randomwalks/dj

"By making publishing and dissemination of information faster and less expensive, computer technology has made it feasible to reach a smaller audience more effectively. It is no longer necessary to market for the lowest common denominator. There is already a growth in the birthrate of small circulation magazines and journals. Although this increases diversity and subsequently the chances of tailoring the product to the consumer, we can only hope that such abundance will not obliterate our choices by overwhelming us with options."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 26, 2008 6:19 PM

1,000 Lies. The Center for Public Integrity has compiled a database of Iraq-related speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony by the Bush administration in the two years following September 11, 2001. They found at least 935 false statements about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq — reaching a crescendo before the invasion. Their analysis and data set are searchable online.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on January 26, 2008 4:43 AM

My friend Stephanie has created an amazingly interesting and weird new project by opening a factory in Second Life! In an attempt to raise serious issues about the intersection of 3d web environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft and our real world economy, she's created the Double Happiness Jean factory, the first virtual sweatshop. It's a little hard to wrap your head around, but they are selling real world jeans (that you can wear) that are digitally printed onto a special fabric, but in order to have the jeans produced a number of people need to be "working" in Second Life. A half dozen people need to literally be simultaneously online and pressing buttons on virtual machines in order to make the virtual conveyor belt run, and for the jeans to be produced (printed out) in the real world.

These workers actually get paid in Lindens, the currency that is used in Second Life. They are paid 200 Lindens an hour, which is about 90 cents. Word is that this is good pay in the virtual world. People talk a lot about how Second Life and other virtual worlds allow for all kinds of experimentation that is difficult or impossible in real life. But can we seriously talk about something being different or alternative when the same exact capitalist social relations that exist in our first life are reproduced in Second Life? What does it mean that people who spend hours and hours in virtual worlds, I would assume in part to escape the problems, pressures or seeming limitations of their real lives, go to work in a virtual factory in order to be able to buy virtual clothes and code scripts to be able to perform virtual sex acts on other avatars?

I feel like I hear more and more about protests, strikes and other activist actions within Second Life, but I'm still unsure as to what they all add up to. There is an excitement and buzz around these things, it seems largely because they are new, but do they challenge any power in a real way? Are the virtual offices of a company a site where they are vulnerable? Is anything actually created there that can be stopped or blocked? Are companies dependent enough on their virtual presences that disrupting them has a real world effect? I guess I don't really know, but I'm very skeptical.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Just Seeds: Blog, on January 26, 2008 2:00 AM

A British novelist has been awarded legal damages in excess of £100,000 because she writes thrillers, not literary masterpieces. What's at fault?
She's been inhaling fumes from a nearby shoe factory.

The author "claimed to have become so intoxicated" by the fumes that "she was reduced to writing thrillers." Indeed, the fumes grew so intense "that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier."
That book went on to sell 10,000 copies.
So there are several unspoken arguments being put forward by her claim. Such as:

1) Literary judgement. Why is one "reduced" to writing crime thrillers? Perhaps Henning Mankell is more interesting than, say, Zadie Smith. This writer thinks so, at least. I.e. me. Perhaps the traumatized British author under discussion here should actually owe money to the shoe factory – a small percentage of her royalties, for instance – or at least an acknowledgment in the book.
2) Environmental causality. Perhaps BLDGBLOG is caused by the fact that I do not inhale fumes from a nearby shoe factory. Perhaps I find it difficult to concentrate on anything but architecture because of my city's aroma... I'd thought it'd been all the coffee.
3) Paranoia. Perhaps you, right now, are inhaling something that prevents you from writing your own Ulysses. Perhaps you are being held back by untraceable smells. Perhaps your life is being quietly reshaped by something you can neither see nor properly talk about, some vast and mysterious influencing machine that manipulates you from the outside. Perhaps that machine is a giant shoe factory.
4) Theft, unauthorized use of services, and/or copyright infringement. Perhaps this woman has been using the shoe factory's fumes without permission. Perhaps, Delphi-like, they have been wafting through the neighborhood for someone else's use, mesmerizing home scribblers into a state approaching hypergraphia. Perhaps there was another writer in the flat next door furiously pounding out thrillers and loving every minute of it. Perhaps this woman had no right to use the fumes in the first place – like taping a film whilst sitting at the cinema. Put the pen down, love. These fumes aren't for you. It's a form of neurochemical shoplifting.
5) Scapegoating. Perhaps you can't finish the novel you started writing last summer because of London. You don't live in London – in fact, you've never been there – but it's distracting you. It's forcing you to write emails to friends, instead. You haven't touched your novel in ages. You should sue London... Or perhaps all those buildings you see everyday are preventing you from being a good architecture critic. It's not your eye for detail – it's the buildings you're forced to write about. Perhaps the streets you take to work each day are not inspiring you to travel abroad and be interesting and do something fun with your life. Perhaps your coworker's cubicle makes you terrible at data entry. Perhaps nothing is your fault at all. Perhaps the color of Manhattan taxi cabs prevents you from writing good music. You're now homeless. You prepare to sue.
6) Aromatherapeutic innovation and/or the future of global perfume. In 2010, Burberry will release a new scent. It will smell like the fumes of British shoe factories. Within days of buying your first bottle you begin to convulse – and write thrillers...

So is your neighborhood causing you to write – or not write – highbrow novels? Can you prove it? Or do you only cook spaghetti because of the sad little street you live on – when, really, you're a gourmet chef...?
What is your city doing to you?

(Thanks, Steve T!)

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on January 26, 2008 1:18 AM

ThingM's first product, BlinkM is now for sale from Sparkfun. BlinkM is a smart LED. What's a smart LED? Well, on the one hand, it's the atomic unit of ubiquitous computing: an RGB LED and a CPU. Input, processing, networking, and output in one package. If technology worked like chemistry, it would be analogous to hydrogen; if it worked like biology, to algae. OK, maybe that overstates the point, but it's the simplest device that we could imagine that represents the essence of ubicomp, and it was the one we could, as a self-funded startup, afford to develop and manufacture relatively quickly (development started in November, though it's based on work we did with WineM). It's designed for hobbyists, designers and artists who want to add low-power colored light to their projects, but don't want to mess with pulsed width modulation or color theory. Give it an RGB number, or select a color from the color picker, and it glows that color; enter two colors, and it'll do a smooth fade between them. Want to simulate the breathing sleep light on a Mac computer but in purple, it'll do that. Take a look at the description for the full...

Originally posted by mikek from Orange Cone, on January 25, 2008 4:13 PM

In 1994, years before the Internet became the world's diary (or ashtray, depending on your point of view) that it is today, Heather Powazek Champ launched her first home page. Some form of addiction formed in her constant forays into self-publishing, and after some years the avid photographer found herself co-founding JPG Magazine, the Photoshop-restrictive publication loved well (if not equally) by purists and digital mavens alike. Today, along with running the magazine with her husband and fellow founder, Derek Powazek, Heather plays the role of Community Manager at Flickr, the hugely popular photo-sharing site.

We chatted with Heather about plastic cameras, digital vs. film photography, and the shortcomings of the iPhone, and learned a few things about ourselves — i.e., ‘The Perpetually Posting' — in the process.

Joshspear.com: What inspired you, initially, to start taking pictures?

Heather Powazek Champ: My parents. They were both inveterate shutterbugs. My sister and I found thousands upon thousands of slides when my father passed. My mother purchased an SX-70 when they were first introduced by Polaroid in the 70's. The sleet aluminum and metal camera became an object that I lusted and desired after.

JS: Do you have a favorite camera? If so, what is it, and what about it do you love so much?

HPC: Well, my cameras would tell you that I'm quite fickle. I tend to have year- long "affairs," and I'm currently very much enamoured with loading 35 mm film into a Holga. In all, I'm a fan of all things cheap and plastic. I do have a Leica M6 that I adore but am completely intimidated by.

JS: You still prefer (and will probably always prefer) film to digital photography. Why is this?

HPC: To my eye, there's something integral to photography that's not translating from film to digital. This isn't to say that I think that digital is crap, but there's definitely something missing.

I also think that a photographer's relationship with shooting is quite different when it's film and when it's digital. If I buy fresh Polaroid film for my pinhole camera, it's roughly $3.75 a shot. Shooting with an SX-70 is roughly $1 a shot. The choices that I make are an important and necessary part of my process.

With digital, you pretty much shoot ‘til your card's full. I guess, I miss the ongoing interior editorial conversation that happens in my head.

JS: If photography were to progress into a solely digital art form, what do you most fear might be lost?

HPC: Herm. A closer relationship with image making? That might sound a little poncy. Then again, with digital, it's cheaper (in the long run) and — as the cost of cameras fall — available for more people. It's hard to say. Digital is the natural progression of photography and hundreds of years of people endeavouring to capture a slice of the world around them.

JS: You have a very close relationship with blogging, both through your own tendencies and through your husband Derek — who was quite an early adopter as far as Internet communication goes. What does the Internet, as an art forum, mean to you?

HPC: I quickly became addicted to the sense of euphoria that I felt when I published my first home page back in 1994 — "I am Heather, hear me roar!" Granted, it was difficult then. You need to know some HTML and there weren't any books, but given the inherent templatization of blogging, it was more free. Don't get me wrong — I love the ease in which people can now share their voice (and millions of people are doing so daily). Something has been lost and as an art form, I think we've all become a little too complacent.

JS: How did you become involved with Flickr?

HPC: I was an early alpha tester, having created my account back in January 2004. In terms of joining the team, I pinged Caterina over IM to congratulate the team after the much rumoured and finally announced acquisition of Flickr by Yahoo! at TED in 2005. I blithely mentioned something like "please let me know if there's anything I can do..." and one thing led to another.

JS: What do you do there?

HPC: I'm the Community Manager — I can be a conduit back and forth between our members and the team. I also have days where I'm good cop or bad cop depending upon what's going on. There's an editorial aspect too, one that I very much enjoy in featuring some of the incredible work that our members share on FlickrBlog.

JS: In your own words, what has Flickr done for photography/photographers?

HPC: Flickr provided a collaborative space that has allowed so many to flourish, find their voice and share their view of the world. We've shared in the joy of the birth of a baby and the sorrow of the death of the loved one — the breadth of slices of life that our members have chosen to share is humbling.

It's sort of a flexible empty container of indeterminate shape. The members have very much crafted and are crafting an incredible variety of communities focused around so many different interests, conversations and explorations.

JS: In an interview you did with geeksugar.com, you claimed you were obsessed with your Treo… yet now one of your few methods of picture taking is with an iPhone. What won you over?

HPC: I don't know that I'm completely won over. I totally miss a dedicated qwerty keyboard. Wouldn't it be marvelous if someone developed one that you plugged into the dock at the bottom? That's most likely a heretical thought but I find myself sending our garbled text messages all the time ("are you drunk?" has come back on more that one occasion). That said, I think that the camera application is fantastic. The way in which you scroll through your albums, enlarge and reduce images is pure genius. Some aspects of the iPhone do feel a little "1.0" and I have high hopes for future versions.

JS: As both a writer and a photographer, what does the term "A picture's worth a thousand words" mean to you?

HPC: If this was a recorded conversation, this would be the part where I "erm" and "ahhhh" for an uncomfortably long period. How about.... some people are better with words, while others are better with images. I think that I fall mostly in the latter camp. "A picture's worth a thousand words" could be reminder that looking a little or a little deeper might bubble up more to the surface.

JS: What's next?

HPC: I'm on day 21 of a year-long project: Polaroid 366. Given that I haven't successfully made it through NaBloPoMo on both occasions that I've participated, it's a little daunting, but it seemed like a good way to celebrate a leap year.

Art, interviews, photography, speartalks, websites

Originally posted by Carmel Hagen from JoshSpear.com, on January 25, 2008 2:38 PM

WGA member "Chris" sends this anecdote. -JA

I have a nice story from the line that will warm the heart:

We're at the CBS TV City main gate today, and it's raining, with big, slappy drops. There's maybe a dozen of us braving it out for The Cause, but only a couple umbrellas, meaning most of us are getting soaked. (Someone asked, "What's more unappealing than an unemployed writer? An

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on January 25, 2008 2:00 PM

"reAnimator is a tool for visualizing how regular expression engines use finite-state automata to match regular regular expression patterns against text."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 25, 2008 1:29 PM

This morning I quickly put together an updated version of my resume and got great feedback on the changes but I also was told that I wrote that I've been in my current role since June of '08 so in the words of the person who told me, I am in fact working in the future which is very Web 3.0 even 4.0.

It is exhausting talking about one's career to strangers and afterward it often leaves me a little sad.  I go over possible mistakes,  I think of Voyager closing, the fact that I left Hearst too soon, Workman too soon, didn't start this or that. It opens a door to too many uses of the word "should have" and I find I need to be careful to shut that down.  It is what it is.  Would I do it differently possibly but then I might not have B and W waiting for me at home and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

I don't like being told I'm too senior for things or too junior for other things.

Putting it out there on Facebook has led to a few nice notes and leads.

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on January 25, 2008 12:22 PM

[Ths post was cross-posted over on the O’Reilly Network LAMP blog.]

Last night, the first stable version of Movable Type under a GPL license was released. You can download it from here.

Being a Perl coder and advocate of open source, the release of MTOS has great significance to me personally.

There is still a lot of work to be done in its transition, but progress has been steady.

With development of MT’s being mostly closed to date and Six Apart’s relentless focus on end-user user experience, the MT community has significant amount of designers, consultants and other professionals who use it to run their business and deliver solutions. What is now needed are experienced Perl coders to join the mtos-dev mailing list and start discussing how to improve the existing code, tap further into the collective experience found in CPAN, and in return, make what’s been developed for MT, an asset to the Perl community as a whole.

There definitely where some issues over the years in terms of code style and quality that are being addressed. It’s improved though there is still a long way to go.

Here are some links for getting involved:

• Contributing to MTOS
• Downloading MTOS
  • Subversion Repository
  • Nightlies
  • Stable Releases
• MTOS Mailing Lists
• The Movable Type Wiki

Originally posted by Timothy Appnel from Code / Appnel Solutions, on January 25, 2008 6:48 AM

Last week, we busted Target for blatantly mimicking one of Diane von Furstenberg's best known patterns (and on a wrap dress, for shame.)

Now, Business Week reports that Diane von Furstenberg herself is sueing Target for the copyright infringement, charging that Target's copies "nearly identically copy the scale, pattern and colorways of DVF's Spotted Frog Design," and that the shape of the copies are purposefully " 'wrap' dresses made of materials designed to look like silk jersey, a style consumers and the general public have come to associate with DVF."

We guess Target's designers don't have any friends at Forever 21. At least they could have given them the warning:

The inimitable DVF does not mess around.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on January 25, 2008 4:01 AM

A new poll of Massachusetts by SurveyUSA shows that the endorsements of Sen. John Kerry and Gov. Deval Patrick haven't helped Barack Obama very much in this Super Tuesday state. Hillary Clinton has a huge lead with 59% support, followed by Barack Obama at 22% and John Edwards with 11%.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney enjoys a healthy lead in his home state: Romney 50%, McCain 29%, Huckabee 7%, Giuliani 6%, and Paul 3%.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on January 25, 2008 3:56 AM

The new Zogby poll in South Carolina shows Barack Obama continuing to hold a healthy lead over the rest of the field — and that John Edwards just might be sneaking up on Hillary Clinton for second place. Barack Obama leads with 38% support, followed by Clinton at 25%, and Edwards with 21%.

Some commentary from John Zogby: "The real movement here is by John Edwards, who is the only one who continues to gain ground in our three-day tracking poll ... Can he catch Clinton by Saturday’s vote, perhaps bumping her from a second-place finish? Perhaps that is why she has returned to the state to campaign."

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on January 25, 2008 3:50 AM

Delta 7 Sports and Miōn Footwear partnered to power their booth at the Outdoor Retailer show with a mountain bike. Scott emailed me about it and we got a photo from Delta 7 Sports. Show attendees, employees, and anyone else they could find, attempted to pedal more than 3,000 watts of electricity per day

a couple notes

• Interbike! Maybe for a few turns of the pedals, booth attendees can escape the fact that they’re in Vegas — then be reminded on the fun-ride monorail.
• Perfect karmic task for the a-holes at Gizmodo — they should have to pedal power Motorolas booth at CES for their mean-spirited stunt.
• And we thought the bike blender was cool — you could have one of these pedal-power setups running a blogger lounge and recharging cell phones.

Admittedly, we lack Mountain Bike coverage here, but did notice the Arantix in the photo. It takes about 300 hours to build that IsoTruss structure with carbon fiber. And only 200 hundred are being built this year.

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on January 25, 2008 3:13 AM

We've been reading more comics around here lately. For me, it started with an urgency to get that first book of the year under my belt. For Sol, I think it's that after months of reading way above his “grade level” (a phrase that doesn’t really apply to us, but is kind of a lazy way to get at the point), he’s naturally gravitating to some lighter stuff. And by lighter I mean Calvin and Hobbes,  Peanuts collections, and the Bone series. I’m familiar enough with comics to know that heavy on the pictures doesn’t necessarily mean light on the story. I just finished reading Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and was really amazed by the power of its simplicity.

This is similar to how I feel when Luna shows me her drawings. She does page after page of renderings of the people in her life. They are most always just faces, but with such detail and such emotion that they almost speak to me. She has recently been concerned with capturing the lines in the brow—some faces have more lines than others, and the shape of the lines can change with fluctuations in facial expression. She pays close attention to this. I wonder about the stories she is creating about her life, about herself, in these pictures. What does she make of this world?

Speaking of comics, and specifically Peanuts collections, I appreciated the post, "My First Lesson in Being Black" on Aunt Jemima’s Revenge. Professor Tracey writes about her identification with Peppermint Patty as a kid, and the fact that it never occurred to her that the character was white, and therefore somehow different from her, until she was criticized for “fixing” Patty’s skin tone in a drawing.

This really spoke to me because my son has spent almost half his life identifying with a character that could only really look like him with the help of Photoshop. Actually it would be more accurate to say that Sol believes he is Link from the Legend of Zelda Nintendo game series. He doesn’t just play the game, he lives it. In fact, he has spent more time being Link than he has playing Link. There is something about a young boy fated to save  the world from evil forces that appeals to my young boy with a highly-attuned sense of justice. He’s a boy hero; a hero with a cool costume, a sword, and a shield.

So, what if the fair-skinned, blonde-haired, often-times-blue-eyed boy looks nothing like my bronze-toned, dark-haired, deeply-brown-eyed son? Does this even register for him? And if so, how does he feel about it? I haven’t figured out how to ask him these things without risking disrupting his play world. And maybe that’s the key: he’s playing, and as long as no one is telling him there is something wrong with the picture he is painting in his head, then it doesn’t matter what colors he chooses.

I have a friend who regularly shaded in the skin tone of the  princesses that adorned her daughter’s clothes, books, and even shoes during a particularly avid Disney Princesses phase. I can’t help wondering what Link would look like if I “fixed” him just a little. I also can't help wondering why Link doesn’t look a little more like his creator Shigeru Miyamoto? It wouldn’t solve all my problems if he did, but it might help a little.

This morning while I was perusing Goodreads, as I often do these days, Sol came up and began reading over my shoulder, as he often does these days, and exclaimed, “F. Scott Fitzgerald?!”

“Yeah,” I said. “You heard of him?”

“Well, his wife Zelda inspired the character 'Princess Zelda,'” he said.

“What?" I asked disbelievingly. "Are you sure? Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true. I read it on Wikipedia,” he said. “Anyway, why are you reading about the man that was married to the woman that inspired a character in my video game?”

“Well, first of all,” I said, “everything on Wikipedia is not necessarily true. And secondly, F. Scott Fitzgerald is pretty famous on his own. He wrote some really good books.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said, eyeing me skeptically before walking away.

Originally posted by Lorraine from blueperiod., on January 24, 2008 8:17 PM

Hillary wins the big one, the endorsement of The New York Times:

The sense of possibility, of a generational shift, rouses Mr. Obama’s audiences and not just through rhetorical flourishes. He shows voters that he understands how much they hunger for a break with the Bush years, for leadership and vision and true bipartisanship. We hunger for that, too. But we need more specifics to go with his amorphous promise of a new governing majority, a clearer sense of how he would govern.

The potential upside of a great Obama presidency is enticing, but this country faces huge problems, and will no doubt be facing more that we can’t foresee. The next president needs to start immediately on challenges that will require concrete solutions, resolve, and the ability to make government work. Mrs. Clinton is more qualified, right now, to be president.

But how does the paper deal with Hillary's support for the invasion, which The Times opposed?

We opposed President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and we disagree with Mrs. Clinton’s vote for the resolution on the use of force. That’s not the issue now; it is how the war will be ended. Mrs. Clinton seems not only more aware than Mr. Obama of the consequences of withdrawal, but is already thinking through the diplomatic and military steps that will be required to contain Iraq’s chaos after American troops leave.

The paper's conclusion:

We know that she is capable of both uniting and leading. We saw her going town by town through New York in 2000, including places where Clinton-bashing was a popular sport. She won over skeptical voters and then delivered on her promises and handily won re-election in 2006.

Mrs. Clinton must now do the same job with a broad range of America’s voters. She will have to let Americans see her power to listen and lead, but she won’t be able to do it town by town.

When we endorsed Mrs. Clinton in 2006, we were certain she would continue to be a great senator, but since her higher ambitions were evident, we wondered if she could present herself as a leader to the nation.

Her ideas, her comeback in New Hampshire and strong showing in Nevada, her new openness to explaining herself and not just her programs, and her abiding, powerful intellect show she is fully capable of doing just that. She is the best choice for the Democratic Party as it tries to regain the White House.

Full endorsement here.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on January 24, 2008 4:06 PM

Filed under: Software, Productivity, Software Update, Leopard

DiskWarrior, my personal favorite disk repair utility (especially if the problem drive is the startup disk) has just been updated to Version 4.1. The new version is now fully compatible with Leopard (there were some issues with repairing disk permissions on a Leopard startup volume), so if you rely on DiskWarrior as an essential part of your Mac Toolkit arsenal (as I do), you can rest easy.

Alsoft has also introduced some additional Leopard specific repair features in DiskWarrior 4.1. What has me the most excited is the ability to repair directory hard links. Hard-linking is a key part of how Time Machine creates back-ups. How the process works is complicated (although this article does a very good job of trying to explain the whole process), but it is a vital part of Apple's back-up system. The ability to repair directory hard links means that DiskWarrior 4.1 should be able to at least attempt to repair a Time Machine volume. That has actually been my only concern about Time Machine -- what happens if that volume become corrupted or wonky? I hope I don't find out first-hand, but I'm glad some options exist.

Current users will soon be able to download an update CD directly from Alsoft's website that will create a new DiskWarrior startup disc (in the event that the drive needing repair is the startup volume and you don't have access to another Mac). However, please note that the update will only startup the same set of Macs as your current CD. So if your current CD will only boot up to June 2007 MacBook Pros, the update CD will not allow that disc to be used with a November 2007 MacBook.

One other caveat, if you want to run DiskWarrior 4.1 from a version of OS X other than Leopard (say, Tiger), two features will not work. You will not be able to repair permissions of a OS X 10.5 startup disk and you will not be able to rebuild a FileVault created under OS X 10.5. So if you need to repair a Leopard volume, it is best to either run the startup CD or access the drive from a computer that is also running Leopard.

[via MacTech]

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Originally posted by Christina Warren from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 24, 2008 4:00 PM

Say THAT ten times fast. Rolls right off the tongue. Anyhoo…

You spoiled rich kids who’ve already upgraded to Leopard can give your Mac’s seemingly-useless Color Picker a little extra zazz with Mondrianum, a plugin that pumps Adobe’s Kuler into CP:

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum.

And, no, it doesn’t work in 10.4. I tried. Wahh!

Originally posted by Luc from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 24, 2008 3:34 PM

Brandon Walkin:

Apple has released their updated HIG with well thought out Leopard specific information such as making 512px icons, system provided images, transparent panels, and window-frame controls.

I haven’t perused the whole thing yet, but so far I agree with Walkin that it’s a good update, finally codifying some design patterns and control styles that have been implicit standards for years.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 24, 2008 1:48 PM

I have to say that Michel Gondry is my favorite filmmaker of the moment. Right now I'm thinking why haven't I been invited to any screening of his newest Be Kind Rewind. Apparently someone at Adage has seen it and written about it:

"In the film, Jerry (Jack Black), through a series of unlikely events, comes to be magnetized and accidentally erases all of the movies in the quiet video store where his pal Mike (Mos Def) works. Compelled to make the show go on for a beloved regular customer (Mia Farrow), the boys re-create and reshoot the movies she rents by whatever lo-fi means they can. That premise has Black and Def using a cheap camera, cardboard and neighbors to remake such films as 'Boyz n the Hood,' 'Driving Miss Daisy' and 'Ghostbusters.'

How can you not love that. Another big fan of Gondry is Jeffrey Deitch who is coming through once again with an exhibition by Gondry as he did when The Science of Sleep came out. This time Gondry will be recreating the video store (photo above) in the gallery, complete with a variety of movie sets where visitors can make their own renditions of movies.The videos will then be sold in the store. Quite a concept! There's also an incredible website bekindmovie.com with all kinds of fun interactivity. There's also this funny video which makes fun of Gondry.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 24, 2008 1:24 PM

Everything you ever wanted to know (and probably more) about regional pizza styles.

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from A Full Belly, on January 24, 2008 1:07 PM

Three cheers for Fantagraphics Books’ redesigned website!

The Seattle comic publisher is offering a slew of new online features, including membership registration, a revamped blog, event listings, artist bios, integration with their Twitter and Flickr accounts, a wide selection of RSS feeds, avatars and some really cool desktop & mobile wallpapers.

(via Laughing Squid from whom I basically copied and pasted the above info).

Also of interest:
Willie & Joe, by Bill Mauldin
The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora
John Cuneo’s nEuROTIC

Originally posted by Matt from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on January 24, 2008 12:47 PM

The eight-and-a-half foot long, 1,800 pound smart fortwo has arrived in the US, with the first American owner taking delivery here in New York. As it happens, he's a friend of the folks at car blog Jalopnik, who took it for a drive. Here's some of what they had to say.

We do need to change the way we think about the Smart. It is safe. Bookended by crumple zones, a steel roll cage surrounds the occupants.

It feels safe, too. The size defines the driving experience, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than feeling intimidated in traffic, you feel empowered. Gone is the need to take responsibility for an acre of SUV on a crowded road. Present is the freedom to move down that crowded road as you see fit. Congested urban streets and crowded highways stop feeling claustrophobic and start feeling easy.

It's not Green. The problem is, the Smart isn't that smart. The 1-liter, 70bhp engine has to work hard, so it only averages about 38mpg. Less if you drive fast.

So the Smart is a more complete, practical car than most people assume it to be - but that's also its biggest problem. It'll still get caught in traffic jams. Look at the Smart as a practical car that's easier to use in an urban environment than anything else, and you'll be happy. Look at it as fundamentally altering the way Americans think about transportation though, and you'll be disappointed. 

Photo: Jalopnik

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on January 24, 2008 11:44 AM

Photograph of a Smart Car perpendicularly parked from Jalopnik

We've been following the progress of the Smart Car's U.S. introduction for a while and last month it was reported that they would be making their way to NYC this month. Jalopnik took a ride in the first Smart Car and has photographs of the 8.8' by 5.1' car in some super scenic NYC spots.

Jalopnik's Wes Siler wrote, "Congested urban streets and crowded highways stop feeling claustrophobic and start feeling easy. It's quick to turn, yet feels more stable than most vehicles twice its size." He's quick to point out that it's not an electric or a hybrid car, but for a vehicle, it's "easier to use in an urban environment than anything else." Too bad parking perpendicularly is illegal!

Speaking of parking, Streetsblog has an interesting comment from a parking workshop held in Queens - some people spoke of the "right" to own a car because they live in Queens, far away from "the Manhattan urban core."

Originally posted by Jen Chung from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on January 24, 2008 11:28 AM

New feature alert! Every once in a while we’re going to just mention a blog we like, that we think you’d get something out of reading. We’re going out on a limb by calling this section “blogs you should be reading”. And we’re gonna leave it at that, ’cause, well…’cause we think you should leave here for a little while and experience these blogs firsthand, and see why we’re kvelling! First up, Anything Wine authored by John Witherspoon whose topics include…well…anything wine related. Now, leave already (but please come visit us again soon or we’ll be very, very sad)!

Originally posted by d547 from domaine547, on January 24, 2008 10:17 AM

The American southwest: home to some of the world's finest foods, four -- count 'em, four -- corners, and the biggest dreams of solar geeks and "well-meaning scientists," according to Scientific American:

The U.S. is lucky to be endowed with a vast resource; at least 250,000 square miles of land in the Southwest alone are suitable for constructing solar power plants, and that land receives more than 4,500 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of solar radiation a year. Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation's total energy consumption in 2006.

SciAm outlines -- in some depth -- a big, geeky plan for providing nearly 70 percent of the U.S.'s electricity by 2050. It costs an awful lot of money, and it's not quite as sexy as, say, something that spews pollution out of its backside at 100 mph -- I've been saying for a long time that an electric car has to win a NASCAR race for renewable energy to be taken seriously -- but it's evidently quite possible quite soon.

 

The story addresses land needs, environmental concerns, and financial and technological obstacles. It's not even just photovoltaic cells, baby. They get into steam, power storage, molten salt (!), and nationwide distribution. One point they seem to have missed, though, is that nobody's gonna pretend to think there are WMDs on the sun. So there's that advantage, too.

Originally posted by Dave Burdick from EcoGeek.org, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Jan 24, 2008 at 11:44 AM

Originally posted by Dave Burdick from Eyebeam reBlog, on January 24, 2008 6:44 AM

Next door to Aix Restaurant on Broadway between 87th and 88th, there's a new Starbucks set to open. Historical fun fact! This Starbucks replaces the city's first Starbucks, which opened at 2373 Broadway (at 87th Street), but closed about two years ago to be replaced by a North Fork Bank. [Racked]

Originally posted by Lockhart from Eater, on January 24, 2008 6:04 AM

I'm obsessing over this Japanese stovetop pizza oven that looks like it would replicate the ideal baking conditions of a traditional Italian pizza oven. I say "looks like" because, honestly, could this thing really work? I have my doubts. Not to mention that the pies that come out look incredibly small.

http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/01/japanese-stovetop-pizza-oven.html

Send to a friend

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from david’s Neighbors, on January 24, 2008 5:48 AM

This morning we announced our new partnership with the Washington Post: our buzzmaps for the DC area are now live on the Post site. As you'll see, these maps are variations of the buzzmaps we've created for all the bloggers in our system: they're tracking all the places that local bloggers are discussing in the DC area, and mapping the top ten places based on overall volume over the past week. But of course it's not just about the map; there are links to all stories from the blogosphere about each place, along with links to the place pages themselves at outside.in.

One thing that's important to note: we're also tracking Washington Post content as well. (If the Post has an article about a place in the top ten, you'll see an orange slice in that placemarker on the map.) So in this relatively simple page, a number of cool and interrelated things are happening:

First, we're strengthening the ties between the local bloggers and the Washington Post. (Our investor Fred Wilson talks about this a little today on his blog.) The Post gets a easy way of integrating blog content onto its pages, and the  blogs get traffic from -- and the fun of appearing on -- the Washington Post's pages.

Secondly, we're not just geographically organizing the blogger content -- we're organizing the Post's content. That's because our system is designed to track geographically pretty much anything that outputs a feed. So building a map like this for another newspaper, in another city, takes us about five minutes. (You can see where we are heading with this.)

Thirdly, it's an extremely distributed system. We're not just creating a page that shows you information about a neighborhood (though of course we do that at outside.in.) We're connecting stories from dozens of bloggers, from a newspaper site, from our own  database of places in the DC area, and from Google's map API -- and we're putting it up on someone else's site, not our own.

The other thing that's exciting about this deal -- and I hope it's just the beginning -- is that we're working with the Washington Post, which is not only one of the top newspapers in the country, but also a true leader in their local coverage online. (Their local explorer maps, for instance, are very cool.) So congrats to the team at outside.in and at The Post for making it happen!

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on January 24, 2008 5:36 AM

A video and accompanying text from Edward Tufte on Interface Design and the iPhone.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 24, 2008 5:03 AM

Yep, another day, another Mac OS X 10.5.2 seed for developers. Considering the signs though, an official release may be right around the corner.

Read More...

Originally posted by dchartier@arstechnica.com (David Chartier) from Infinite Loop, on January 24, 2008 4:13 AM

I feel like this happens to a lot of authors...the covers of their books end up being the opposite of what they should be.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 24, 2008 4:00 AM

CHI, a module I've been working on for a few months, has made it to CPAN:    file: $CPAN/authors/id/J/JS/JSWARTZ/CHI-0.03.tar.gz   size: 62313 bytes    md5: ec828f2466ba266e11cd6d1dd5ca2913 CHI provides a unified caching API, designed to assist a developer in persisting data for a specified period of time. It is intended as an evolution of DeWitt Clinton's Cache::Cache package, adhering to the basic Cache API but adding new features and addressing limitations in the Cache::Cache implementation. You might think of it as a fledgling "DBI for caching". Driver classes already exist for in-process memory, plain files, memory mapped files and memcached. Other drivers such as BerkeleyDB and DBI will be coming soon. Fortunately, implementing drivers is fairly easy, on the order of creating a TIE interface to your data store. Special thanks to the Hearst Digital Media group, where CHI was first designed and developed, for blessing the open source release of this code. There's lots more in store for this module, so stay tuned! Feedback welcome here or on the Perl cache mailing list.

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by jonswar (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on January 24, 2008 1:47 AM

Adrian's baby EveryBlock launched today, offering locative neighborhood information for San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. They include things like alcohol permits, restaurant inspection reports, craigslist missed connections, filming permits, police and fire activity. No SF crime yet, but that's something we may be able to help with.

I love a site that has the gumption to roll their own maps:

A challenge for EveryBlock: make a write API for other towns.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on January 23, 2008 4:16 PM

At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee (thanks, Marc LaFountain)

Incredible. Don’t miss the explanatory photo slideshow showing exactly how it works.

Designed by three Stanford graduates, it lets the user program every feature of the brewing process, including temperature, water dose and extraction time. (It even has an Ethernet connection that can feed a complete record of its configurations to a Web database.)

Filled with too many amazing quotes.

“The whirlpool, it messes with your mind,” said Mr. Freeman, the owner of the Blue Bottle. “There’s no way to rush it.” Mr. Freeman said he practiced stirring plain water for months to develop muscle memory before he brewed his first cup of siphon coffee.

While I don’t think any coffee maker could be worth $20,000, I’d happily risk $5 to try the coffee it makes.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org Tumblelog, on January 23, 2008 12:37 PM

wonderful local data/news in a gorgeous design; if you live in SF, Chicago, or NYC, pop in your address and dig around [via] 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 23, 2008 11:58 AM

Using an Offline Editor to Post to Your Blog Chad writes-up a nice overview (albeit Windows-centric) of using an external editor like Ecto or BlogJet with MT. The state of blogs and external editors is still kind of rocky though. AtomPub was recently made an IETF standard and has yet to make it ways into deployments. MT 4.1 introduces AtomPub 1.0 support though. Previous interfaces based on XML-RPC are a horrendously flawed mess. Though they shouldn’t have to care, sometimes technical details to indirectly impact users.

A Better Movable Type QuickPost I’ve been aware of the QuickPost bookmarklet in MT for years, but it never quite did it for me like my GmailThis! and post to del.icio.us bookmarklet. (Perhaps this is why I don’t bog nearly as much I use those sevices.) This post discusses how you can create your own.

MT Security Update for MT 3.3x and MT 4 Announced Last week Six Apart released security updates for MT 4 and MT 3.3. Having review the potential exploit the update addresses I have to agree with Su when he says “The issue itself isn’t too likely and hasn’t been discovered in the wild, but it’s always a good idea to apply any security patches, of course.”

Movable Type 4.1 Almost Here In the past couple of weeks we’ve seen a pair of release candidates from Six Apart for the latest MT, version 4.1. An announcement has not been made to the MT blog, but RC2 is available for download and expected to be the last before the official release.

Universal Template Set Jim Ramsey with help from Byrne Reese, both Six Apart employees, released a plugin that provides a template set for publishing a traditional web site using Movable Type that they call the “Universal Template Set.” Byrne did a nice screencast of what this plugin can do for your MT system. This is quite nice thing and a good step in the right direction that speaks to the power and flexibility of MT. I think the name does it a bit of a disservice though. (The use of “turnkey” in the announcement may be overselling things like the initial Podcast support in MT4, but I’m going to let that slide for now.)

When I first took a look I was under a different impression to what it was based on the name. “Universal” implies “for all uses” so I was expecting to see a bare bones set of MT templates in which other template sets could be built. It’s not though so I think there will be some confusion and skewed expectations. “Classic Website Template Set” would be more appropriate and clearer. It’s just semantics, but in my experience is that it’s enough to confuse and perhaps even annoy users.

Criticisms aside, this really is a good and welcome thing. I like the overall look of the default templates more then what’s been shipping with MT.

What’s (still) sorely missing is any type of documentation for building your own sets and styles. Arguably that is not the purpose of this plugin, but as the first of its kind and being released by two members of Six Apart’s staff I’d expect to see an effort like this serve a text book example for future development. It’s not really and that makes it an opportunity missed — at least so far.

With the changes made going from the MT 3.x default templates to what shipped with MT4, everything in the MT Style Gallery is broken when applied to default templates in MT4. (I’ve been mildly surprised there hasn’t been more of an uproar — not like the MT community needs another.) My concern is that without documentation — and some assurance this isn’t going to happen any time soon — there will few, if any, third-party template sets for users to choose from.

Originally posted by Timothy Appnel from Code / Appnel Solutions, on January 23, 2008 11:25 AM

Maybe we couldn’t be so easily convinced to wage unnecessary wars if people cared as much about soldiers and foreign civilians as they do about actors.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org Tumblelog, on January 23, 2008 11:03 AM

Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone

If you're using version 1.1.3 of the iPhone or iPod touch-with-January-Upgrade , you'll probably encountered Web Clips. Web Clips add home screen icons that lead to your favorite sites. It's easy enough to make Web Clips, just tap the "+" button at the bottom of any MobileSafari webpage and choose Add to Home Screen from the pop-up menu (and yes, we're working on one for TUAW).

Continue reading How Web Clips Work

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Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on January 23, 2008 11:00 AM

White New York City Subway Map.

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by yatta to humor - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on January 23, 2008 10:37 AM

If art school was in our future we might opt to study under, or on top of, the amazing green roof at the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This 5 story facility sweeps a wooded corner of the campus with an organic, vegetated form that blends landscape and structure, nature and high-tech and symbolizes the creativity it houses.

(more…)

Originally posted by Ali kriscenski from INHABITAT, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Jan 23, 2008 at 02:57 PM

Originally posted by Ali kriscenski from Eyebeam reBlog, on January 23, 2008 9:57 AM

 

For a while now I've been in communication with Brett Mosley, the guy who started "BuyMyTronics.com." Brett's a huge EcoGeek...he basically buys broken electronics, fixes them, and then sells them on EBay. It's like recycling, but way better, because the gadgets get to keep living. He's recently expanded his business to cover iPhones, Zunes, and gaming systems, and is about to expand even further into cell phones and laptops.

But Brett is upset, and that makes me upset. Apparently, the sixth generation iPods and the current iPod Nano have been designed to be 100% unfixable. According to Brett,

The new generations of iPods and the iPhone are not designed to be opened. Because the Nano, iPhone and generation 6 "Classic" bodies are metal to metal the body gets completely trashed upon opening. In the Nanos and Shuffles, parts are actually soldered together, eliminating the possiblility of simple repair. So, for me, it will be harder to fix these, increasing repair costs and diminishing their resale value after they have been repaired.

All of this kinda flies in the face of Apple's new green image. So I thought maybe they were just trying to get people to send them back to Apple for proprietary repairs. I asked Brett if Apple maybe had special tools that allowed the to repair these metal-to-metal devices:

Besides charging you hundreds to fix it (which makes it more economical for most to just get a new one) they probably have to give it a whole new body whenever they open one. I don’t know how they could make a repair without trashing the body.

Kinda the opposite of green there. We need to hear more from Apple, obviously, but it's hard to imagine, in the midst of their "green-up" why Apple would switch to bodies that are impossible to open for repairs. Brett's answer: "Looks...Pure Looks." And as Apple has always been known, and commended, for its design, this doesn't seem too hard to accept. He also surmises that they might be trying to discourage the market in repairs and mods that fuel his and many other businesses.

But it comes down to the fact that, when choosing between extending the life of their gadgets and making things look pretty, Apple is landing on the side of pretty.

Making these models more difficult to repair is invariably un-green in the long run. By reducing their future re-use, value and lifespan, Apple is basically saying, "These gadgets are no use after two years, so send them back to us for recycling, and buy a new one."

Originally posted by Hank Green from EcoGeek.org, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Jan 23, 2008 at 02:52 PM

Originally posted by Hank Green from Eyebeam reBlog, on January 23, 2008 9:52 AM

Richard Jones of Last.fm:

Something we’ve wanted for years — for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free — is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner — and the artists they work with — plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Ad-supported revenue model, with payments based on popularity — the more a song is played, the more money they pay to the artist.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 23, 2008 9:21 AM

Emigre is posting some essays from the back issues of its dearly departed magazine.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 23, 2008 9:12 AM

Speaking of Andy Ihnatko, he’s got a fantastic photo set from a visit to Alcatraz last week, including a slew of shots from areas not normally available to the public.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 23, 2008 8:07 AM

Did you read the article about high-end coffee brewers in the New York Times today? If so, you're probably wondering where you can find a coffee shop that uses one of the $11,000 Clover brewing machines mentioned.

Easy enough. Just use the Find a Clover map on the company's website. Turns out there are quite a few more than the handful of locations the paper mentions. After the jump, a video of a Clover in action, if you're curious.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Main, on January 23, 2008 5:45 AM

Yet another of the oldest TinyBuildings: the "blue" post office. Poor, pitiful thing is mildewed and rather unlovely. It is also a 'bastardized' TinyBuilding in that it is made from two packaging materials.

The sides are from the cardboard cover of machine-dispensed stamps. The top is from one of the Atlanta blue-printing companies: AAA Blueprinting. Probably an extra business card included in a roll of prints delivered to James' office.

I can almost smell the developing fluid. This was way before the gigantic 'xerox' machines that are used now...or, for that matter, the direct-from-the Cad machine plots...That fluid was a sweet-acidic taste on the back of your tongue. Goodness knows what it was doing to our brains.

At the time, it signified progress on a project: if you had a roll of prints, you were finally ready to deliver them to a client. Finally, after many days and nights of thinking and drawing and erasing and drawing and thinking....

I like the little 'blue' roof section- a little hat for the building; and, you can tell James composed this TinyBuilding so that the old-fashioned mailbox fit on one side of the structure, exactly. Then he must have sorted through the detritus on his very messy drawing board to find the AAA card for the roof. I'll bet he smiled to himself when he stuck the 'blue' on top...a little cap, and a reference to the USPS colorings.

c. 1976

Originally posted by skm from Tiny Buildings, on January 23, 2008 4:07 AM

"Collabos are particularly popular in the world of hip-hop, where selling out is not only acceptable but required. Pioneering hip-hop branding collabos over the years include The Wu-Tang Clan and General Foods (Wu-Tang Tang), Ice-T and Folger's (Ice-T Iced Coffee), and NWA and Kellogg's (Fuck Tha Police Cereal)."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on January 22, 2008 5:44 PM

OMFG this is so awesome!

1) Monday, January 21st, 12:30pm: O calls us with emergency news. Our favorite gelato joint, Capogiro, has Sea Salt on the menu! We head over and blog about our experience. Here's mine.

2) Tuesday, January 22nd, 12:15pm: O calls me at work to say that "Kmart" left a comment on our ilovecapogiro site about how they actually made Sea Salt from my request! See my original lament.

3) Tuesday, January 22nd, 12:20pm: I read owner/chef Stephanie Reitano's musings on boredom at Capogiro's official site under the "News & Updates," which totally verifies the truth about Sea Salt and the power of blogging!

SALT - Our friends at www.ilovecapogiro.com wanted to remind me of this flavor. I've made salt gelato before, always paired with Margarita sorbetto in the summer. They must have missed it. This version is just for you, made with Maldon Sea Salt and it's incredible with something sweet like warm bread pudding.

Click here to read her whole post, which contains very excellent suggestions on assorted pairings, as well as information on a PICK ME flavor contest!

Originally posted by beXn from beXnlog, on January 22, 2008 4:31 PM

Hearing poets read their work out loud really tests my powers of concentration.  Not because poetry readings are dull (well...) but because I find poetic language incredibly distracting.  Graham Foust says "gawky cross" and my mind wanders.  By the time I refocus, he's on "mumble."  Listening to readings on line allows me to pause, resume, restart.  It gives me more time to consider the relation between what is written and how it is read.  How a poet's breath brings lines together or pries them apart often reveals something new about a poem.  All of this you can pick up at live readings but, like I said, I'm easily distracted.  I have been enjoying as well Joshua Marie Wilkinson's "poemfilm journal," Rabbit Lights Movies.  Some of these episodes combine poetry read out loud with hypnotic urban imagery.  Other videos depict more standard readings (poet at lectern).   Watch, listen.

A Voice Box: Bay Area Recordings of the Recent Past

Rabbit Light Movies

Originally posted by Adriana from Stingy Kids, on January 22, 2008 4:19 PM

Blanka just presents a reprint of the classic 1999 poster designed by nb:studio for knoll international [www.knollint.com]. GF Smith have very kindly manufactured this sheet in A0 size colorplan specially for the purposes of making this print and they will be making this larger sheet size available commercially in ebony and pristine white for a trial period.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on January 22, 2008 3:27 PM

Well now that Chloe Sevigny and Natalie Portman have their own clothing projects, it's about time Kirsten gets in the game, isn't it?

And so, the actress will debut her latest line - a collaboration with the cashmere giants Lutz + Patmos - on Sunday, February 3, at the New Museum. DJ Michel Gaubert, who does all the music for Karl Lagerfeld, will helm the decks.

Although this marks Kirsten's first clothing foray, it isn't the first time Lutz + Patmos has been to Hollywood. Their past guest "designers" include Liv Tyler and Julianne Moore, plus one collection with Carine Roitfeld at the drawing board.

Lutz + Patmos also did a collaboration with Uniqlo two years ago, but we don't think Kirsten will follow in their footsteps with that one...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on January 22, 2008 1:08 PM

Photo of Michael Strahan kissing the George S. Halas Trophy after the game by AP/David J. Phillip

The Giants are going to the Super Bowl! Thanks to a 47-yard field goal in overtime New York defeated Green Bay on the infamous “frozen tundra” 23-20 to advance to Super Bowl XLII.

It was a game of dramatic twists and turns and it produced some unlikely heroes. Start with Dominic Hixon who had several big kick returns in the second half, but most importantly recovered R.W. McQuarters fumbled punt return at midfield with just over two minutes remaining in a tie game. Hixon was a member of the Denver Broncos when the season started.

Then look at Corey Webster. Webster will be remembered for his fantastic interception to setup the winning field goal, but his tackle of Ryan Grant on 3rd-and-3 in the fourth quarter saved a potential touchdown and forced the Packers to kick a game-tying field goal. Webster lost his starting job early in the season and has only played recently due to injury.

Or, consider Ahmad Bradshaw who barely made this team out of training camp and finished the NFC Championship with 63 yards and a touchdown. And there are countless other examples of guys who stepped up to make this win possible. Plaxico Burress had a huge game while Amani Toomer and Steve Smith made some huge catches. Antonio Pierce made several big plays and Justin Tuck, Osi Umneyiora and Michael Strahan got in Brett Farve’s face. And don't forget Eli Manning and the game that he had.

Suffice it to say, it was a team effort and this team that seemed so lost just over a month ago is now heading to Arizona for a rematch with the Patriots and a chance to stop history. With the success of the Giants on the road, it should be noted that they will officially be the road team in the Super Bowl.

Originally posted by Peter Trinkle from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on January 22, 2008 11:14 AM

Some people may prefer other bakeries, but from the looks of the crowd at the Magnolia Bakery's new Upper West Side location, people are hungering for some heavily frosted cupcakes. If the treats are available, that is.

We stopped by the bakery yesterday, a day after its Saturday opening, and the shop was packed. And many of the customers were victim to the opening frenzy, because Magnolia ran out of cupcakes for a spell (there were red velvet cupcakes on hand, just no traditional buttercream ones). An employee was posted at the door, making sure potential customers realized this as soon as they entered.

The new store has high ceilings, making it feel ten times bigger than the tiny Bleecker Street location. But the scene inside was as teeming as it gets downtown (sans the line around the corner) and even more chaotic. There wasn't any clear indication of a line for customers - equal parts UWS families, Magnolia devotees, and sugar fiends - to request the available items. When we saw people who came in after us being helped before us, we just looked at one employee (we had wanted to ask where we should even stand) who wearily snapped, "I can't help you!" Okay, sorry!

Luckily, another employee was very helpful and helped us with our order of banana pudding (creamy and comforting) and cherry jamboree (a confection of whipped cream and cream cheese, topped with cherries on a pecan crust). We imagine after the opening kinks and demand that Magnolia will be a big hit with the neighborhood.

Originally posted by Jen Chung from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on January 22, 2008 11:12 AM

1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. "I'll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please"), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it's often a little over and you're charged for the overage. I've noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It's a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company...and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.

2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn't have anywhere to put Ollie's stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 22, 2008 10:59 AM

Here's a little behind-the-scenes shot of Lindsay Lohan on the set for her upcoming PAPER cover, photographed by fashion designer Jeremy Scott (pictured next to her). You may recall seeing this dynamic duo together when they stopped by PAPER's 24-Hour Department Store in L.A. this past November. How gorgeous does Lindsay look? We shot the cover at the W Hotel Westwood and hate to disappoint anyone looking for dirt, but Lindsay was on time and a total pussycat. Wait till you see the Patricia Neal-in-The-Fountainhead-inspired shots photographed at a nearby construction site. They're not like anything Lindsay has ever done!!!!! Photo by J. Everette Perry

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on January 22, 2008 9:47 AM

100 hours of tape in 80 interviews; I've watched some early footage and it's thrilling
 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 22, 2008 9:05 AM

The WGA has run an analysis of the value of the DGA deal summary, contrasting it to the value of the deal last offered to the WGA by the congloms on December 7th.

It also includes a side-by-side analysis of each provision of the DGA deal summary against both what the congloms last offered us, and what we last proposed to them. The details were posted on wga.org yesterday.

Go here to see the

Originally posted by Laeta Kalogridis from United Hollywood, on January 22, 2008 8:52 AM

Ratatouille—everyone's favorite computer animated movie about a French rat with a penchant for cooking—has been nominated for five Oscar awards: Best Animated Feature Film, Best Music (Score), Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Writing (Original Screenplay). Winners will be announced in February 24th.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on January 22, 2008 8:45 AM

fun for stats crunching  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 22, 2008 7:53 AM

Working with Bill Hurt was - shall we say - enlightening. In those days, he was pretty wild. He drank a great deal and took a lot of recreational drugs - he loved those magic mushrooms. He loved women, too; I don't know how many he went through during filming.

***

Now, Nicolas [Cage] happens to be the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, who was directing the film. And my contrary co-star was absolutely determined to prove that he wasn't there as the result of nepotism.

So, everything Francis wanted him to do, he went against - to show that he wasn't under his uncle's wing. Which was ridiculous. Oh, that stupid voice of his and the fake teeth! Honestly, I cringe to think about it.

He caused so many problems. He was arrested twice for drunk-driving and, I think, once for stealing a dog. He'd come across a chihuahua he liked and stuck it in his jacket.

On the last night of filming, he came into my trailer after he'd clearly been drinking heavily. He fell on his knees and asked if I could ever forgive him. I said, "Not right now. I have a scene to shoot. Excuse me," and just walked out.

Nicolas didn't manage to kill the film, but he didn't add a lot to it, either. For years, whenever I saw him, he'd apologise for his behaviour. I'd say: "Look, I'm way over it." But I haven't pursued the idea of working with him again.

- Kathleen Turner, in extracts from her new autobiography. Read more about Burt Reynolds, Christie Brinkley, Michael Douglas and others in The Daily Mail.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on January 22, 2008 6:41 AM

It may not have a population larger than a billion of people like India or China, but Brazil keeps growing like crazy nevertheless. At the end of 2007, 121 million Brazilians owned a mobile phone, 21.1 million or 21% more from 2006.

According to the country’s telecommunications regulator Anatel, net additions in December were a record 4.7 million, reflecting intense promotional activity in the pre-Christmas period.

Brazil’s main operator, Vivo Participacoes — which is jointly owned by Spain’s Telefonica and Portugal Telecom — ended the year with 27.7% of the local market, while Telecom Italia’s TIM Participacoes and Mexico’s America Movil owned Claro held 25.8% and 25% of the market respectively.

[Via: CellularNews]

---
Related Articles at IntoMobile:

• Nokia to open design centers in Brazil and India
• LG Electronics wants to sell 100 million mobiles next year
• Fun Fact: In Q406 Nokia sold more than a million phones a day
• Numbers: China has more than 600 million mobile phone users
• China phone industry in numbers; 487 million mobile phone users in the country

Originally posted by dusanb from IntoMobile, on January 22, 2008 4:47 AM

We have had a fantastic beginning to the year at Joyent. Our revenue continues to grow quickly. We have been gaining new Accelerator customers at a record pace. The Facebook deal is dramatically increasing the size of the Joyent community and is already paying off handsomely as successful start-ups upgrade their Accelerators to serving millions of pages to millions of users. The biggest Facebook application running on Joyent Accelerators now serves over 700 million pages per month. Yes, 700 million.

While the commercial grade Accelerator products have been growing faster than ever, two of our smaller, “prosumer” products hit a serious road-bump.

Ten days of downtime

The past 10 days have not been the best days at Joyent. Bingodisk and Strongspace went off-line 12 Saturday. Bingodisk service was restored eight days later on 19 January. Strongspace limped back into service late 21 January, nearly ten days after it went off-line. Customers of these services are rightly outraged by the outage. While Strongspace and Bingodisk represent a very small fraction of Joyent’s entire infrastructure, we understand how critical it is to many of you, and have been working and investing many, many hours to bring these services back on-line as expeditiously as possible. I apologize for the outages.

In this post I would like to report on what happened, how Joyent plans to compensate our customers, and what we plan to do in the future with Strongspace and Bingodisk.

Some Background: the Economics of Bingodisk and Strongspace

Strongspace was introduced in August, 2005 as an elegant multi-user storage solution using SFTP. It initially was deployed on EMC Clarion storage. The market for on-line storage was rapidly crowding and the price of on-line storage quickly dropped. We began the process of looking for a new architecture and hardware platform in order to remain competitive. With the Zettabyte File System (“ZFS”) in OpenSolaris and the introduction of the Sunfire X4500 (aka “Thumper”), we realized that we could build very competitive on-line storage solutions at costs that kept us more than competitive. Strongspace moved to ZFS in December, 2005 and onto a Thumper in October, 2006. We came out with Bingodisk, also based on ZFS and the Thumper, in September, 2006. Without ZFS and the Thumper, we probably would not have been able to continue Strongspace or introduce Bingodisk. The Thumper and ZFS provided the raw storage-to-controller ratios and ZFS the redundancy and data protection we required without having to spend, literally, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I’m laying out this background to note that both Strongspace and Bingodisk were always designed to be (a) inexpensive, utility storage in the cloud, and (b) built on top of a filesystem and hardware platform that would ensure we would not lose data.

OK, enough preamble. What happened?

On 12 January, both Strongspace and Bingodisk went down because ZFS encountered what it thought was duplicate data on disc. The so-called “spacemap bug” (fixed in build 60 of OpenSolaris) apparently double-writes blocks. The problem arises when ZFS later realizes this and tries to free that which is supposedly already free.  ZFS thinks that something went wrong and that it may corrupt data so it (correctly) panics. Once this loops gets going, it’s tough to break out of it.

We were conservative and methodical in how we moved forward from here.

We updated to the latest Solaris build and ZFS code so that issues from the bug wouldn’t occur again, and then set out to find and repair the problem areas while getting the services separated and running. The operating system updates went fine. The dataset imports and updates took quite a deal of time. One of the larger distractions early on in the process was a bug in the NCQ driver that made the SATA drives appear to have “issues”. We corrected the NCQ driver. We also performed a complete hardware swap-out (just to be safe). Every piece of hardware in the original Thumper was replaced with parts from a standby Thumper. In the end all the drives from the original Thumper (48 of them), ended up in a new Thumper. We had to do all this so that we could safely read the data off the original Thumper to bring the services back up on new Thumpers.

When it became clear that the data set under Bingodisk was fine and likely not where the issue lay, we moved all that data to new storage. We didn’t trust a block-level restore, so we had to read and write files, and writing that much metadata takes a enormous amount of time: about 1TB every 10 hours. We were able to get BingoDisk operational first.
Strongspace took longer because that was the dataset with the problematic area(s). Areas that took about 5-10 hours to expose themselves in testing each time. We are currently running ZFS for Strongspace in a state where we set ZFS so that it won’t panic when it hits the problem area, but will instead run a recovery.

We’re quite fortunate these problems happened to us with ZFS. ZFS at the very least gave us the confidence that our data is there and valid. No data was lost.

Some have wondered why we didn’t upgrade the operating system earlier. Upgrading the operating system is not a trivial task on a production system with so much storage in play. Further, the version of ZFS we were running on Strongspace and Bingodisk was more mature code than that code originally shipped in Solaris 10. This meant the code we had in production had gone through ZFS’s vaunted test bed. Finally, the likely scenario of an operating system upgrade would have been to expose the “spacemap” data errors on disk sooner, bringing down the services nonetheless. Once bitten…

Was there a backup?

Yes, and no. In the traditional sense of us writing the data from Bingodisk and Strongspace to tape or some other Thumper, no, there was no backup. Data redundancy is built into the ZFS/Thumper software/hardware combination. The Thumper is both server, and backup. Moreover, it’s hard to see how a backup of 18TB of data to another physical device would work, in practice. Moving Bingodisk to another Thumper during this crisis took 30 hours (3TB of data). A large, multi-tenant service such as Bingodisk or Strongspace with the amount of data they manage makes it practically impossible to do a meaningful backup. A single backup would take over a week. The backup process would kill end-user performance. A service like Strongspace, which people use to rsync their own backups, means the data turns over rapidly and an incremental backup would not make sense. ZFS has a facility, zfs_send/receive, that runs on an idle thread. There is currently no idea of giving priority to this functionality, so, again, practically speaking, this could not be used for backup.

Joyent Accelerators and Connector are backed up for disaster recovery daily. The datasets for each of these is much smaller and therefore fit into a practical backup scheme.

So, Bingodisk and Strongspace were backed up based on the redundancy built into the Thumper itself and the capabilities of ZFS. Fully 6TB of storage on a Thumper is dedicated to redundancy. ZFS’s capabilities to ensure no data loss were proven in this instance. These Thumpers sit in a telco-level data center (the best) that is rated to withstand a 9 richter earthquake. The fire systems in the data center itself mean the chances of the Thumper being lost to fire are statistically meaningless.

What is Joyent going to do for customers?

With the events of the past ten days, we’ve been doing some hard thinking about Strongspace and Bingodisk.

Here’s our plan for Strongspace. We’re not taking anymore sign-ups for Strongspace. The current Strongspace will be replaced by a new service (not named Strongspace) that will not have the economic model of the current service. It will be expensive, distributed and bullet-proof. The replacement service will likely be introduced before October, 2008. We will retire the current Strongspace on 1 October 2008. There is Strongspace functionality in Joyent Connector today, and that will remain. Customers currently on Strongspace will be allowed to continue to use the service for the next 9 months for free. If you bought Connector for Strongspace and only want Strongspace, please file a ticket. You’ll be allowed to remain on Strongspace for 9 months for free, but your Connector and Shared Hosting (or Shared Accelerator) accounts will be deleted. If you bought Connector for Strongspace and you want to keep your Connector and Shared Hosting (or Shared Accelerator) accounts, please file a ticket and you will get a coupon for 4 months of the new service for free. If you are a Mixed Grill (or similar) customer, we will be replacing the Strongspace component with the replacement product. Every current Strongspace customer will get a coupon for 2 free months (minimum) of the new service. If you just feel like saying “screw it, I don’t want to have anything to do with these guys”, please file a ticket and we will refund you for two weeks of down time.

We will be open-sourcing the current Strongspace. This will allow anyone to run Strongspace private label on any infrastructure provider they choose. After Connector, Slingshot, and our DTrace probes for Ruby, this is Joyent’s fourth major contribution to open source. We will continue to provide some infrastructure for the FreeStrongspace community and a test bed for installations, demos.

Bingodisk is used widely by people preferring HTTP over proprietary APIs to serve up static assets for web sites. Due to the downtime, we are giving Bingodisk customers four months free. In fact, anyone signing up for Bingodisk will not be charged for two months. If you feel you don’t want to have anything to do with Joyent, please file a ticket and we will refund your annual subscription, pro-rated plus an additional two week. Bingodisk sign-ups are currently disabled, but we’ll be bringing that process back on-line this week. Bingodisk continues to have the same economic model of inexpensive storage and an industrial strength filesystem for data security. Over time it will be folded into Connector.

Bingodisk will also be open-sourced. Anyone will be able to run Bingodisk on any infrastructure provider they choose. This is our fifth major contribution to open source. As with Strongspace, we will continue to support the FreeBingodisk community through providing infrastructure and a test bed for installations, demos.

While these measures do not get back the eight and ten days of down time, I hope they do send the message that we value all of our customers. Again, I apologize for the down time.

Originally posted by David Young from Joyeur, on January 22, 2008 4:19 AM

Tim Zagat suggests that his technique of concise summaries are more accurate and informative than user-generated reviews: "We try to make it nice and easy to read—in as few lines as possible.” Online companies “are running into the problem that anybody can throw up things on the wall, and after a while there are just too many people doing it.” In an article ironically titled "Online Reviews of Hotels and Restaurants Flourish".

Originally posted by Raphael from Serious Eats: Main, on January 22, 2008 4:15 AM

Randy is going to be on TV on this Saturday! Check it out!

http://www.bs-asahi.co.jp/eitatu/eitatu.html

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Originally posted by Nob Seki from david’s Neighbors, on January 22, 2008 2:59 AM

In remembering Martin Luther King today, I came across this speech by him against the Vietnam War (or in Vietnam, the American War).

I couldn't help but wonder how he would feel about the Iraq war if he were alive today.

» This article continues

Originally posted by (author unknown) from EPIC-FU blog, on January 21, 2008 4:24 PM

Photograph of kicker Lawrence Tynes after the game-winning field goal by David J. Phillip/AP

The Giants won the NFC Championship in overtime, beating the Green Bay Packers 23-20 in overtime and overcome the frigid, below-zero conditions. They are now headed to the Super Bowl where they will meet the New England Patriots, who beat the San Diego Chargers 21-12.

Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes missed a field goal as time expired in the fourth quarter, sending the game to overtime. Packers won the coin toss and received the ball, but Brett Favre threw an interception in Green Bay territory. Tynes got a chance to redeem himself and kicked the winning field goal from 47 yards away (overall he made three of five field goal attempts). And Giants quarterback Eli Manning had a good game, especially given the conditions, completing 21 of 40 attempts for 254 yards, no interceptions. Favre completed 19 of 35 for 236 yards but with two interceptions.

We'll have a more detailed write-up tomorrow, but in the meantime, should we chalk this up to the East Coast media conspiracy, with a Northeast Super Bowl? Mayor Bloomberg can expect the goods from his bet with Green Bay Mayor James Schmitt and we bet Tiki Barber's feeling pretty bummed right now!

The Super Bowl will be held in Glendale, Arizona on February 3 - get ready for non-stop Big Blue coverage from the local papers.

Originally posted by Jen Chung from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on January 21, 2008 11:50 AM

Satellite map rendering of 475 Kent Avenue from Live Search Maps

Over 150 residents of an eleven-story building at Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg were evacuated yesterday after the Fire Department and Buildings Department found a number of violations. The building had been illegally converted to residences and a matzoh factory, complete with two silos of (highly combustible) grain in the basement. A neighboring building was cited as well, and the violations ranged from non-working standpipes (which firefighters use to deliver water to fires), illegal partitions, blocked exits, inoperable sprinkler systems and others, including the illegal grain silos for the unauthorized basement bakery.

Residents were forced to move out by midnight, and many were upset about being asked to do so on an extremely cold night. One emailed Gowanus Lounge:

There are cops and firefighters roaming the halls of my building in south williamsburg telling everyone that the "building is being vacated" at this very moment. my building has about 100 or so people in it and is located at 475 kent ave. apparently there are numerous fire code violations and such. but, instead of trying to fix them, they are attempting to put 100 or so folks on the street on a 20 degree sunday night. i've refused to go anywhere. i have a dog and i have don't know that i can take her anywhere. what really bothers me is that the FDNY believes that my safety is being enhanced by putting myself and my dog on the street on a night where we could both literally freeze to death. this is real and it is indeed happening right now.

Residents were offered housing assistance from the Red Cross, but it's unclear how long that will last and when they will be allowed back in. The building has been slapped with a number of violations over the years.

This morning, the police on hand were letting residents wait inside the lobby to stay warm while they made arrangements to move out their belongings; an Office of Emergency Management Command Center was stationed across the street from the entrance.

We spoke with a third floor resident who wished to remain anonymous. When asked why he thought they were evicted on such a bitterly cold night, he told us:

I don’t think anyone knows. We’re essentially thrown out on the street, for safety issues and a lack of occupancy. But there are about 300 residents here who’ve been renting under the guise of being able to live here. We pay rent to a company named Sheila Management.

And it’s not like we’re living here as a slum. People are paying a ton of money; there are lawyers who live here, doctors, producers and some of the most famous photographers in the world. It’s a pretty substantial group of people paying a lot of money to live here. I was paying close to $2,000 a month for a 900 square feet space. My place was set up with kitchen, stove, track lighting and all that stuff. There are people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on their space.Asked when he thought they’d be able to return, he said, “Not anytime soon. There’s months of work they have to do and they need a certificate of occupancy. Sheila owns the whole lot and I don’t want to speculate but there’s a reason they want to empty the whole lot.”

Photograph of 475 Kent Avenue at night by imjustsayin' on Flickr

Building owner Nachman Brach also owns the Williamsburg building where firefighter Daniel Pujdak fell to his death last year. The FDNY had been responding to a fire, which was accidentally set by a resident's cigarette in the illegally converted building (though Brach was in the process of trying to legalize the situation). We asked another former resident of the building if he knew he was living in an illegal conversion:

Well, when I first moved in, in 2002, I had no idea. My girlfriend at
the time found it on Craigslist and we went through the normal process of signing a lease, giving a security deposit, etc... It wasn't until a year or so later when we tried to upgrade our cable to carry internet when our provider told us that a commercial internet package was around $300.00 a month. I insisted that I didn't need a commercial contract but they then informed me that the building was zoned as commercial.

He also mentioned that a number of film and TV shoots and weddings took place in the building and added, "I hope that these violations can somehow be addressed because it would be a shame to see this building sitting vacant, demolished, or converted into million dollar condos. There is also the fact that hundreds of people/families call this home and have so for years. It really is a shame and there should be something that the people there can do."

Originally posted by Jen Chung from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on January 21, 2008 11:42 AM

and it's got a free API. time to monte-carlo that ass to get polygons.

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by fruminator to geo gis hoods - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by fruminator from del.icio.us/fruminator, on January 21, 2008 11:25 AM

Grading the world's flags. Gambia is a surprise #1. (via marginal revolution)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 21, 2008 11:23 AM

remix of B-Down Brothers' tribute to MLK from 1986  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 21, 2008 11:00 AM

Let's talk Antarctica blogs.

Antarctic Journal is one of the best; it's written by a grad student studying penguin ecology. Big Dead Place is also great (but not strictly a blog); check out the stories and interviews section. Also of note but of varying quality and timeliness are a blog by the British Antarctic Survey, John Bean's Antarctica blog, a U of Delaware blog, Antarctic Blog, and Antarctica Blog.

I'm still looking forward to the SOUTH expedition blog whenever that happens.

Update: One more: 75 Degrees South. Very nice photos, as in this post. (thx, pete)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 21, 2008 10:28 AM

Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it's no contest: New York all the way.

What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins', don't you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I'd only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.

Ed's a bit hard on Boston here...there's some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 21, 2008 8:52 AM

This is getting interesting. In an interview with me a couple of minutes ago, senior Hillary adviser Howard Wolfson claimed that Obama's assertion this morning that Bill Clinton is fibbing about his campaign is a "right wing talking point."

Wolfson was responding to my questions about Obama's Good Morning America appearance this morning, in which Obama claimed that Bill has been dissembling badly about Obama campaign tactics. Obama also charged that Bill has been dissembling regularly about the Illinois Senator's consistent opposition to the Iraq war and about Obama's claim that the GOP has been the "party of ideas."

"From time to time the Obama campaign has used right-wing talking points against Bill and Hillary Clinton," Wolfson said at one point in response to questions about Obama's appearance. Asked whether Obama's claim that Bill is fibbing is one of them, Wolfson said: "Yes."

The assertion that calling Bill a liar is a "right wing" attack escalates the battle over today's Obama interview. And it's heavily suggestive, because it seems to imply that Obama's claims are of a piece with charged moments in the past when the right has attacked Bill for his mendacity.

One claim by Bill that the Obama camp is specifically faulting is his assertion that the Obama campaign had encouraged Republican and independent Nevadans to switch parties for a day to vote for him. In fact, an Obama volunteer, a precinct captain -- not the campaign itself -- made this suggestion in a flyer attacking Hillary, and the Obama campaign disavowed it and asked him to stop.

But Wolfson rejected the argument that this is a distortion, insisting that the failure of the Obama camp to get the precinct captain to resign showed tacit approval for the tactic. "When [volunteers] in Iowa emailed out those scurrilous emails about Senator Obama, they were removed from our campaign," Wolfson said.

Pressed on whether there were any point at which Bill's conduct would come to be seen by the campaign as a liability, and asked if there was any campaign discussion of this possibility, Wolfson replied.

"A few more liabilities like New Hampshire and Nevada, and we'll win the nomination," he said.

Wolfson also repeated the claim he's made elsewhere that Obama's criticism of Bill was born of frustration out of losses in New Hampshire and Nevada. "Losses are harder to take when you expect to win," he said. "They're taking that frustration out on Bill Clinton."

The Obama campaign declined to comment.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on January 21, 2008 8:32 AM

Roger Federer might like to say he's playing against history, but Saturday, he had to play literature buff Janko Tipsarevic.

Bonnie D. Ford discerns a potent literary connection in Saturday's match between Roger Federer and Janko Tipsarevic.  It's a stretch but if she wants to argue that reading Fyodor Dostoevsky bolstered Tipsarevic's performance, as a Comparative Literature person, I won't discourage her. 

Tipsarevic has the words "Beauty will save the world" tattooed on his left forearm.  This line appears in Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot.  The line in its original Russian should read Красота спасёт мир.  But Tipsarevic had it translated into Japanese.

....Beauty might, in fact, save the world, but Tipsarevic, his soulful eyes burning behind jock-nerdy glasses, had to save two set points in the third to elongate a beautiful match. He said he was able to pull off what might be the most difficult thing of all against the man who is gunning for the all-time Grand Slam win record -- convince himself he was in the match before it started.

"His soulful eyes burning behind jock-nerdy..."  There is something about this well-read athlete that has journalists waxing poetic.  Imagine the kind of articles that would be written over the next two weeks if Eli Manning and Tom Brady had lines from Siddhartha and Middlemarch tattoed on their arms--in Hungarian!

Federer ultimately won the match but in the end the words of Dostoevsky (choose them "at hazard") will prevail.

Tipsarevic proved what self-belief can do for a lower-ranked player. In that effort, he might have drawn inspiration from another Dostoevsky novel. This passage comes from "The Insulted and the Injured," a title that could be applied to the ATP during Federer's reign of terror the past few years:

You're a poet, and I'm a simple mortal, and therefore I will say we must look at things from the simplest, most practical point of view.

The mere mortal's pragmatic game plan fell a little short this time, but it wouldn't be surprising if Federer finds he has to work harder than ever to fend off the proletariat.

"He has to work harder" would make a nice tattoo.

Originally posted by Adriana from Stingy Kids, on January 21, 2008 8:07 AM

John Mackey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Whole Foods Market Inc., has a good idea as to what the future of global organic and alternative food production should look like. Despite consumers’ “willful ignorance” toward how their food is made and the “lies” fed to consumers by the industrial agriculture industry, a new era of food production is on the horizon, Mackey declared Thursday evening during a presentation at the American Grassfed Association’s Grazing America ’07 Conference in Austin, Texas, hometown of the $5.6 billion natural and organic retail giant.

Originally from ENN: Top Stories, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Jan 21, 2008 at 01:01 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Eyebeam reBlog, on January 21, 2008 8:01 AM

This summer's big public art project in NYC: 4 large waterfalls falling into the East River and New York Harbor, including one falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. Olafur Eliasson is the responsible party...he's done a couple previous waterfall pieces.

Update: Eliasson's work will also be on display at MoMA and P.S. 1 this summer, April 20 through June 30, 2008. (thx, praveen)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 21, 2008 6:21 AM

“Everyone is reporting election irregularities on the part of the Hillary campaign. There is widespread cheating and voter suppression going on all over Clark County—and it’s obviously coming in from the top down. Whether it made enough of a difference to swing the election is another question—but there is no question that Hillary was running a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred campaign in which all of her surrogates were instructed to cheat in every way possible.”

- Widespread Cheating & Vote Suppression by Clinton Campaign in Clark County, NV. What a surprise. Hillary Clinton is corrupt and willing to cheat, lie, and defraud our democracy to win. See? No different from the current administration.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org Tumblelog, on January 21, 2008 6:19 AM

This was contributed by Thania St. John, WGA member since 1988.

We did it. We accomplished the impossible. We got the AMPTP back to the table and finally received a counter-proposal to the one we made them so many months ago. The deal they made with the DGA is the first true sign of negotiation they’ve shown since we started asking them to do so back in July.
That, my friends, is a great victory

Originally posted by United Hollywood from United Hollywood, on January 21, 2008 6:02 AM

Everything you need to know to become a stencil graffiti artist, or even just make stencils for your artwork!

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by onelegout to stencils stencil graffiti graff streetart street art onelegout oneleg spraypaint eyebeam-reblog - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by onelegout from del.icio.us/subscriptions/djacobs, on January 21, 2008 5:57 AM

The Dutch RFID public transit card, which has already cost the government $2B -- no, that's not a typo -- has been hacked even before it has been deployed:

The first reported attack was designed by two students at the University of Amsterdam, Pieter Siekerman and Maurits van der Schee. They analyzed the single-use ticket and showed its vulnerabilities in a report. They also showed how a used single-use card could be given eternal life by resetting it to its original "unused" state.

The next attack was on the Mifare Classic chip, used on the normal ticket. Two German hackers, Karsten Nohl and Henryk Plotz, were able to remove the coating on the Mifare chip and photograph the internal circuitry. By studying the circuitry, they were able to deduce the secret cryptographic algorithm used by the chip. While this alone does not break the chip, it certainly gives future hackers a stepping stone on which to stand. On Jan. 8, 2008, they released a statement abut their work.

Most of the links are in Dutch; there isn't a whole lot of English-language press about this. But the Dutch Parliament recently invited the students to give testimony; they're more than a little bit interested how $2B could be wasted.

My guess is the system was designed by people who don't understand security, and therefore thought it was easy.

Originally posted by schneier from Schneier on Security, on January 21, 2008 2:35 AM

Dennis Lim on the sound design for No Country for Old Men, which has almost no musical score whatsoever:

What is unusual about “No Country for Old Men” is not simply the level of audio detail but that it is a critical part of the storytelling. Skip Lievsay, the sound editor who has worked with the Coen brothers since their first feature, “Blood Simple” (1984), called “No Country” “quite a remarkable experiment” from a sonic standpoint. “Suspense thrillers in Hollywood are traditionally done almost entirely with music,” he said. “The idea here was to remove the safety net that lets the audience feel like they know what’s going to happen. I think it makes the movie much more suspenseful. You’re not guided by the score and so you lose that comfort zone.”

(Via Buzz Andersen.)

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 20, 2008 12:03 PM

The brand new 8th Cloaca, Mini Cloaca

The tubular structure is made of metal and glass, and composed of mechanical organs that swallow, grind, digest and defecate a given amount of food. While Super Cloaca consumes 300 kg of food and produces 80 kg of faeces per day, the quantity of food ingested by the dwarfed one is equivalent to that of a breakfast.

[...] he also ate the same meal as a Cloaca machine, gathered some of the product of its digestion, went to the toilet, collected some of his own faecal matter and brought the two samples to a laboratory. The scientist compared the two samples bacteriologically and found them very similar.

Previously.

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on January 20, 2008 11:53 AM

Filed under: ATT, Misc

It looks like all that shouting AT&T has been doing lately about its "openness" is starting to manifest itself in the way the company does business. It's come to our attention that the mobile telco has started offering a SIM-only plan, thus providing the ultimate in open options. The idea being, of course, that you can bring any random / crappy / salvaged GSM-compatible handset the provider's way, and it'll let you hook a towline onto its satellites. Of course, you could just get one of those cheapo giveaways and pop out the card, but this is so much more open and free, like San Francisco in '69, a car-less road, some land of your own, and a good old-fashioned whiskey on the rocks. Oh, you still have a sign a two-year agreement... enjoy your freedom!

[Via The Boy Genius Report]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Originally posted by Joshua Topolsky from Engadget Mobile, on January 20, 2008 9:31 AM

Adam Leventhal, after getting seemingly inexplicable results from DTrace (Leopard’s new super-low-level debugging tool) while iTunes is running, discovered that Apple’s DTrace implementation allows apps to opt-out of it:

Wow. So Apple is explicitly preventing DTrace from examining or recording data for processes which don’t permit tracing. This is antithetical to the notion of systemic tracing, antithetical to the goals of DTrace, and antithetical to the spirit of open source. I’m sure this was inserted under pressure from ISVs, but that makes the pill no easier to swallow.

My guess is that this has more to do with making it harder to use DTrace to examine/backwards-engineer secretive code like FairPlay and DVD playback.

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Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on January 20, 2008 9:05 AM

Gourmet runs an until-now unpublished essay by the late food writer Edna Lewis, What is Southern? [Gourmet]

Two months after their own Frank Bruni goose-eggs Harry Cipriani's, the New York Times tries to explain its enduring popularity. [NYT]

Amanda Hesser revisits a late 80s recipe for Potato, Shiitake and Brie Gratin. [NYTM]

Eric Asimov has a hangover. [NYT]

The Hydrox cookie has been killed off. Fun fact: the "name came from combining the words hydrogen and oxygen, which Sunshine executives thought evoked purity." [WSJ, via Coldmud]

Chinese exporters are going kosher to offset the U.S. backlash over tainted food products. [Mercury News, via Consumerist]

Maureen Dowd gets food poisoning and White House doctors come to the rescue. [Barfblog]

Originally posted by Raphael from Serious Eats: Main, on January 20, 2008 8:00 AM

I was a bit tongue-tied when it came to present the Aenne Burda award to Martha Stewart at the DLD conference today, but as Steffi said, she has always been a hero of mine.

Creating something that enables *other* people to create themselves is a miraculous kind of business to have, and Aenne Burda herself certainly exemplified this in her magazines, by publishing patterns for women to make their own clothes; Flickr has seen a creative flourishing unlike anything I would have ever dreamed or imagined, and certainly Martha, in so many ways, has unleashed more creation, more DIY and more self expression than any other woman in the world today.

Congratulations Martha!

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on January 20, 2008 7:56 AM

World oil production may peak in the coming years, but it will be because of a decline in demand for petroleum rather than constraint on supply, a BP economist said on Wednesday. The comments come in the wake of remarks from other industry officials who in recent months have questioned mainstream supply forecasts, suggesting a peak in output may be closer than the industry has previously admitted.

Originally from ENN: Energy, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Jan 20, 2008 at 12:52 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Eyebeam reBlog, on January 20, 2008 7:52 AM

Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns' next project for HBO about the Iraq War. It's from October but I hadn't seen it until now so maybe you hadn't either? The 7-hour miniseries is based on Evan Wright's book of the same name. This video discusses the book and its subject matter. (thx, david)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 20, 2008 6:10 AM

As we noted earlier on Serious Eats, a London chef is opening a fish and chips shop selling only sustainably caught seafood. A basket of fish and chips is going to cost about $20. This reminded me of the age-old question facing all of us: Are we willing to pay more for food that is sustainably grown, raised, or caught?

Food in the U.S. is still, relatively speaking, incredibly cheap, mostly because of a combination of government policy and the laws of supply and demand. Our food supply is created too efficiently. So people who can pay more should. And I don't think it's an either-or proposition. We produce enough food in this country to feed every man, woman, and child in it. That we don't is downright shameful.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats: Main, on January 20, 2008 6:00 AM

Unsurprisingly, 'Casablanca' is a film coming up in discussions of Lust, Caution - and in terms of the quality of the cast, story and direction they are movies on equal terms. They both look at love and espionage during the period of the Second World War, and take place within cities of sin and intrigue. Taiwanese director Ang Lee's film is framed by a history which is absent from the ordinary formal education delivered in Europe and America- it's set towards the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War and in the context of the Chinese Civil War.

A Girl and a Gun favorite Tony Leung Chiu Wai heads up the sterling cast, playing against type as a high level Japanese collaborator - responsible for the torture and execution of resistance members amongst other things. Tony Leung's monstrous Mr. Yee is extreemly human - completely aware of how dangerous his position is and accordingly scared, secretive and emotionally inaccessible.

Newcomer Wei Tang puts in a stellar performance as the equally lonely Wong Chia Chi, a student who has lost her mother and been abandoned by her father, and who agrees to take on the role of Mrs. Mak in order to seduce Mr. Yee to give the KMT/Chinese Nationalist Party resistance opportunity to assassinate him.

Mrs. Mak eventually moves into the Lee household (at the behest of Mrs. Lee - played by the outstanding Joan Chen) and begins an affair with Mr. Lee. The sex scenes are extreemly explicit but crucial to configuring Wong and Mr. Lee's relationship - they act as admission of vulnerability, tests/pledges of trust and as the lead characters only really intimate contact with anyone, in a context where they are both aware that talking to anyone about their lives could lead to their deaths. There is a key scene when Wong relates the reality of her relationship with Mr. Lee to her handler and he can't cope with her honesty - he actually gets up and walks out of the room.         

The historical tragedies of the protagonists (not to mention the personal ones) are far bleaker than those of Rick and Ilsa - no one in Lust, Caution has the luxury of belonging to a winning side, since Japan surrenders in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT/Chinese Nationalist Party flees to Taiwan in 1949. The combination of an unfamiliar political landscape, subtitles, the more psychologically complex characterisation of the protagonists and the "strong sex" scenes is going to make this a far harder sell to mainstream English speaking audiences than Casablanca ever was. It's a film that deserves to be seen widely though, so that we can all be haunted by Ang Lee's looming South Quarry -  there are so many amazing, essential scenes that it's hard to pick out favorites.

Originally posted by Josie Fraser from A Girl & A Gun, on January 20, 2008 5:41 AM

When I heard that chess champion Bobby Fischer had died, I immediately went searching for some of that "sprawling New Yorker shit" on Fischer. Sure enough, the New Yorker ran a piece on Fischer back in 1957, when he was 14 and still "Robert". Also from their archives, a 2004 review of a book about the 1972 Spassky/Fischer match. The NY Times has extensive coverage of the hometown boy from past and present, including the annoucement of his victory against Spassky.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on January 20, 2008 5:16 AM

I still find the Google Sky interface less appealing than some dedicated planetarium software I've tried, but I'm still interested in the most recent updates, including, among other things, imagery from space-based telescopes and imagery layers from 17th-century celestial...

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on January 20, 2008 4:56 AM

Earlier tonight, we premiered U2 3D at Sundance 2008 for approximately 1200 people. Hollywood heavyweights, politicians, musicians, and rabid U2 fans packed the house. It was an epic night for many as hundreds witnessed a historical film event.  Lots of amazing things happened throughout the evening. Following is a recap in case I wake up and think it was all a dream:

The evening kicked off at the Supper Club at Riverhorse on Main with a U2 3D Talent-Filmmaker cocktails and dinner. 3ality Digital filmmakers, National Geographic staff, Best Buy executives, talent, and guests enjoyed the exclusive engagement while Paddy Casey performed a soulful acoustic set. Members of U2 walked the floor mingling with guests, who for many reasons, had to keep pinching themselves in disbelief.

Acclaimed New Orleans chef, John Besh, created and served a scrumptious Bon Appetit-sponsored meal fit for rock gods and guitar heroes.  Dinner notables included Former Vice President Al Gore, music mogul Jimmy Iovine, actor Woody Harrelson, and musical artist will.i.am. 

Immediately following the exclusive dinner, Team U2 3D transported the whole crew to the Eccles Theatre.  Once there, producers, directors, and members of U2 walked the Sundance red carpet.  Flashes were popping off like fireworks inside.  Director Catherine Owens looked radiant and the producers stood proud. It was electrifying! 

The undisputed highlight of the evening immediately followed the red carpet. The crowd roared as Robert Redford and then U2 entered the theatre. As the lights faded, the excitement quickly grew. Many attendees moved to the music while participating as though they were attending a live concert -- waving hands in the air, shining mobile phones in lieu of lighters, and clapping passionately at the end of each song. Invited guest, Jeffrey Hopkins, Program Manager for Waterfront Film Festival was awed to see the theatre audience merge with the film audience, "It made the point that we experienced what the concert goers experienced during the show." 

Many attendees walked away feeling inspired.  Irish actor Kevin J. Ryan felt that U2 3D was more emotional, inspirational, and charismatic than 99% of films today, "It spoke for the Irish and it spoke for the people.  It wasn't about 'I'm proud to be Irish', it's that I'm proud of being human."  Hopkins agreed adding that he thought the 3D technology helped push Bono and U2's messages of positivity.

The film received a boisterous standing ovation at the end with the audience enjoying the credits on their feet.  Congratulations to the U2 3D family.  You should be so proud of being a part of filmmaking history!  U2 3D launches in IMAX theaters on January 23, 2008.

Originally posted by Souris from U2 3D Live, on January 20, 2008 2:51 AM