Rickey take you to a ballgame, so Rickey can show you how Alfonso Soriano drops balls in centerfield and strikeouts like a chump. That’s what hundreds of millions of dollars gets you if you don’t get Rickey - a chump.

And Frank Thomas? Frank Thomas is almost as old as Rickey! But Rickey, he doesn’t get old - he ages. Frank Thomas, he gets old. You watch Frank Thomas hit a ball in the gaps, he’ll get to first if he’s lucky. Rickey hits a ball in the gaps, he’s sliding into third before that ball even gets on the warning track. You know Cool Papa Bell? That story about making beds when the lights are out? That’s almost as fast as Rickey is. Frank Thomas is fast like kidney stones. (And Rickey don’t want to talk about no kidney stones. Rickey gets sensitive about kidney stones, you dig?) Frank Thomas hit a home run in September, and Rickey pretty damn sure he’s still rounding second. You wanna pay thirty million for that? You give Rickey league minimum, he’ll run the bases on his hands and beat Frank Thomas by about five years. Give or take. (Rickey always takes.)

That’s why Rickey’s not playing nice anymore. It’s time for Rickey to get what’s his. Roger Clemens got his, and he’s a redneck. That El Duque, he’s old enough to be Rickey’s grandpa, and he got paid. That Julio Franco everyone likes - that should be Rickey! Rickey holds the bat the way you should, and can do a helluva lot more than just pinch hit and play first base. First base is for old men, fat dudes, and Carlos Guillen. Rickey ain’t old, he sure ain’t fat, and if Rickey was Carlos Guillen, then Carlos Guillen would be the greatest of all time. But that’s Rickey, not Carlos.

Folks don’t know it yet, but they want Rickey. And Rickey’s right here, waiting for offers. You want to know why you should sign Rickey? Let me show you a book about Rickey called the Baseball Book of All-Time Records. You see who’s on the top of all those lists? That’s right. But Rickey don’t come cheap. You had your chance back when Rickey wanted to play more than get paid. Shoe’s on another foot now. It’s on Rickey’s foot. And Rickey’s foot just slid into second base, right under your nose. You want to know how to stop Rickey? You want to know how to keep Rickey from hurting you the way Rickey does best? Two words: PAY. RICKEY.

Now, if you’ll excuse Rickey, he’s gotta get ready for some turkey and stuffing. And gravy with big ass badonkadonk lumps. You’re goddamn right. Rickey might get by on some gum, but that don’t mean he ain’t down with getting a belly full of good home cookin’. Get some for yourself! And save Rickey some sweet potatoes!

Originally from Yard Work by Administrator reBlogged on Nov 22, 2006, 3:32PM

Originally posted by Administrator from Yard Work, on November 26, 2006 10:09 AM