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April 21, 2007
Twelve Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them
Many of my readers are consultants, but even if you're not, you may find some useful insights in FreelanceSwitch's article on theTwelve Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them. The author breaks things out this way: the Low Tech Client, the Uninterested Client, the Hands-On Client, the Paranoid Client, the Appreciative Client, the Get-A-Good-Deal Client, the I’ll-Know-It -When-I-See-It Client, the Always-Urgent Client, the Design-By-Committee Client, the Doormat Client, the Budget Client, and the You-Should-Be-So-Lucky Client. As a client, do you see yourself in there somewhere? What would the breeds of consultants be?
YouTube - NBA on CBS 1985 NBA Draft Lottery - COMPLETE VERSION
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by djacobs to dj-reblog basketball - more about this bookmark...
China's response to the Virginia Tech Shooting
China Digital Times has a great post that says the Virigina Tech massacre has prompted a discussion among Chinese netizens, comparing China's ban to US's non-existing ban on guns.
This really is a topic of interest to the Chinese - one of the first question Beijing cabbies ask me after they find out I am an American citizen, is if I see people with guns everywhere in the US. At first I was totally shocked by that stereotype of the States. But after watching the news in Beijing, I noticed there were always several reports per week of American citizens killing other citizens with guns. After a few conversations with other Beijingers, I realized that this was a common view of Americans - and it's not a racialized view either - they think that whites and blacks all carry guns around. They also think that guns are readily available and everyone owns one. The latter view is not accurate, however unfortunately, the former view is more accurate.
I wrote my personal thoughts about reaction among the Asian American community to Virginia Tech on my personal blog. This photo was taken by one of my favorite photographers, Stuart Isett.
-tricia
Technorati Tags: american, ban, beijing , china, control, gun , massacre, policy, stuart isett, virginia tech
HandBrake v0.8.5b1 for OS X
New features and a MediaFork-look make up the latest version of HandBrake.
Taste of Chinatown Today!
It's a gorgeous day out (high of 76 degrees!), so we're going to echo our earlier suggestion for an outside Saturday event. Head to Chinatown for the Taste of Chinatown, where you can try a number of different Asian foods for $1-2. According to a menu, the dishes include "Peking Duck, Shrimp Salad, Green Curry Chicken, Thai Spring Roll, Papaya Salad, Banana Sticky Rice, Thai Iced Tea, BBQ Pork/Duck/Ribs, Fried Squid, Grilled Beef Papaya Salad, Lobster Balls, Vegetarian BBQ "Roast Pork," Shark Fin Soup, Oyster Flavored Jerky, Vietnamese Sandwich, Mango Pudding." The event is between noon and 6PM - here's a map (PDF) - there are tables on streets from Baxter to Bowery, between Canal and Chatham Square. Photograph from last spring's Taste of Chinatown (when it was rainy) by Tien Mao
MeFi and Me
For those of you who might not know, Metafilter is a community weblog where members discuss stuff they've found online. Matt started the site in 1999, and I signed up as a member at some point in the early days. (I'm user 191.) I only participated a little at the site during the first couple of years.
Matt and I worked together at Pyra (makers of Blogger), and during that time Metafilter lived on a single desktop tower under Matt's desk. A lot of the early members of Metafilter were also early bloggers, and it became sort of a central "hang out" for people interested in weblogs. Often it was one of the only sources covering and discussing what was happening with blog-related topics. At Pyra, we often asked ourselves, how will Metafilter react? when contemplating changes—because we knew any announcement would show up on the site.
Matt's been running and growing Metafilter ever since, with the addition of several Metafilter sites including the insanely useful and popular Ask Metafilter. I've been a regular reader and fan of the site despite my lack of conversing there, and I've gotten to know various MeFites, both through the site and through conversations with Matt. The community there is definitely unique (in a good way), and I'm constantly surprised at the depth of knowledge members have on any given topic. Though every site has its share of arguments and name-calling, I'm also continually surprised by the level of civility for such an open community. (Which I think is a reflection of the crack MeFi moderation squad, and the community norms that have been established.)
For the past year I've been working with Matt on Metafilter behind the scenes one day/week. I helped Matt launch MeFi Music, Metafilter Jobs, and some new features across the site. It's been great working with Matt regularly, and having instant, massive feedback to changes from lots of, erm, passionate users was a good change of pace from writing books.
In about a week, I'm going to be spending most of my time on Metafilter. I'm excited about this change, and I'm looking forward to helping Metafilter grow with a more sustained effort. Matt has some cool stuff coming up for the site, and it's going to be great to help him build it. The only remaining question for me is, how will Metafilter react?
Tesla's tooth is coming!
As you know, every time Tesla had inexplicable fits of crying, I thought it was teething...but the reality was a tooth never came. Maybe the process takes that long...a little discomfort then it subsides over and over. It's been months though, and younger babies already have multiple teeth. Tesla was sure taking her time, but we knew it would be any day.
Sure enough, I came home yesterday and Telsa's granny said, "guess what! There's a tooth!" I never imagined I would be as excited and proud, and even a tad sad about one tooth. Excited and proud that I'll be seeing my girl with teeth, imaging how that leads to eating different foods and talking. Wow, she did it! Sad because my baby is growing up. No more gummy smiles, and our bond with breast-feeding slowly changing. A mixture of emotions indeed, but I was so happy to hug and hold her as I tried unsuccessfully to open her mouth and get her tongue out of the way so I could see. You actually can't see the tooth yet, but there is a distinct breakage in her lower front left gum. And you can feel it.
I continue to be amazed at watching her grow, and the deep feelings of love I feel for her. A tooth! How am I going to contain myself when she starts walking and talking?
The milestones are arriving. At times with a sense of relief, at times with nostalgia. You see, Tesla is also reaching another new phase. We think she's ready to sleep in her own room. I didn't want to do this too early and expected to have her with us for a full year, but we've discovered she actually sleeps better on her own. We co-slept until after 6 months when she started sleeping in her crib that was right next to our bed. Then she came to bed only when I fed her during the night. Otherwise, she pretty much slept in her crib. However, she's aware that I'm right by her, which makes her wake up more to demand for me. It appears she sleeps better when I'm not that close, and it's a natural time to put her in her own room - for the first time. Boy, I'm gonna miss her!
What Computers Can’t Do (We Can Do Better)
This book, “What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence” written in 1963 by Hubert L. Dreyfus is an interesting debate on the future of AI and how computers could not possibly engage with the daily human cognitive, emotional, and physical needs and tendencies we have as a species. Some of his hypotheses however, since this book was written in 1963, have been overcome through the years by software and hardware development and increased capabilities that were probably never even imagined when Dreyfus sat down to write this. Even the annoying “Clippy” paperclip in MSWord is a testament to that fact, as its dumb intelligence goes way beyond the “limits” outlined in this book. Anyways, it’s an interesting read to discover what abilities people thought computers were capable of and how the evolution of AI has really challenged this assumption over the years.
The Bloggotangle
"Here we have a hyperbolic display of blogs using both the WWE and the ICWSM 2007 data sets.
Green links are one way; blue links are reciprocal. LJ is over the eastern horizon, DailyKos is in the middle, Boing Boing is northeast, and porn is in Japan.
Peso Servicing Lucy
Isha, This Is For You
This is dedicated to my best friend who recently had a baby aka my Godson. Isha, since you might not "catch" this video, I am posting it here. Please call me and tell me what you think. I am a bit disappointed by this new Maroon 5 song. Is it disco? Is it not? I don't know. Anyway, since you are not a big blog commenter, call me and tell me your thoughts.
(Other folks can comment too. Don't be shy.)
More Firefox Mapping Extensions
Mapz: A GIS Librarian takes another look at Firefox mapping extensions -- all 16 of them, ranging from geotagged photos to online map viewing. Previously: Firefox Mapping Extensions....
Signposts for the Week ending April 20, 2007
Woowee! It’s been two weeks since our last signposts, so here’s a bunch for you all:
We want one of these do-it-yourself mobile testing cams!
Jan Chipchase on What You Carry and Why It Matters
Enough with the lists, try objects for mobile. And speaking of mobile, here’s what mobile executives really want: a phone form 7 years ago
Make me care about your design, says Andy Rutledge
Youtube, Myspace, Flickr and blogging, they are, in many ways, a massive infrastructure that breeds and feeds an unhealthy level of narcissism, claims Rich Ziade
Leisa Reichelt describes The Four Kinds of Failure
Jason Freid would rather be Microsoft than Yahoo
We’re digging the content on the new TED site
Mac hacked for $10,000
A 0-day exploit involving Safari was revealed at a security conference.
tedg on The Black Dahlia
Been awaiting IMDb critic tedg's review of The Black Dahlia, since he "gets" De Palma and it doesn't disappoint. Many commentaries (including this one) talked about the "discovery of the body" scene and the casting of Mia Kirshner but tedg explains them best. First the body:About 22 minutes into this there is a wonderful crane shot, probably done without artificial assistance, beginning five minutes which is the heart of the overly complex story. It sets up two apparently unrelated threads in the story that interweave from this point. It is of the front of a building where later there will be a shooting, moves up and over the building to look at a vacant lot behind where we see a woman making a gruesome discovery. She runs to the street alongside the building where we see the car of our two cops coming to park in front and engage in a shooting. We move in front of the car to a bicyclist, who plays no role in the story. He brings us to a couple walking down the sidewalk approaching the front of the building where they will encounter our cops. We come down to street height and listen in on their conversation.And Kirshner:
Its masterful. Even if you think everything that follows is a mess, its a glorious mess made glorious by our setting of the knitting needles.But there's another joy here too. The story — no surprise — features a film within the film. It's the whole story, there, with elements of that internal film overlapping the main story in three or four significant ways. The star of this inner film, who also is our bisected victim is a character played by Mia Kirshner. She's so much more alive and real than anyone else in the main story, I can only assume it was deliberate and a truly thrilling risk. If you follow film, you'll know her very similar and hugely complex role in "Exotica," a landmark film.
Tainted pet food reaches human fare - The Boston Globe
WASHINGTON -- An industrial chemical linked to kidney failure in dogs and cats has found its way into the human food supply chain. California officials quarantined 1,500 animals at the American Hog Farm and are tracking who purchased nearly 100 hogs from the farm this month, when the animals' feed included pet food that had been tainted with melamine .
April 20, 2007
We have done it ourselves
Learn from the people
Plan with the people
Begin with what they have
Build on what they know
Of the best leaders
When the task is accomplished
The people will remark
We have done it ourselves.-- Lao Tzu
From Wally
Swallowing a sewing needle
Jenny posted about our cat swallowing Cassandra's sewing needle during last Sunday's knitting circle over at tooboo (Tie one on, Bind one off).
It's apparently really common. I called my dad's girlfriend, a librarian and former cat-owner and she found us a 24 hour cat ER in NYC in about 30 seconds flat. We called and they explained that ingesting sewing needles was probably not a big deal, but that we should get him in quickly for X-Rays and surgery. Luckily the needle made its way to him stomach without lodging in his esophagus or ripping up anything on the way. They gave him emergency surgery-- really... we were up waiting for the results until 1am! Here's one of his X-Rays.
As soon as we got him home, he started playing with my drawstring pajamas! His yarn/ string addiction is impossible.
W. Bradford Paley: Charting and Graphic Work
"I couldn't find a simple enough calendar to draw on to manage possibly conflicting travel and conference dates, so I typeset one for myself. It's intentionally very plain looking to allow the scribbles, circlings, and annotations that will give it its functionality and visual life."
US lawmakers rail against KBR, former Halliburton unit, for alleged abuses on $20B contract - International Herald Tribune
U.S. lawmakers on Thursday railed against senior U.S. Army officials and defense contractor KBR Inc. over persistent allegations of fraud and contract abuse on a multibillion-dollar deal to provide food and shelter to American troops in Iraq. "Profiteering during wartime is inexcusable," said Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan, testifying at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "This is the most significant waste, fraud and abuse we have ever seen in this country." Side Note: But Bush says the government really care about our troops.
Who'dat?™
Sometimes, when a celebrity that you have seen one billion times over the course of many years suddenly stops being a part of your world, you totally forget that they ever existed. It's weird.
To play today's edition of Who'dat?™, look at the celebrity below and try to guess who it is. Click on the picture to see if you are right.
I still can't decide if it's nice to see her again or not (no clicking until you've guessed!)
written by Amy
A Magazine You Can Read in Your Underwear
I've been spammed for a lot of things that I neither need nor want. Out of all the junk I've received, however, I can think of nothing I want less than Blogger Podcaster magazine. Finally, a print magazine worth leaving my computer for! And it is apparently part of a trend, as I received this email on the same day that Boing Boing wrote about dubious net-to-paper daily Boston Now. I don't think that I can top the Boing Boing commenter who wrote their slogan should be 'Bringing you yesterday's news tomorrow. BP—why not give them a snappy acronym—says that...
A history of mealtimes
Because people use to go to sleep around sundown, the biggest meal of the day once centered around noon. As candles and lamps became more common, mealtime shifted. By the 1800s, the upper class would have supper at 2 AM and stay up until dawn. Who knew the history of mealtime could be so interesting? [thanks Jason]
Jake's featuring a photo today of some NYC street art...
Jake's featuring a photo today of some NYC street art by Bloke, who does paper-plane pieces. I'm a sucker for dashed lines.
Update: More stuff by Bloke here. (thx, daniel) (link)
Cynical-C is keeping track of what the media is blaming...
Cynical-C is keeping track of what the media is blaming for the Virginia Tech murders. So far, the list runs to more than 30 items, including South Korea, Bill Gates, the second amendment, violent video games, and cowardly students. (link)
DJ Vadim Contest Extended
The DJ Vadim remix contest currently under way at ccMixter ran afoul of server outages and other shenanigans yesterday so we decided to extend the deadline 48 hours to accommodate entries that could not access the site yesterday. The new deadline is 9 PM PDT Saturday April 21 (4 AM GMT Sunday April 22).
The contest has been a huge boon to the site bringing great new talent and bringing out the best in old-timers. We look forward to working with BBE Records again.
Catalyst Tip: Don't pollute!
Currently, your "MyApp.pm" file is both your application class and your context class (NB: this is expected to change in 5.8000). We've been slowing suggesting that people move things out of th context/app class so as not to pollute it with an abundance of mehods which may occasionally have unwanted consequences -- for example "login : Global {}" conflicting with the Authentication plugin's login() method.
This tip is broken into two parts:
- It's been said time and time again (c.f. this and this [phaylon++]), not everthing has to be a plugin! If the sum total of your plugin is this:
You should reconsider. Either use the module directly, or make a controller base class. That should handle most cases.package Catalyst::Plugin::Foo;
use Foo;
sub foo {
my( $c, @rest ) = @_;
return Foo->new( @rest );
}- Be careful what you import into MyApp.pm! Some modules will export methods (and other symbols) by default, and sometimes you'll do it manually. Consider explicitly importing nothing:
before:
after:package MyApp;
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex); # MyApp now has the md5_hex method
sub foo {
#...
return md5_hex( $string );
}
If you want a quick-n-easy cleanup, try namespace::clean.package MyApp;
use Digest::MD5 (); # no imports
sub foo {
#...
return Digest::MD5::md5_hex( $string );
}
Following up on my post about gender diversity at web...
Following up on my post about gender diversity at web conferences, Jeffrey Zeldman of An Event Apart commissioned a study by hiring "researchers at The New York Public Library to find out everything that is actually known about the percentage of women in our field, and their positions relative to their male colleagues". "There is no data on web design and web designers. Web design is twelve years old, employs hundreds of thousands (if not millions), and generates billions, so you'd think there would be some basic research data available on it, but there ain't." I found the same thing when poking around for a bit back in February. They do have stats for IT workers in general...men outnumber women by over 3-to-1 and that gap is growing. (link)
Some fantastic Bushisms from the Huffington Post: "There Are Jobs Americans Aren't Doing…If You've Got A Chicken Factory, A Chicken-Plucking Factory, Or Whatever You Call Them, You Know What I'm Talking About"… "Everybody Wants To Be Loved...Not Everybody"… "There Are Some Similarities, Of Course [Between Iraq And Vietnam]. Death Is Terrible"… "I've Been In Politics Long Enough To Know That Polls Just Go Poof At Times"...
I want my rBGH
Stephen Colbert explained rBGH the other night on "The Colbert Report." So if you're still in the dark about this milk additive, perhaps the amusing clip will help you understand the issue more clearly. [via The Ethicurian]
Are Belong to U.S.
Are Belong to U.S.. A good collection of links to maps, essays, and statistics on the number, scope, and significance of U.S. military bases around the world.
Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents - washingtonpost.com
As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age.
Google Web History - Good and Scary
Many years ago, when the web was a simpler place, one of the scariest monsters conjured up to describe the privacy threats that lurked on the Internet was the DoubleClick cookie, used for tying your ad-viewing behavior on the web to your real-world identity. USA Today said it was Orwellian, and set off a half-decade of worries for web surfers, many of whom didn't even have the foggiest notion what they were worried about.
Today, Google's released Google Web History. It's a brilliant, powerful, even insightful tool that will undoubtedly worry those who were concerned about privacy in the early days of the web's popularity. It doesn't help that Google now owns DoubleClick, and all those worries about cookies are amplified that Google actually stores all of this data on its computers, not yours, tied to an identity that might well also be linked to your email, office documents, your instant messages, and of course your browser history itself, courtesy of the browser toolbar.
Services For Your Web History
From a technical standpoint, Google Web History is one of those tools that's so well-executed it seems simple, or even obvious, the first time you see it. There's a basic timeline of your search history, with the ability to drill into specific search result histories for Google properties like web search, image search, news, Froogle (now renamed Google Product Search, though the UI for Web History shows the old name), Video, and Maps. There's even, astoundingly, a history of which AdSense Ads you've clicked on.
Some Google properties are missing -- Google Apps documents don't show up in your history, and the more loosely-connected services like Blogger, Reader, and Picasa are nowhere to be found. Plus, there's a peculiar disconnect with the Google Desktop Search tool's services -- the Timeline feature shared between both applications appears completely different, and your desktop history isn't integrated into the new service.
As you'd expect, there's a prominent and simple way to remove those scurrilous bits from your web history. And the improved presentation of an item as mundane as one's browser history reveals a recent strength of Google's: revealing data you already have access to. The Google Desktop Search tool on Windows made smart use of a disk indexing system that Microsoft had already built into Windows. In a similar way, the Web History service makes use of the Google Toolbar history to take old data and turn it into useful information through smart presentation.
There's a promising, but (for me, at least) still blank area titled "Interesting Items", and the reappearance of a feature that first showed up in the excellent Google Reader: Trends.
Now, Google's data for my own history is slightly skewed; I tend to use Blingo for a lot of basic searches on my computers, and Google's toolbar doesn't track that. But the fundamental underpinnings for a remarkably deep look into behavior on the web are already present.
The Real World
Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft. In fact, it's probably safe to say that no other major web company could release this product today; The backlash from the user community of players like Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL would simply be too strong.
Google is still in a period where most users on the web feel they are a relatively benevolent company. And it helps that the new product is excellent, useful, and unique. But with the release of Web History, especially in the context of its recent acquisitions and announcements, Google may have crossed the line where regular users start to react with skepticism and caution instead of unabashed enthusiasm.
This product is all about web history. We've already learned some lessons from the history of the web about what happens to companies once users start to question their trust in the intentions or implications of new products. It may serve Google well to revisit those lessons.
Some Links
Here are a few useful links to add to your own web history:
- Eight years ago, concerns about privacy in a billion-dollar DoubleClick deal. A related story from the period in USA Today, as well as a contemporary warning from a privacy advocacy group.
- A comprehensive overview of Google Web History from Search Engine Land.
- Google's first mistake, which was a fairly naive post I wrote four years ago, back before it was as clear to outsiders how important AdWords and AdSense would be to Google. I think it was most useful in the context of refuting some understandably hyperbolic observations such as Google are building the Memex. Jason Kottke also chimed in with Google is not a search company a few weeks later.
- Fred Wilson's skepticism over Google's recent direction, in the context of their acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube, as well as the departure of Dodgeball's founders.
- And finally, Blingo, to whom I trade my search history in exchange for intermittent prizes which mostly consist of free movie tickets. Seems fair to me.
Ontario to ban inefficient lightbulbs
Sales of inefficient incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed in Ontario beginning in 2012, the provincial government announced Wednesday.
Ontario to ban inefficient lightbulbs
Sales of inefficient incandescent light bulbs will be outlawed in Ontario beginning in 2012, the provincial government announced Wednesday.
Upcoming Reading At Get Lost Books
On Wednesday, April 25 I will be giving a short reading from Argentina on Two Steaks A Day at Get Lost Books in San Francisco. The event starts at 7 PM and features a number of writers from this Travelers’ Tales anthology:
Nearby readers of this site are invited to come down and we can retreat together afterwards to a local beer hall. No vegans, please.
April 19, 2007
Links for 2007-04-19
My thoughts on Virgina Tech, Asians, Condolescences, Racism and etc - Tricia Wang's blog
"This is one of the reasons why I find it difficult to work with Asian-American orgs -- because ultimately it is too often that Asian activists who fight against discrimination and for representation, are only fighting for Asians."
More big cat heads
Since I first posted a link to Bruce Mckay’s Big Cat Heads, he has added pastels to his repertoire, giving his signature mousers some wonderful texture. This one’s called “The Golden Hills of Catilonia”
Funny or Die, The Landlord
I'm literally the 8252302nd person to see this, but better late than never.
Art in the age of surveillance
I've blogged, seen and talked about many artistic projects that remind us of the omnipresence of technologies of control --and in particular surveillance cameras-- in public space. And grown increasingly sceptical. The audience of such art works usually "knows", right? Most of them are already very critical of the big brotherization of our society. It sometimes feels like preaching to the converted. What about the others? Those who don't go to the ars electronica of the world or feel safer when they are video'd on CCTV, can they really be shaken by these artistic and activist projects? Is "trying to rise awareness" enough? I was thinking again about those questions today while travelling, arrived in Turin and stumbled upon an article on BBC news where Bill Thompson discusses an upcoming session at the ENTER_ conference that will take place in Cambridge at the end of the month. One of the projects presented is (re)collector, by James Coupe.
The installation uses footage from CCTV in Cambridge to extract daily storyline narratives, and make up larger computer generated feature films
Surveillance cameras were programmed to recognise and capture public activities including farewell scenes, meetings, escape scenes, chases, love scenes, etc. Each day over the festival, the results will be edited to produce a daily feature film, rather than a documentary, showing just how much variety, interest and excitement can be reflected in everyday lives. The daily films will be organised to have a premise, protagonists, locations, plot, etc. to be viewed at a public screening in Cambridge during the festival programme. Interesting, not as powerful as the Surveillance Camera Players but i'd love to see what comes out of it. Would innocent passersby be disturbed (or just amused) to discover that their most banal activities can be material for a soap CCTV opera?
I was about to leave the story as a del.icio.us link but 3 seconds after read about another surveillance project on plus six.
Tracking-the-trackers is a mobile unit that provides participants with an expanded audible experience of the proliferation of video surveillance in urban space. A bag contains a laptop, GPS-receiver, earphones, and a mouse is taken on a walk through the city. The sound in the headphones changes whenever the participant enters the vicinity of a surveillance camera. This effect is not automatic but created by other participants who are continuously adding new locations to the existing database.
Track-the-trackers got all my attention because the technology used in the piece is documented with precise instructions to allow others to build similar systems and improve on the design. Apparently the last time they carried out the experiment was in 2004. Too bad... I might be sceptical but i still want to believe that artistic projects do matter.
disinfographics
Dion Hinchcliffe is a blogger responsible for an intimidating volume of writing on web 2.0, ajax, service-oriented architecture, and other such topics. To accompany his articles, he creates a torrent of infographics that are a clear example of muddled thinking. Arrows point this way and that, boxes sit inside boxes, and labels abound: consumption, viral feedback, REST, engagement. Fortunately, they're all served up from an open directory, so here are a selection of my all-time faves. Click on each to see the full-res original!
This is the first Dion Hinchcliffe infographic I ever saw. Things that struck me: the "mutual sense of community" label under the people (oh, that's where that goes), the arrows labeled REST, HTTP, JSON, and SOAP, and the public edge of the enterprise peeking into the cloud from the right:
I assume there are sentences containing the following words in the accompanying article:
This one has the obligatory internet web cloud:
The important part of this chart is the five blobs to the right, yet the full internal structure of an AJAX application is show to the left:
"You can't make requests to servers other than the one the page is from":
I like the little thread pinwheels here:
The people consume, create and consume, and socially consume:
The Einsteinian gravity-sheet here is awesome:
The cloud has been upgraded to "2.0":
"The web is growing":
I thought for sure the fall trend for 2006 was open platforms being closing up in response to the lure of acquisition:
Synchronize Metadata From Flickr to Hard Drive
Dutch IT consultant and photographer Erwyn Van Der Meer is working on something called a Flickr Metadata Synchr, “a tool to synchronize relevant metadata added to images stored on Flickr with the original versions of those images stored locally on your hard drive.” Though the project is only at version 0.6.0.0 at the moment, this is a great idea. Erwyn shares some of the thinking behind it in this blog post. I think it’s a great idea. (The one drawback, for now, is that it works only under Vista.) It would be great to have access to the metadata associated with my Flickr photos even while offline, and to be able to work with that and then synch the same data on Flickr without having the enter it all again. Storing that kind of data locally makes it accessible to all kind of other applications, which broadens the range of things I can possibly do with it.
Discovery chain: Interestingly, I found out about this while checking out this image on Flickr, from Thomas Hawk, CEO of photo-sharing site Zooomr. Hawk uses the image as a long blog post that mainly describes Geotagger 1.2, a cool-sounding Mac app that geotags photos locally with the help of Google Earth. Not that Hawk blogs solely on Flickr–the post is also on Hawk’s blog itself–but I dig the fact that the discovery chain starts at Flickr, not at a blog. Now if only I could trackback to Flickr.
earth, Flickr, Google, mapping, Tagging
Brooklyn's Sludgie the Whale Dies
Sad news about Sludgie the whale: The baby minke whale, who captivated our attention as he frolicked in the Gowanus Bay, died yesterday afternoon. He beached himself near Clinton Street around 5PM. The Riverhead Foundation's rescue program had been monitoring the whale and did not believe he was in trouble when he first appeared yesterday, since he seemed to be swimming normally. Rescue director Kim Durham told WCBS 2, "it suddenly began heavy splashing, hit the dock and then just went quiet." She said, "It was a very young whale that became confused and disoriented." There will be a necropsy performed on the whale - apparently it had fresh cuts on its head. The NY Times spoke to Debra Clarke, who arrived too late to catch sight of the whale:
"We just came hoping for good news,” she said, noting that she and her friends had spent most of the day watching broadcast news of the Virginia Tech massacre. “After Virginia, you come here rooting for the whale. You hope that something good has to happen, because it turns out these are days for tears.”Gowanus Lounge's Robert Guskind had told the press, "People are concerned about the creature's ability to survive. Quite honestly it could not have picked a worse spot." Even Mayor Bloomberg agreed; before the whale died, he said, "My thoughts are with the whale." Photographs by Amy Langfield/NewYorkology
Road To Nowhere: David Byrne's Bike Stolen
David Byrne's foldable Montague mountain bike has been stolen. The avid city biker rode in the 5 Boro Bike Tour last year, commenting: "The organizers close the FDR drive, the BQE, the Belt Parkway and the Verrazano-Narrows bridge on one side — so we get the thrill of riding in the middle of the street, not having to stop at red lights and no worries of the ubiquitous jaywalking peds on suicide missions." This past weekend however, after a shorter ride, he had locked his bike up outside of the IFC Center only to find it missing upon his return, an all too familiar city tale. That stretch of 6th Avenue isn't looking to good lately, with a Talking Heads bike theft, lesbians beating up straight men and rats running rampant. The Papermag blog reports:
"David Byrne is many things -- musician, artist, lecturer, blogger -- but most endearingly he's an avid city bicyclist. The vision that lingers most from Miami's Basel Art Fair was that of Byrne making the rounds on his bicycle. So you can imagine how I felt when I heard the news that his bike was stolen over the weekend right in front of the IFC theater! "If anyone sees a bike with both a Che sticker and one for the MOST space telescope that's mine," says Byrne who's already back on the streets sporting a new two wheeler as he goes around organizing an Alternative Transportation Music Festival for Oct. 6 at Town Hall."Of course, Byrne can afford a new bike - but this one seemed pretty personal to him. What we want to know is...what's this about an Byrne-curated Alternative Transportation Music Festival? Photo via Abreck's flickr.
Whale Confirmed in the Gowanus; Nickname: Sludgie
Yesterday, WNBC's Chopper 4 captured footage of a minke whale swimming in the Gowanus
CanalBay. Minke whales are a suborder of baleen whales, which rise to the surface the way this whale does. Chopper 4 reporter Dan Rice told us, "It was hard to see the whale under water because it is so brown. But about every 60 to 90 seconds it would surface for air and dive again." He added, "Almost looked like it was playing with the Coast Guard zodiac." [Zodiac is a kind of boat.] Cute, except given Gowanus Lounge's belief that sewage has seeped into the canal post-Nor'easter, we're worried. And, in a clear tribute to Carvel's Fudgie the Whale as well as the Gowanus's conditions, the Daily News (and NY1) calls this whale "Sludgie." The Riverhead Foundation's rescue program director Kim Durham says, "This is definitely not a place for a whale to be," and adds that they will continue monitoring Sludgie's behavior. She also asks people to call 631-369-9829 if the whale is seen outside the Gowanus. John Quadrozzi, who spotted a harp seal in 2003 (battered and bloodied, yet still alive, in the Gowanus), was the first to spot the whale. He told Newsday, "Originally, we thought he was a porpoise. Then we could see he was much bigger." His 5-year-old daughter had her opinion: "She said, 'There's no whales in the water, Daddy.' Then it came up. She can go tell people she was whale watching in Brooklyn." Indeed - the Daily News reported others turned to catch a glimpse - did you?
Whale of a Tale: Guess What's in the Gowanus Canal
If you were looking at the Gothamist Newsmap and noticed a "Water Search" in the Gowanus Canal around 22nd Street, brace yourself: Authorities were searching for a whale. According to WNBC 4, "Authorities were trying to rescue what appeared to be a whale that had wandered into Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal." Chopper 4 has footage, but
it's not online yethere it is (it's kind of hilarious, the person in the chopper - perhaps Dan Rice - says he can't follow the whale because "the water's so dark" but you do see something breach the surface three times). Gowanus Lounge had some photographs of the canal, post-Nor'easter, and we wonder if the weather somehow caused a whale to appear. There's no word on the condition of the whale, but apparently the whale may have been in distress. Last year, a whale wandered into the Thames. And a harp seal was found in the Gowanus Canal in 2003 (she was later named Gowana). Update: 1010WINS reports that "there may be two, a big one and a smaller one" - awww! Also, the police are standing by if the whale needs help, but there will be no attempts to redirect the whale to the ocean yet. Newsday says that the DEP is listening at the whale's conditions with underwater listening devices, and the Coast Guard thinks it might be a baby whale separated from its mother.
The first rough sketch of what became Twitter (previously called...
The first rough sketch of what became Twitter (previously called stat.us and twttr). (via preoccupations) (link)
Comment from Alaina Browne on 2007-04-19
S'Mac is probably the mac and cheese place you are thinking of and certainly is kid-friendly. I can't speak from experience, but I imagine most restaurants would be accommodating of your party especially if you dine early. A few more suggestions in this thread...
Virginia Tech Aftermath: Did Legal Drugs Play a Role in the Massacre? by Arianna Huffington
Arianna raises an important question I really want answers to.
Comparison between food pictured in fast food advertising and how...
Comparison between food pictured in fast food advertising and how the food looks when you actually get it from the restaurant. The Whopper is particularly beauty and the beast. (link)
Upcoming drops the ".org" with new redesign
biggest changes ever; full geo database, visual redesign, switch to Yahoo IDs, and more
Jeff Hawkins on making AI more human
Independent artificial intelligence researcher Jeff Hawkins has an article in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine asking the question 'why can't a computer be more like a brain?'.
Hawkins argues that while we hope that machines will be able to simulate human intelligence, we ignore the thing that makes us so - the brain.
He suggests that we need to create artificial intelligence systems that closely match the architecture of the brain to achieve this task.
Hawkins has outlined his arguments, and his own theories of simulated brain architecture, in his book On Intelligence, but if you want a whistle-stop tour of his theories, this article is a great summary.
Link to Hawkin's article 'Learn Like a Human'.
I Am Cheating On You
I am also writing for the MediaRights blog (aka where I work). The first entry I wrote, I posted here on tuckergurl. The second I did not. Now that we are live, I will not be cross posting. That sounds techy and weird. Anyway, check it out.
I am really busy at work. My head hurts. The Virginia Tech massacre is upsetting. Upsetting is really an understatement but I do not have any other way to put it.
That's it for now.
Pagination and Page-View Juicing are Evil. "The realistic ones at...
Pagination and Page-View Juicing are Evil. "The realistic ones at least admit that it's a cheap way to boost stats. The disingenuous (or naive) ones actually posit that they are improving readability and usability for their audiences by reducing scrolling. Because scrolling is so hard." See also my pagination tantrum. (link)
Thursday Blog Wrap
Blossoms in Brooklyn. Photo by slackeratslack.
Dumbo Hearing Could Initiate Landmark Process [Gothamist]
The Buyback Project: How to Get a Buyback [Eater]
Bushwick Booming, Or So The Brokers Say [Brownstoner]
Sludgie, We're Going to Miss You [Gowanus Lounge]
Pace and Student Housing [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
Dave Chappelle recently performed a set at a comedy club...
Dave Chappelle recently performed a set at a comedy club lasting more than 6 hours. Most of the audience stayed the whole time, until 4:43 am. (via tumbledry) (link)
Tickets to the Media That Matters Film Festival Premiere (May 30) Available Now!
Join us for the World Premiere of the seventh annual Media That Matters Film Festival. Be among the first to see the 16 inspiring short films we selected this year. There will be take action tables, giveaways and a chance to meet the festival filmmakers! Seventh Annual Media That Matters Film Festival World Premiere May 30, 2007 7 pm IFC Center 323 Sixth Avenue at West 3rd street New York, NY $11 Buy Your Tickets at ,a href="http://movietickets.com/">movietickets.com!
Recipe for white chocolate cheesecake
Beautiful looking white chocolate cheesecake from Flickr user Sashertootie, recipe included.
This article on commuting is from last week's New Yorker,...
This article on commuting is from last week's New Yorker, but I read it while commuting -- my commute is a relatively short 15 minutes door-to-door -- so it took until today to finish it. Anyway, well worth the read...in some ways, the long commute is one of the USA's defining characteristics. People like Judy Rossi, who commutes 6.5 hours a day, are increasing in number. "[Rossi's] alarm goes off at 4:30 A.M. She's out of the house by six-fifteen and at her desk at nine-thirty. She gets home each evening at around eight-forty-five. The first thing Rossi said to me, when we met during her lunch break one day, was 'I am not insane.'" (link)
Bug Love at the Botanic Garden
Allure, hand-cut black paper, 50" x 28" in. Courtesy George Adams GalleryThere are two great reasons to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden before May 6. One is Sakura Matsuri, the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. The other is Kako Ueda’s cut-paper artwork exhibition in the Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery.
“Hana to Mushi: Flowers and Insects” is a two-person show in the modest subterranean gallery space. The Conservatory sets the stage well for an exhibition revolving around exotic blooms and bugs: descending through moist greenhouse air, brushed by ferns, you are now at root level, at flower height. The first part of the show features April Vollmer’s traditional Japanese wood block prints. They are largely unremarkable due to a dated palette and stale arrangements. Kako Ueda’s pieces, oddly segregated to an empty corner, steal the show. Inspired by Japanese stencil designs used in kimono patterns, Udea has created a series of imaginative pieces that lend themselves to mesmerizing examination and fluid interpretation.
View from Nepenthe
View from Nepenthe
Originally uploaded by bromptonman.Back from vacation, where I was offline and unable to share the amazing scenery we drove through on our Rt 1 road trip from LA to SF. This is a view from Big Sur. I'm putting together a mymaps version with some key stops.
Launch (Ftrain.com)
"The best thing to hope for is that in time and with much more effort the work will become transparent to its users, that it will be taken for granted. That's life with websites."
Source: iPhone running into OS issues, won't meet demand
A close source to talked to Ars this morning about iPhone "issues" at Foxconn/Hon Hai, as well as availability problems when the gadget finally does trickle out. Uh oh.
Download or Upgrade to Feisty Fawn (7.04)
Feisty Fawn is here! Here’s the Press Release.
The Release Notes contain things you should watch out for when installing or upgrading, including the most common installer bugs and other issues. Read it before you install or upgrade.
The 7.04 tour guides you through what’s new. Phil Bull’s 41-item list of what’s new in Feisty is an awesome collection of the new bling.
You can download Feisty by bittorrent, or you can download the cd images. Using bittorrent would be right thing to do.
Upgrading
If you are upgrading from Edgy, read the upgrade notes. Please note that the graphical method using the Update Manager is recommended over the command line method using APT. For 22x faster upgrades, read my earlier post
Thank you, Ubuntu developers, MOTUs, Documenters, Bug Fixers, Forum members, IRC chatters, and Ubuntu users. Let us not take predictable, regular, ultra-cool releases for granted. My heart is so big right now, it might just explode. Thank you for this release, and for the release from the mundane, the bloated, the untrustworthy, and the unstable!
Video of a two-song Arcade Fire show, one of which...
Video of a two-song Arcade Fire show, one of which is sung in a freight elevator and the other in the middle of a Parisian crowd through a megaphone. (link)
Every Image Has A Story: "Free Banksy"
From Cam BsAs: "Ive seen so many people all the time coping Banksy, discussing about Banksy, getting angry and insulting each other about Banksy, that they made me want to do an stencil about it. Is not against or pro anyone, is just a thought. The image title is FREE BANKSY."
I have more stuff in www.cambsas.blogspot.com
April 18, 2007
A low wattage color palette for web designers. The palette...
A low wattage color palette for web designers. The palette is based on the Energy Star wattage ratings for colors. (via migurski) (link)
Pelosi: "The President Is Not King"
WATCH THE VIDEO!== Pelosi: "The President Is Not King"==== By Jamie Holly/ Crooks and Liars==== ============= On the Today Show, Nancy Pelosi sat down with Campbell Brown to discuss her trip to Syria, as well as the stand-off between the White House and Congress over the war funding. NP: The president is not king, the president is the president of the United States. America is a democracy. We have to make decisions based on our judgment. Thus far, the president's judgment hasn't been good, in terms of say for example the war on Iraq. So with all due respect to the president and the role he has, we want respect for the role we have. And members of Congress have gone on fact finding trips since our country began. We're not going to stop because the president wants to avoid the facts and doesn't want to engage in dialogue. We had a bipartisan trip, interesting that the administration chose to ignore the trips of the Republicans who had been there in the week that we were there. Pelosi: "The President Is Not King" By Jamie Holly Crooks and Liars Friday 13 April 2007 On the Today Show, Nancy Pelosi sat down with Campbell Brown to discuss her trip to Syria, as well as the stand-off between the White House and Congress over the war funding. NP: The president is not king, the president is the president of the United States. America is a democracy. We have to make decisions based on our judgment. Thus far, the president's judgment hasn't been good, in terms of say for example the war on Iraq. So with all due respect to the president and the role he has, we want respect for the role we have. And members of Congress have gone on fact finding trips since our country began. We're not going to stop because the president wants to avoid the facts and doesn't want to engage in dialogue. We had a bipartisan trip, interesting that the administration chose to ignore the trips of the Republicans who had been there in the week that we were there..." VIDEO
The Deadly Compromise by Jonah Peretti
Jonah writes a very realistic and unfortunately true observation about the gun situation in America in light of the Virgina Tech shooting.
American gun policy is a deadly compromise.
Pro-gun advocates explain that the Virginia Tech killer would have been stopped in his tracks if students and teachers were carrying concealed weapons. This is absolutely correct -- it is obviously much harder to kill people who are armed.
Meanwhile, gun control advocates explain that those murders would never have happened if the killer could not get guns in the first place.
The is also completely correct -- just look at the murder rate in Asia and Europe to see how limiting access to guns reduces violent crime.
Both sides are right, but they want to live in different worlds. continued...
Foods worth shortening your life for.
From Esquire comes this list of 60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For, many of which are food. Also some of which I've eaten, and would eat again, like duck-fat potatoes and deep-fried Twinkies. I'd like to try The Fat Darrell at the R. U. Grill & Pizza in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a "sandwich made up of chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, and french fries." Yum. And of course, the downhill skiing they mention sounds pretty fun too.
Humans are the animal world's best distance runners...we can run...
Humans are the animal world's best distance runners...we can run long distances relatively fast without overheating. "Once humans start running, it only takes a bit more energy for us to run faster, Lieberman said. Other animals, on the other hand, expend a lot more energy as they speed up, particularly when they switch from a trot to a gallop, which most animals cannot maintain over long distances." (via beebo) (link)
Map of the cracks in the Guggenheim's facade. "Since the...
Map of the cracks in the Guggenheim's facade. "Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright's massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that cause the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand." (link)
Cities are often thought of as organisms or ecosystems, but...
Cities are often thought of as organisms or ecosystems, but the authors of a new study find that metaphor lacking. "The one thing that we know about organisms whether it be elephants or sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down. They use less energy, they don't move as fast. That is a very important point for biological scaling. In the case of cities, it is actually the opposite. As cities get larger they create more wealth and they are more innovative at a faster rate. There is no counterpart to that in biology." (link)
Django Databrowse
Saw a demo of this the other day. Small idea that pushes Django just over the edge of need-to-investigate for me.
WWW::OpenSearch 0.11 Released
The last development release of WWW::OpenSearch was nearly 3 months ago. It was a development release due to some changes that weren't backwards compatible -- mostly having to do with how OpenSearch URLs were parsed and used in a request, adding a dependency on URI::Template.
During that time I haven't had any complaints, so I figure that must mean it's okay!
0.11 should hit a mirror near you soon.
Ben Brown leaves CNET and Consumating
couple weeks old, but news to me; who's next? three makes a trend [via]
April 17, 2007
On Faith: Guest Voices: What Imus Should Have Said, and Why
Google releases Objective-C data APIs
Mac programmers wanting to integrate their programs with Google products will be happy to hear that Google has released the GData API in Objective-C.
bell hooks' Shortlist
The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders--leaders like writer bell hooks. We asked bell to share her favorite films and her thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world. So what films make bell hooks' Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.Who is bell hooks? bell describes herself as a "seeker on the path of love, spiritual advisor, cultural critic, feminist theorist and writer (non-fiction and children's books)." She lives in the Kentucky hills and has spent time in New York City and Florida. She is an obsessive reader, especially of mystery novels. bell hooks is a distinguished professor at Berea College. bell hooks on the Power of Film In a world where censorship and the silencing of dissent is common practice we cannot rely on the media to give us movies that are "real," informative or transformative. Documentary films remain one of the essential expressions of free speech. Two Spike Lee documentaries, Four Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, inspire me because they poignantly document the impact of post-traumatic stress caused by racist exploitation and oppression in the lives of black folks. bell's Film Picks Stranger With a Camera: This film raises crucial ethical and political issues about the power of the camera and the relationship between artists and subjects. It is also about class, homophobia and the dangers of a closed community. Four Little Girls: Every American should see this film. It is a true to life portrait of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. One of the most powerful visual accounts of the traumatic impact of racial terrorism in the lives of black folks. An amazing story of a white woman who loves Justice enough to take a stand. Saving Jackie: Talk about the power of the documentary. This young black female filmmaker turns the camera on her family to explore the impact of drug addiction on children. She examines both her mother's addiction to cocaine and her recovery. Her: A blend of futuristic filmmaking using several forms including animation and straight-forward documentary. Some might call it sci-fi--it's visionary. Challenging patriarchy, it gives everyone the opportunity to understand injustices--the pain of sexist domination and oppression. Blue: Derek Jarman's Blue invites audiences to see and feel with him, losing his sight as a consequence of AIDS. He shows us that beauty can emerge from even the most tragic circumstances. Happy to Be Nappy and Other Tales of Me: A film for children and grown-ups who want to look at the impact of difference in the lives of young folk. It's beautiful, funny, sad and uplifting. When the Levees Broke: Significantly, this film offers a voice to diverse groups of people who were not given media coverage during the Katrina crisis. It exposes the racial terrorism that is the continued political practice in our water [system] and offers amazing humanizing portraits of black people, especially black men. Crumb: A powerful portrait of dissident creativity. Shut Up and Sing: An interesting look at the radical politicization of white women who initially lacked critical consciousness. Black Is...Black Ain't: Marlon Riggs' provocative look at the formation of black identities and homophobia in black life.bell hooks, photo by Barbara Ries
iPhone in flux
As June nears, reports of possible iPhone delays and rebates appear.
Joyent To Offer Open Source Version of Slingshot [2]
When Slingshot ships, Joyent will use a dual license model similar to Trolltech, MySQL, and Sleepycat.
Open Source and/or Free
Slingshot will be open-sourced under the GPL and available to anyone with a publicly available service that is free (advertising is “ok”) running on the Rails platform. An example of this type of application is Twitter. You will be able to download the source-code of Slingshot, dig your fingers in, and work with it in any way you see fit.
We are planning a number of initiatives in order to build a vibrant community around Slingshot and are currently working to get a number of open source Rails applications working on Slingshot. We have Radiant working, and we will release this as part of the SDK when we ship Slingshot to the world.
Commercial Use
If you plan to use Slingshot for commercial purposes, we will have two types of licenses. One license type will be for commercial applications that are publicly available. An example of this type of application is Joyent Connector. The other license type will be for commercial applications that are not publicly available (either it is behind the firewall or customer cannot sign up for accounts).
Having commercial use licenses allows people to contribute to the continued development of Slingshot as we plan to reinvest a significant amount of this license revenue into further development of Slingshot and support for the Slingshot open source community.
If your commercial application is powered by a Joyent Accelerator, you get a commercial use license for Slingshot for free. No kidding.
Apollo Model?
When we announced Slingshot, Andrew Shebanow at Adobe posted about Apollo, Competition, and Openness.
Next is SlingShot from Joyent and Magnetk. I love Ruby on Rails, so this product is very interesting to me. They basically have taken the all-in-one desktop server approach of Locomotive and turned it into an application runtime. Its a great idea, and one that opens up a lot more power to the local application than Apollo. Downsides are a lot of potential security issues (no sandbox?), the fact that the entire source of your application is distributed to the world whether you like it or not, and the fact that it is limited to Ruby on Rails applications. More disturbing, though, is that it sounds like Joyent will be charging a royalty for distributing applications based on their runtime unless you are a customer for their hosting service. Maybe they just plan on charging a flat fee for the SDK. Either way, this is much less open than the Apollo model where the SDK and runtime are both free of charge.
We are charging a license fee to people using Slingshot for commercial purposes. I believe Adobe does this for content producing tools, too. Joyent would like to invite Adobe to open source Apollo and the ecosystem around it (Flex, Flash). Don’t just make it free, free it.
And by way of response. Sandbox? What’s the sandbox Adobe Photoshop runs in? Entire source? More on that, later. Limited to Rails? Yes. Focus.
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the embodied energy of bottled water:...
Some back-of-the-envelope calculations about the embodied energy of bottled water: "the cost to produce and deliver a bottle of imported water is $0.22, leaving $1.28 per bottle profit for the manufacturer and the retail store". (link)
Comment from Alaina Browne on 2007-04-17
A reminder that this is a forum for conversations about food. For those concerned, Ed's comments here summarize why we are proud to have Adam Roberts as a Serious Eats contributor.
Please email us at feedback@seriouseats.com with your site feedback.
Because this thread is off-topic (not about food), and not particularly productive comments are now closed.
? A tale of two hos
Snoop Dogg recently explained the difference between the language used by old, white radio announcers and rappers:
It's a completely different scenario. [Rappers] are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit, that's trying to get a nigga for his money. These are two separate things. First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthafuckas say we in the same league as him.
What Mr. Dogg is arguing here is that it's ok to refer to actual hos as hos in the service of artistic expression but it is not ok to refer to college basketball players as such for the purpose of demeaning people. As we're currently engaged in another go-round on the issue of speech, political correctness, and its potential enforcement, it's not hard to imagine that someday an argument like Snoop Dogg's will be deployed in a court of law. I wonder if anyone will buy it?
Chaos theory and hype around scientific trends
Discover Magazine has a good piece about what happened to the overhyped Chaos Theory
“From The Simpsons to Jurassic Park, chaos theory became fashionable and funny, terrifying and true. In the 21st century, chaos theory, for all its previous pomp, makes barely a peep on the mainstream radar. Still, it hasn’t gone away—far from it, says Harvard University physicist Paul Martin says. “It’s a collection of tools, and it’s a way of understanding phenomena that occur over a wide range of fields.”
“Why do I blog this? overhyped phenomenon in science and technology is a very interesting topic to me. I am often amazed by how certain topics (fractals, web 3D, artificial intelligence, neural networks) gain some incredible attention and then leads to intriguing judgments, decisions and actions. I don’t mean here that this topics are not good or interesting but instead that the overemphasis/over-expectations lead to some failures or sometimes hide the genuine importance of what they bring to the table.
However, should such a hype be dismissed? personally I would say no and when it pervades pop culture (the simpsons, sci-fi novel) it can also be a way to bring people to work on these issues. That may be the flip side of the coin.
Maki Reviews Guinness Marmite
Maki reviews Guinness Marmite—and manages to convince me that I'd like to try some.
American Civil Liberties Union : Citing New Study Showing that Federally Funded Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Don’t Work, ACLU Calls on Congress to Stop Funding
Citing New Study Showing that Federally Funded Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs Don’t Work, ACLU Calls on Congress to Stop Funding (4/13/2007) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: media@aclu.org WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union said the long-awaited release of a study showing that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs don't work should end the debate over federal funding for such extreme programs. The study, commissioned by Congress, looked at several federally funded programs and found that teens who participated in these programs were just as likely to have sex as teens who did not participate. “The ACLU has long said that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are ineffective, and what’s worse censor vital information about how to protect against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,” said Lorraine Kenny, Public Education Director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. “Today’s study makes clear that these programs have no place in our classrooms and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars.” Since 1996, the federal government has spent more than a billion dollars on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs despite research like today’s indicating that many such programs are ineffective. Some studies show that abstinence-only programs actually deter teens from protecting themselves from unintended pregnancy or disease when they start having sex. In the coming months, Congress will consider whether to continue funding abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Today’ study is strong evidence that these programs should no longer receive taxpayer dollars, the ACLU said. Today’s report, Impacts of Four Title V, Section 510 Abstinence Education Programs, concludes, “Findings indicate that youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.” “It is time for the federal government to leave ideology out of the sex education equation and stop wasting money on abstinence-only-until-marriage programs that risk teens’ health,” said Vania Leveille, Legislative Counsel for the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “It’s common sense: teens need complete and medically accurate information on both abstinence and contraception to lead healthy lives.” - more
The Shins busk in Montmartre, Paris
impromptu live performances by great bands, recorded in one long shot [via]
April 16, 2007
PeaceMaker, game simulating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
here's a detailed review from Gamasutra [via]
Two weeks of broken Shack cam and counting
You'd think with all the recent wind (gusts over 50 MPH) here NYC, the Shake Shack would be able to power their web camera but the poor thing's been out of commission for at least two weeks. Either that or this guy's been hanging out forever trying to decide what to order. Come on, Shack Crew! How hard can it be to keep a lil' ol' web cam running?
Missing links at the New York Times
It seemed like the New York Times Dining Section was really trying hard to get the web. They set up some blogs like Diner's Journal for critic Frank Bruni and The Pour for wine writer Eric Asimov. Recently they added more bloggers to Diner's Journal, increasing the number of daily posts and the breadth of coverage. Things were looking good. And then, they go ahead and run articles like today's Expanding the Options.
The article is a little summary of new joints that have opened in the West Village in Manhattan that they've already reviewed. But they don't link to the original reviews in the online version of the article! They just mention there was an article and the date it appeared, leaving readers to dig through their archives to find it. How stupid is that? Links people, links! The web is all about links!!! And a business aside to the Times: if you're worried about getting your dead-tree-printing ass kicked by the internet, your best bet would be to up your page views (and advertising revenue) by driving people to your own freakin' content. You wrote it once, help people find it again.
Get farmers off the agri-welfare roles
Get farmers off the agri-welfare roles, says the Christian Science Monitor, encouraging Congress to revamp the Farm Bill this year. "This is the year for Congress to do for agriculture what it did for welfare reform in 1996."
Feast your eyes on the new design for the US...
Feast your eyes on the new design for the US passport. "They'll never go for this...it's too over-the-top." "Perfect!" (link)
Why the Leopard delay is a (somewhat) big deal
A little schooling in the fine art of timing an Apple hardware purchase.
A Beautiful Day for the Half Marathon
This weekend the weather held out long enough for 4847 participants to run 13.1 miles from Coney Island to Prospect Park. Runners all gathered first thing Saturday morning to run the biggest race in the borough. There was a chill in the air at the beginning, but by the time they arrived in the park, everything had warmed up and crowds were out to cheer on the runners.The photo above was taken on the boardwalk as runners finished mile 3. Those of us standing out there cheering them on bounced with the vibration of nearly 10,000 feet pounding on the wooden planks. See the rest of the photos of the race here
Cold windy spring means fewer lobsters in the Northeast
The cold rainy spring here in the Northeast has been a bummer for me. But it's really been a bummer for lobstermen. A pattern of strong northwest winds has made it difficult for lobstermen to head out to sea for the last two months or so. And colder water temperatures mean the lobsters aren't feeding, so the traps are often empty. End result: lobster is scarce and pricey right now.
Diagrams of connections
A collection of diagrams, including How the United States are connected to each other, a Hebrew Bible overview, Wall Street Scandals, and Star Wars. (via notm)
Microsoft Wary of DoubleClick Buyout - washingtonpost.com
Don't you just love it when Microsoft gets all fussed about monopolistic restraint of trade?
New TED.com and TED's June Cohen featured in today's New York Times
Today's New York Times carries an article by E-Commerce reporter Bob Tedeschi about the new TED.com:
Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
June Cohen, director of TED Media, said putting conference presentations on the Internet helped increase exposure.
By BOB TEDESCHI
Published: April 16, 2007
THOSE who don’t have $6,000 or enough prominent connections to get into a TED conference can take heart. The price of admission just went to zero, provided you can settle for a more remote experience.The TED organization (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design) runs an invitation-only conference in Monterey, Calif., every year for movers and shakers in business and nonprofit circles.
Yesterday, TED introduced a Web site that offers about 100 of its TED Talks, the polished 20-minute presentations for which the conference is renowned.
The new site will generate more advertising revenue for TED, but more important, conference leaders said, it will expose TED’s content to millions of people who would otherwise never attend the event.
In so doing, TED is at the vanguard of a trend in the conference industry, where organizers have begun to exploit assets that in years past evaporated as soon as speakers left the stage.
“I’m so struck by it anytime I’m at a great event,” said June Cohen, director of media for TED, a nonprofit business based in New York. “That was so wonderful, but now it’s gone. It’s a shame they’re not captured and preserved.”
Ms. Cohen said TED’s organizers began posting last June a handful of free videos from past conferences on TED.com, with “fairly aggressive goals for how I thought they’d do. But we blew past those pretty quickly.” By January, the number of TED Talks on the site had grown to 44, and they had been viewed more than three million times.
Article continues after the jump...
Based on that success, Ms. Cohen said that the organization pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into its video production operations and into the development of a Web site to showcase about 100 of the talks.
The presentations are arranged thematically on the site’s home page. For example, visitors can browse on “Spectacular Performance” to find one of 11 TED presentations chosen for the category by TED editors (like a piano improvisation by the 14-year old prodigy Jennifer Lin in 2004), or find 22 TED Talks roughly related to “The Rise of Collaboration.”
“We’re creating a TED experience online,” Ms. Cohen said, “and that’s not about watching a single talk, but watching several in succession that relate to each other in unexpected ways.”
With the new site, each presentation has its own Web page that includes an overview of the Talk, a biography of the speaker, comments from users, links to related Web pages and a way to rate the presentation that differs from conventional methods. Users choose three characteristics from a list that includes “long winded” and “courageous,” among others.
Three of the more than 50 presentations from last month’s conference, including high-definition video of former President Bill Clinton’s speech, are featured on the new site.
From a business standpoint, Ms. Cohen said that giving away the conference’s content in such a highly polished manner has “completely transformed” the organization.
•
“Conventional business logic would tell you that in a community like TED you have to keep your commodity scarce and expensive to retain brand value,” she said. “But the same year we started releasing most of our content for free we raised our conference price by nearly 50 percent and still sold out in 12 days.”
“This has actually created a huge challenge for us, in how to manage our growth,” Ms. Cohen added. “We have a waiting list of a couple thousand people for the event and we can’t grow it more. So the question is how to expand it in other ways and do more online.”
Jack Pitney, head of marketing for BMW of North America, said visits to the company’s Web site have jumped strongly in the last year, to about 1.7 million people a month. “That’s due to a confluence of a lot of things, but the TED Talks certainly contributed to a lot more people coming to the site,” he said.
Of the 11,000 or so trade shows and corporate events each year in the United States, about 10 percent in the last year have begun to use videos from their shows to generate more revenue, according to Darlene Gudea, publisher of Trade Show Executive Magazine, an industry publication. “Show organizers are realizing that only part of the industry comes to a trade show, leaving a lot of educational opportunities, and revenues, on the table,” Ms. Gudea said.
And trade shows themselves are a booming business. According to a recent report from American Business Media, a business-to-business media industry group, revenue from trade shows last year grew by 10 percent, to $11.3 billion, and for the first time exceeded revenue from industry magazines.
One example of a company that is capitalizing on the trend is Reed Exhibitions, a unit of Reed Elsevier, which organizes about 60 large-scale conferences in the United States each year. Two weeks ago, Reed introduced out ISC365.com, a site devoted to ISC West, an Internet security conference held in March in Las Vegas.
In a test that could eventually extend to all of the company’s events, Reed will soon begin posting videos from some of the roughly 90 sessions held during the three-day event on ISC365.com. Dean Russo, a Reed Exhibitions group vice president who oversees the company’s Internet activities, said subscribers would pay about $300 to $350 to download five of those videos. Other sessions, he said, would be supported by advertising and will be offered free.
Mr. Russo said that about 25,000 people attended ISC West, and about 1,200 paid $400 to $1000 to attend educational sessions. “We’re thinking in the first six months we could bring in at least that many people with the online subscription, and it could potentially be many, many times that,” he said.
Depending on the objectives of the conference speakers, that approach could meet little resistance. Those who earn a living speaking on the conference circuit may have to negotiate different agreements with trade shows that seek to capitalize on those speeches in perpetuity.
But for others, like the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the exposure is enough payment.
Mr. Gladwell, who spoke at the 2004 TED conference, said his talk was “a riff that was taken from a New Yorker piece just before it came out. Certainly more people have read that story as a result of my talk being online. If I can get people to read my stuff more, that’s all a plus.”
open all tabbed blogs.
Being stuck in San Diego for a couple more days allows me time to catch up on the stuff I haven't been twittering, like counting the calories I've consumed on my April 2007 SoCal Food Tour and figuring out how many times I can listen to the Daft Punk remix of Prince's 'Kiss' before Tricia gets sick of it. Here's a rundown of what's been on my mind lately:
Canon HV20 vs Sony HC7 - I've been in search of a small, 1-chip HDV camcorder for use on my own field reports for Rocketboom (yes, I'll be on camera. I used to do it all the time.) Although the image on the HC7 would probably match better with the HC1 we're currently using for production, I'm leaning towards the HV20 and its native 24p mode, especially with the release of FCP6 and its open format timeline support (although I'll have to upgrade my 12" Powerbook G4 to something that can at least play back a 1080 clip.)
Terra Plana's new Spring 2007 line is out. Terra Plana makes relatively eco-friendly shoes of mostly locally-sourced recycled materials and minimal glue. I like them because they have thin soles and weigh next to nothing. With the exception of an unnecessary pair of snow boots and my basketball kicks, I've been buying all of my shoes from Terra Plana for a couple years now. If like me you can't afford their regular prices, keep an eye out for their end of season sales. I'll usually stop by their NYC store twice a year to scoop up three or four pair at $50-$75 a pop.
The USC Annenberg Center is being shut down in July which is a low down dirty shame. I've also heard rumblings of a new IP policy regarding the stuff produced by game dev students (they won't own them, much like the cinema school does with student films) which concerns me to no end.
Speaking of games and USC, Justin's PMOG is brilliant (although I've only completed a couple of quests.)
Why is it that the only people I know who seem to be excited about Joost live in NY or LA?
Enjoying MTAA's Karaoke Death Match almost as much as Cory's live performance of his Glockenspiel Addendum for Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run.
Also enjoying Ethan Zuckerman's Draft paper on mobile phones and activism. Considering his how his ideas impact our Wizzy Digital project.
Watching NY1 via my Slingbox makes me giddy.
Blip's new Show Player is pretty slick.
Not as upset about the Knicks missing the playoffs as I thought I would be.
Taking a good hard look at the labor situation in Hollywood and thinking about its impact on the 2.0 space (and our potential impact on it.)
Some good folks I've had the great fortune to meet, hang, or catch up with in the past couple weeks: Mark, Meg, Alice, Bill, Karin, Drew, Steve & Zadi, Annie, Sandra, Anil.
Lastly, I've been working on several rboom Casual Friday episodes with Erin Greenwell and Sheila Callaghan. Here's a tease of the first:
(much respect to David for the title of this post, btw.)
Josh Wolf is not a Red Herring
On a journalist's duty to the public / PRO: Federal shield law is needed to extend journalist protections:"It feels as if I've barely had a chance to blink since walking out the front gate of the Federal Detention Center in Dublin on April 3, but the debates on what we should take away from my experience have already escalated into a full-on storm of differing voices. Much of the debate has focused on whether or not I am a journalist; this question is nothing more than a distraction and a red herring over the very real issues exposed by the marathon saga that only concluded when I was released from custody."
Dodgeball founders quit Google in frustration
wow, I wasn't expecting that
Dodgeball founders leave Google and that leaves Dodgeball probably dead....
Dodgeball founders leave Google and that leaves Dodgeball probably dead. Then why did Google buy Dodgeball exactly? Not for the founders...they left. Not for the tech. To build it up into a profitable company? (Nope, they didn't put any resources into it.) To kill it before some other company (Yahoo, Microsoft) got their mitts on it? For the PR value? Why did they even bother? (link)
April 15, 2007
Wolfowitz Clashed Repeatedly With World Bank Staff - washingtonpost.com
As he prepared to sign a five-year contract as World Bank president in the spring of 2005, Paul Wolfowitz sent his personal lawyer, Robert Barnett, to negotiate the terms. Barnett, whose high-profile clients have included some of Washington's biggest political and media figures, did not mince words in his meetings with the bank's legal team.
Apple props Red One
In a bold move Apple showed a Red One logo at their NAB keynote presentation. "You can take 4k files, plug it directly into a MacBook Pro, and see and edit them right there. The industry is going to change....
First Responders
Funny to see police and firefighters making their case with street posters (and with such an ‘oppositional’ style) — considering its the police who enforce the vandalism laws. I guess the streets are it when you feel the government has abandoned you.
Apple announces Final Cut updates at NAB (updated)
Apple's NAB event has kicked off with a slew of updates to Final Cut, including the introduction of Final Cut Server, an update to Final Cut Studio, and an update to Final Cut Pro.
Scaling to multiple databases with Rails
Remember that point about Rails lacking an easy-to-use way of dealing with multiple read/write databases? Strike that. Nic Williams has released Magic Multi-Connections. It makes it dead easy to use a cluster of databases to scale read and write speeds higher than a single connection would ever allow.
That in itself is wonderful. Williams let code be his reply to the discussion of Twitter's woes on scaling the database. I would of course rather have seen this work come out of Twitter, but I'm happy that they got a free offering handed to them regardless. They didn't even have to pass step 1 in Brian McCallister's road map for getting stuff fixed in open source. And the turn-around time was within the same day of this whole thing blowing up.
Now how could this be. How could Nic fix such an apparent "critical flaw", as others have billed the lack of this facility in Rails, in such a short time? Simple, he did it in less than 75 lines of Ruby as a plugin for Rails. Less than 75 lines.
In my mind, that's the crux of the story. That extending Rails to do what you want is often much simpler than you think. That you can't compare extending a high-level framework written in a language like Ruby to, say, patching Apache or MySQL. The barriers of entry are simply not in the same sport.
So let's use this occasion to celebrate the wonders of open source ("some times you can just ask and you will receive"), but at the same time keep the effort involved in this example as a guidance for the future ("maybe next time, I could just have a look at how hard it would be to fix myself"). And of course, a big thanks to Nic Williams to making a big fuss a non-issue.
42 :: More Than A Number
Thank you, Jackie Robinson.
Maureen Dowd | More Con Than Neo
MORE CON THAN NEO BY MAUREEN DOWD. But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq. You will not be surprised to learn, gentle readers, that Wolfie in love is no less deceptive and bumbling than Wolfie at war.
Johnny Cash
"God's Gonna Cut You Down" - Johnny Cash
Complete lyrics from Metrolyrics
. . . . . . . . .
Why the famous get famouser…
Kottke points to a great article by Columbia’s Duncan Watts…
The social context of content has everything to do with it’s meaning. It’s one of the reasons that I think that a purely pixel-based algorithmic approach to, say, image recognition is doomed. In optimistic moments, I’ve said that the computer vision community may produce a 98% reliable dog detector… But what we really want is a “funny” detector… or “cool” detector… that’s gonna be a long-time coming… or maybe it’s already here but involves analyzing people’s actions around the pixels v. just the pixels in isolation.
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