Tomorrow marks the first Brooklyn Flea, which will be the largest flea market in New York.

And if you make it out to Ft. Geene say hello to my wife who will premiering some of the clothes she's created for her new venture 'Two Blue Cars: Shirts for Boys'. She'll feature shirts with diggers, cement mixers, garbage trucks, go carts and the like. The kinds of things little boys obsess over... so say hello.

If going for the flea market isn't your thing, go for the food, many of the regular Red Hook taco trucks (the best in town) will be feeding hungry flea folk.

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Tags: brooklyn flea, shirts for boys, two blue cars

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Heading East, on April 5, 2008 10:27 PM

The Underground Railroad returns once again tonight at midnight. You can tune in here, or on WBAI 99.5 FM if you live in the tri-state area. And while you're listening you can talk to us live in the chat room....

Originally posted by jsmooth995 from hiphopmusic.com:, on April 5, 2008 8:23 PM

Online Journalism Blog: “The cartograms below show the world through the eyes of editors-in-chief, in 2007. Countries swell as they receive more media attention; others shrink as we forget them.”

via: Andrew Sullivan.

Originally posted by agolis from andrew golis, on April 5, 2008 5:29 PM

Nolan Strong and the Dialbos: The Wind
From 7" (Fortune, 1954)

The Jesters: The Wind
From 7" (Winley, 1960)

Laura Nyro w/ Labelle: The Wind
From Gonna Take a Miracle (Columbia, 1971)

I recently went to a "Listening Party" event at the LACE, where my friend and colleague RJ Smith gave a great talk on the city of Detroit through its music. With images from Detroitfunk.com rotating on a video screen, RJ covered several decades worth of deindustrialization, White flight, abandonment, un-development and the post-humanization of Detroit.

One of the songs he played during this tour was "The Wind" by Nolan Strong and the Diablos, a decent sized doo wop hit from the mid-1950s that I found incredibly haunting and more than a little spooky given the echo effect that permeates the recording. It is such an affecting track that ti's probably not surprising that it found many future fans. The Jesters' 1960 version is especially well-executed - retains many of the dreamy elements of the original but it's a more accessible recording too. Even Laura Nyro was a fan - recording a 1971 version with Labelle on back-up vocals I presume. Her high voice fits especially well with the song, mirroring the original falsetto but even more piercing. Notably though, Nyro leaves out the spoken bit in the middle (which might be just as well).

Wind wind blow oooooh oooh blow wind wind

When the cool summer breeze
Sends a chill down my spine
And I long for my love's sweet caress
I know she is gone but my love lingers on
In a dream that the wind brings to me.

Originally posted by O.W. from soul sides, on April 5, 2008 2:04 PM

Patrick Ewing Jr. Son of the Georgetown/Knicks great Patrick Ewing, shows off his own skills with a nifty behind-the-back dunk in a college slam dunk contest.

Patrick Ewing Jr. - Behind The Back Dunk

Originally posted by jay smooth from tuberaider video, on April 5, 2008 12:58 PM

The Colombian government has terminated its contract chief Clinton strategist Mark Penn's lobbying firm, after he apologized for personally meeting with their ambassador on Monday to discuss strategy for a free-trade deal that Hillary Clinton publicly opposes.

Apparently the Colombians did not take kindly to Penn calling the meeting "an error in judgment." From their statement: "The Colombian government considers this a lack of respect to Colombians, and finds this response unacceptable."

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on April 5, 2008 10:40 AM

Those of you interested in the book biz may have read about a new venture that aims to rejigger how authors are paid, creating a system that may ultimately benefit both authors and publishers.

Authors typically get advances, or money up front from the publisher. Often times, that's all the money an author sees from a book. That's because a book has to "earn out" the advance before an author can start sharing in the royalties. So if a writer gets, say, a $60,000 advance and the sale of each book counts toward, oh, $3 of that $60,000, the book has to sell 20,000 copies before the publisher recoups the advance and starts paying out royalties. Sadly, a lot of good books don't ever hit that mark.

What's this have to do with food? Well, Michael Ruhlman connects some dots on his blog, citing a similar approach that Chicago restaurateur Nick Kokonas is taking. Kokonas, along with chef Grant Achatz, created famed restaurant Alinea, and they're crafting a book along these lines. As Ruhlman says: "The new model created by Kokonas and perhaps soon a similar one by HarperCollins is exciting because it stands to enable chefs who can finance their own projects to do exactly the kind of books they want to do—which means we’re likely to see more risk taking and more innovative books."

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats: Main, on April 5, 2008 8:30 AM

Here are some nuggets that have been ferreted out of Bill and Hillary's 2000-2006 tax returns, which were released yesterday:

* Their $10 million in charitable contributions all went to a family foundation run by the Clintons, and it has given away roughly half the money they sank into it.

* Some folks are wondering what Bill Clinton did to earn $15 million from billionaire Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Companies.

* But Clinton spokesperson Jay Carson isn't saying whether Bill did any work for Dubai, whose ruler is a Yucaipa investor.

* Many of the wealthy donors who bankrolled both Clintons' White House bids frequently pop up in the returns, suggesting lots of cross-over between the political and private sector realms the Clintons move in.

* The returns show that the Clintons' combined income increased by an astonishing 50 times in the first year after Bill left office, highlighting the money-making opportunities awaiting presidents after they leave office.

* Bill's advance on his autobiography was higher than previously thought, checking in at $15 million.

* Here's what the Clintons made last year:

Sen. Clinton's salary $150,200

Sen. Clinton's book royalties $152,864

President Clinton's pension $186,600

President Clinton's book income $4,434,446

President Clinton's speeches $10,145,000

Partnership income $2,750,000

Adviser income from InfoUSA $400,000

Income from savings accounts $485,000

Investment income from Blind Trust $3,515,000

That partnership income apparently comes from Burkle again.

* And finally, Hillary says that the returns show that Bill made all that cash "doing what he loves doing most -- talking to people."

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on April 5, 2008 7:17 AM

If we can toot our own horn, Ewan at SMS Text News gave Nokia kudos for our blogger outreach work. He's written an article about how different device manufacturers deal with bloggers. And it ain't pretty.

Ewan says:

Nokia is the run-away leader in mobile blog relations. They’ve two main setups that I’m aware of. There’s a Nokia USA blogger program and a WOMWorld offering. As far as I’m aware anyone, whether you’re writing about mobile or otherwise, can talk to the leaders of these two operations and, provided you meet certain criteria, get admitted and in the door, to receive test devices and so on.

With the recent formation of our Social Media team, it's sure to get better.

I also left a comment there as a thanks and an elaboration of what we're doing:

Ewan,

Thanks for the kudos. I (with boss, Christian Lindholm) was the first in the company to start reaching out to bloggers, back in February 04, with Lifeblog. If you knew of Lifeblog in 04-05, it was because of me and and the bloggers that helped me.

WOM World and the US loaner program was set up, I think, in 06, and was Nokia trying the waters in social media relations (I was not involved, ironically). As you comment, the focus was not well balanced.

This year I was called back to join the newly formed Social Media team. My first task was to get a basic (modest) blog up and running for the communications team (a few more weeks if all goes well). Of course, we do have a few blogs existing (the S60 and Betalabs blogs are the most prominent) and we have a ton of employees who have identified themselves as employees publicly on their personal sites (like me) and occasionally participate in the conversations about Nokia. But my site will cover stories (not specs and tech) that are about the people and companies who use, are affected by, or are related to the products and services from Nokia.

While I might be setting up a Nokia-wide blog, that's not going to be the only place my team will be (I'm not trying to control the conversation, just add to it). We've set up channels in Flickr, Share on Ovi, YouTube, del.icio.us, and may set up more, so that we not only participate where people are, but provide media that folks can play with, forward, comment on, and basically follow.

Yeah, Social Media finally is official at Nokia and we have a ton of people who actually know it. This time around, we are trying to set up a coherent, consistent, and for the long-run strategy to participate in the conversations happening around the Nokia neighborhood.

What do you think?

Ping me in a few weeks to see where I'm at. If we're not public with the (damned) blog by then, I might be able to give you a peek.

Cheers and keep up the good work!

Tchau,

Charlie

PS The site is called Nokia Conversations. Watch my blog for any further comments on it <http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog>

Ta!

image from caseywest

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on April 4, 2008 11:43 PM

All over the news here in Shanghai, on CNN International, is NYC’s congestion charging initiative. Following London and the UK, NYC is about to implement fees to drive into the city. Woohoo we say and Dahon has already got a page up supporting the measure and expect other manufactures to follow.

We’d hope most people would just realize, “hey you can ride in,” but if we’ve got to do some hand waving to help, then ok.

Your thoughts on city’s charging to drive?

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on April 4, 2008 2:37 PM

Almost five years ago, I got involved in a project that would eventually become Atom, a pair of matching standards functioning as a syndication format and a publishing protocol. Though its contentious genesis was in the world of blogging and feeds, what's amazing is the improbable end result of the Atom community refining and debating the standard for half a decade.

AtomPub has become the standard for accessing cloud-based data storage. From Google's GData implementation to Microsoft's unified storage platform that includes SQL Server, Atom is now a consistent interface to build applications that can talk to remote databases, regardless of who provides them. And this milestone has come to pass with almost no notice from the press that covers web APIs and technology. A single common interface for keeping data in reliable cloud storage is as important a development as infrastructure-on-demand offerings like Amazon's EC2 and S3 web services, and can radically impact the creation of applications for distributed social platforms like OpenSocial or the Facebook API.

Of course, there's a lot more to the AtomPub story. There's open source support from infrastructure-level implementations like Apache Abdera to application implementations as in Movable Type and interoperability testing as made possible by The Ape. But those have been around for a while: Being able to build a program that doesn't care if the backend is Google Base or SQL Server is new.

The reason this is a true milestone, and that it's especially disappointing that the tech trade press hasn't been paying attention, is because we've seem some remarkable announcements.

From Microsoft's David Treadwell:

Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying our developer platform protocols for services on the open, standards-based Atom format (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). At MIX we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage (see below for more details). Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools or libraries, such as .NET WCF Syndication to read or write these cloud service-based feeds. ...

The intent for these early, experimental releases are to gather valuable feedback from the community around our idiomatic and freely licensed extensions to AtomPub which deal with important service scenarios, such as URL formats, nested directories, image streams, and service metadata. You can read more about this on the Project Astoria team blog.

And from Google's Joe Gregorio:

We've always encouraged other developers to adopt Atom, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and the extensions that Google has created on top of those standards, but we realized the issue of patents may have held back some adopters. Well, those concerns end today as we are giving a no-charge, royalty-free license to any patents we have that you would need to implement Atom, AtomPub, or any of those extensions.

There's clearly still work to be done, of course. I believe Microsoft will find Google's licensing terms open enough for them to feel comfortable implementing GData-compatible APIs. Amazon should find a way to map these same APIs onto the SimpleDB service, though I understand fundamental differences in architecture may make that a challenge. The multitude of smaller cloud-database vendors will find it easier to get adoption and customers if they can assert compatibility with these implementations.

But, put succinctly, Google + Microsoft = AtomPub wins. To paraphrase Dave Winer, the act of putting aside ego and saying a competitor's API is good enough, and that you're going to support it, is a brave and important act in the world of technology. That makes this convergence particularly exciting.

And it's a real act of technological courage because any reasonably competent technology company can find reasons to object to any standard or API that's ever presented. "We'd prefer it work this way." "Your implementation is too verbose!" "What about just using this other technology?"

In the end, it doesn't matter if a standard is perfect; All that matters is that it works. I am, by no means, the kind of person who thinks that anything adopted by two giant tech companies is always going to be acceptable, but the fact that there is also significant support for AtomPub from small, independent hackers is a pretty good sign that this victory is good for the web as a whole.

Now I just hope people make something really cool out of this. I want every program that thinks of itself today as a "blogging client" to reimagine their market as being a front-end to a database in the cloud. I want all the apps built on smart database abstractions to think about this new unified cloud API as an option they must support. And most of all, I want geeks to make something cool with this that we couldn't do before.

Some key links:

• IETF RFC 5023, the Atom Publishing Protocol
• A Unified Standards-Based Protocols and Tooling Platform for Storage from Microsoft, from George Moore, Microsoft's GM for the Live platform
• Google Data APIs protocol reference
• GData patent license

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on April 4, 2008 1:04 PM

We've heard the rumblings before, but this time around, an Aussie newspaper has it from inside sources in Spain that Ferran Adria might actually shutter El Bulli: "In other news from foreign shores, Detective has learned from a San Francisco snout that next year Spanish molecular chef Ferran Adria is considering closing his revolutionary restaurant, El Bulli, just outside Barcelona. Detective's Spanish contacts confirm, after some legwork, that despite frequent similar rumours this time they may be true; Adria is seriously considering closing the restaurant 'for some time, perhaps one or two years from next year.' It seems the copyists have begun to wear him down and he wants to reconsider El Bulli's 'concepts and philosophy.'" [The Australian via Eater SF]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on April 4, 2008 12:35 PM

This should get the Edwards endorsement tea-leaf readers going.

I just got off the phone with former John Edwards adviser Joe Trippi, and he says that Edwards would commend and support Hillary's idea for a cabinet-level poverty czar, which she proposed during a speech today.

"That would absolutely be something Edwards would welcome," Trippi says. "As someone close to him, a cabinet level position on poverty is something he would support 100 percent."

"Edwards pushed both [Obama and Hillary] to focus on poverty," Trippi adds. "She's done something to be commended for."

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on April 4, 2008 12:10 PM

Jonathan Butler has been talking real estate and renovation over at his blog, Brownstoner, since 2005. This year he brings his know-how offline with the most massive flea market Brooklyn has seen, aptly called Brooklyn Flea. While honing our haggling skills, we asked him a few questions about what to expect when it opens this weekend.

How, and when, did you come up with the idea for Brooklyn Flea? I was a regular visitor to the old 26th Street flea markets back in the old days of the 1990s. It struck me last year that Brooklyn of all places should have a kick-ass flea market so I decided to dip my toe into the water with Salvage Fest (a one-day outdoor market for architectural salvage I put on at PS 11 in Clinton Hill) last September.

When that went well, I thought, What the heck, and decided that if I were going to do it, I might as well think big.

Can you give us all the details? 10am to 5 pm every Sunday in the schoolyard at the Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School at 176 Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene.

Do brownstone Brooklynites really need more stuff? Of course--we tend to have a little more space than Manhattanites.

Does this put you head-to-head with the Park Slope flea market? Not to take anything away from the Park Slope flea market, but we're doing this on a completely different level. Brooklyn Flea will have close to 200 vendors a week, a group that has been heavily curated from over 800 applicants; hopefully it will attract visitors from all five boroughs and beyond.

What's been the biggest obstacle you've had putting this together? I think we are the only flea market ever to actually file plans with, and undergo the scrutiny of, the Department of Buildings. They were very hands-on in helping us get everything in order, but it certainly added a great deal of time and expense to the process. But I didn't want to build a franchise on a house of cards.Your partner is Eric Demby was formerly the communications guy for Marty Markowitz -- has that helped cut through any red tape? He's got a few tricks up his sleeve but he's prevented by law from hitting up Borough Hall for favors. (Marty will be attending the "ribbon cutting" ceremony at 1 p.m. on Sunday.) Eric's got a great eye for the stylish, the ironic and the kitschy, so he's perfectly qualified for this gig; he's also been the great communicator when it comes to interacting with the vendors.

What are the shops you're most excited about? I'm excited to see the folks who are basically Flea rookies, rolling out their personal finds and collections for the first time. I bet Morris & Tweed, which includes a stylist for Madewell, has great stuff. Rico Espinet from the lighting store on Atlantic Ave. is unloading 30 years worth of collecting, which should be awesome. And Colonia from Hudson upstate has really unusual pieces.

What's the weirdest thing on sale? I'd have to say Interventionista, who will be doing astrology readings and selling from her vintage Deco clothing collection. Her and the Polaroid photo booth, which starts April 13.

Will there be food? Yes. Choice market will be providing coffee, fresh-made pastries and sandwiches and Wafels and Dinges will putting their irons to good use. In addition, there are a number of vendors selling packaged foods like cookies, chocolates, etc.

How flexible are the flea prices? How much should a person expect to haggle? It wouldn't be a flea market without haggling!

Does the future of blog entrepreneurship lie in flea markets? Not specifically, but I do think that there are a lot of opportunities for a brand that gets established online to migrate offline.

What's next for Brownstoner -- a Fort Greene cafe? Dunno, maybe a book?

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on April 4, 2008 11:44 AM

Williamsburg's N. 6th doesn't want for drinking holes, particularly the strip between Berry and Wythe. With that fact in mind, the owners of recently-opened establishment Hugs -- whose amenities include Guitar Hero, multiple Skeeball machines and sixteen beers on tap -- have created more of a sedentary carnival for grown-ups than a bar. The low-ceilinged, bunker-like space gives the sensation of being in the basement of a high school friend's house whose parents worked full-time -- an atmosphere built for excess and comfort. Artist Tom Taylor has created a series of collage-murals throughout, with maps and newspaper clippings blooming across the walls of the bar. Plastic-covered sofas and classic leather couches run parallel to the lengthy bar, leading up to a stage that hosts nightly DJs, regular dance parties (including a '90s night), and on Sundays, thematic double features (i.e. Nick Cage classics Raising Arizona and Moonstruck). A few blocks from Hugs, you might have any one of these things in the comfort of your own home -- your favorite beer, Guitar Hero when your roommate isn't using it, Raising Arizona on DVD -- but it's the rare place that can bring all these elements together in concert. It just goes to show, sometimes everyone needs a Hugs. 108 N. 6th Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-5959

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on April 4, 2008 11:40 AM

Just got around to reading Ben McGrath's New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader.

Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet").

But maybe not so improbably...Dykstra has a canny sense for business:

Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because "it was a business that couldn't be replaced by a computer chip." He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. "You get the shit out of the ground," he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, "or the shit made in the laboratory that's the perfect lubricant" (Syntec). "Meaning, it's either A or B. It's not about the oil. It's about the people. They got confused." He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee ("the good kind"), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.

One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here's a listing from the article:

The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be "major league," he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of ".300 hitters," and lining up sponsors to match.

Dykstra's business card gives an address for the "headquarters" of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as "big league-like, top five addresses in the world."

Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. "You worked for Esquire and In Style," he said, delivering a pep talk. "That's called the big leagues. It's like in baseball. You can't go above the major leagues. There's not another league. We're teeing it up high, dude."

He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks ("Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers") with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.

"My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting," he wrote. "I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging."

Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. "Do you know the studies and what they've proven?" he asked. "You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It's like the one-one count." The one-one count is another of Dykstra's baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he's in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life's count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.

Here's an archive of Dykstra's articles on trading for The Street.

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on April 4, 2008 10:46 AM

It's really, finally, definitely official now. The Michigan re-vote is dead, with the state Democratic Party releasing the following statement:

The Michigan Democratic Party has carefully reviewed several proposals for a Party-run primary or caucus as a means of resolving the dispute over the seating of the Michigan delegation to the 2008 Democratic National Convention. We have concluded that it is not practical to conduct such a primary or caucus. We will continue to work with the Working Group, the DNC and the candidates to resolve this matter in a manner which is respectful of the views of Democrats in Michigan, and which is fair to those who voted in the January 15th Democratic primary.

Next stop: The credentials committee.

Late Update: Howard Dean and Sen. Carl Levin, plus some other major Michigan Dem names, have released this statement:

"We are united in our commitment to doing everything we can to ensure that a Michigan delegation is seated in Denver this summer. We also know that any solution needs to be acceptable to both Democratic presidential campaigns. While there may be differences of opinion in how we get there, we will continue to work together to ensure that a Michigan delegation is seated and that the logistics are in place for a Michigan delegation in Denver. We have every expectation that we will succeed in that endeavor, and then go on to win in November."

Late Late Update: Jason Horowitz of The New York Observer reports that Dean got an earful from a roomful of Hillary donors upset that he hasn't done more to resolve the Florida and Michigan standoffs.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on April 4, 2008 10:20 AM

Errol Morris returns to his Times blog for the first time since his examination of the Roger Fenton photographs and covers re-enactments in documentary films, a technique he pioneered in the excellent The Thin Blue Line, and how it applies to truth in photography.

Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don't agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens -- no lens that provides a "truthful" picture of events. There is cinema verite and kino pravda but no cinematic truth.

And then:

Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief, and hence, we feel the need to protect ourselves from ourselves? If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves -- because, regardless of what it is -- we are likely to uncritically believe it.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on April 4, 2008 9:36 AM

The Campaign for New York's Future has some handy fact sheets on the transit upgrades outlined in the MTA 2008-2013 Capital Plan, broken down by city and state electoral districts. Since many of these projects will be threatened without the hundreds of millions in annual revenues expected from congestion pricing, some legislators may need to be reminded of what's at stake.

Take Hakeem Jeffries. The Brooklyn assemblyman reportedly has no position on pricing at the moment, but not so long ago he stood with Richard Brodsky in support of the Westchester pricing foe's $6.50 taxi drop charge "alternative."

In addition to system-wide and Brooklyn-specific improvements, here is just some of what residents of Jeffries' district stand to lose without pricing:

• 33 new buses on the B41 line
• Structural overcoating on the B and Q lines between Prospect Park and Sheepshead Bay
• Upgrade of the PA systems in the Bedford-Nostrand, Classon, Clinton-Washington and Fulton Street stations on the G line
• Flooding improvements for the Crosstown Line
• An 8.1% to 22.1% percent reduction in traffic jams

Check your district fact sheets to see what's on the block in your neighborhood. And if you haven't called your reps already, now is the time to pass this information on.

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on April 4, 2008 9:20 AM

Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, wrote yesterday about the difficulty of getting a reservation at David Chang's new Momofuku Ko restaurant. Ko's online reservation system is the *only* way of procuring a seat at the tiny Manhattan restaurant...no walk-ins, no friends of the chef or celebs getting preferential treatment. It works more or less like Ticketmaster's online ticketing: you select the number of guests, it shows you the available reservation times (if any), you click on a time, and if that time is still available when you click it, only then does the system hold your choice while you fill in some information.

It's a simple system; seats for dinner are released on the site a week in advance at 10am each day and the people that click on their preferred times first get the reservations. Ko takes only 32 reservations each night and the restaurant is one of the hottest in town, which means that all the reservations are gone each day in seconds...sometimes in 2 or 3 seconds. Just like Radiohead tickets on Ticketmaster.

Except that diners are not used to this sort of thing. One of Bruni's readers got irritated that he got through to the pick-a-time screen but then when he clicked on his preferred time was told that the reservation was already gone. Someone had beaten him to the punch. So he emailed the restaurant for an explanation. The exchange between the restaurant and the snubbed patron should be familiar with anyone who has done web development for clients or any kind of tech support.

In a nutshell, the would-be patron said (and I'm paraphrasing here), "your system is unfair and broken," and the folks at Ko replied, "sorry, that's how the internet works". The comments on the post are both fascinating and disappointing, with many people attempting to debunk Ko's seemingly lame excuse of, well, that's how the internet works. Except that's pretty much the right answer...although it's clearer to say that that's how a web server communicates with a web browser (and even that is a bit imprecise). When the pick-a-time page is downloaded by a particular browser, it's based on the information the web server had when it sent the page out. The page sits unchanged on your computer -- it doesn't know anything about how many reservations the web server has left to dole out -- until the person clicks on a time. An anonymous commenter in Bruni's thread nails the choice that a web developer has to face in this instance:

This is a multi-user concurrency problem that all sites with limited inventory and a high demand (users all clicking the button all at the same time) have to deal with. It's not an easy problem to solve.

The easier method (which the Ko site has chosen) is to not "lock" a reservation slot until the very end. You submit your party size and the system looks for available slots that it knows about. It shows you the calendar page, with the available slots it knows about (if any). This doesn't update in real time because they haven't implemented it to know about the current state of inventory. This can be done, but it's more complicated.

The more complicated method is to lock a reservation slot upon beginning of the checkout process, with a time out occurring if the user takes too long to finish, or some other error occurs (in other systems this can be a blacklisted credit card number). If this happens, the system throws the reservation slot back into the pool. However, you need to give people a mechanism to keep trying for ones that get thrown back into the pool (like a "Try Again" button).

Building something like this not impossible (see Ticketmaster) but requires a much more real-time system that is aware of who has what, and what stage of the checkout process they're in - in addition to total available inventory. Building a robust system like this is not cheap.

Even then, you might get shut out. You submit your party size, everything is already gone, and you never get to the calendar page. It just moves up the "sold out" disappointment to earlier in the process.

A subsequent commenter suggests using "Web 2.0" technologies (I think he's talking specifically about Ajax) but as Anonymous suggests, that would increase the complexity of the system on the server side (unnecessarily in my mind) while moving up the "'sold out' disappointment to earlier in the process". Plus, that sort of system could put you "on hold" for several minutes while the reservations are taken by the folks in front of you until you're told, "too bad, all gone". I'm not sure that's preferable to being told sooner and may result in much more irritation on the part of potential diners.

In my opinion (as a web developer and as someone who has used Ko's reservation system from start to finish), Ko's system does it right. You're locked into a reservation by the system only when you've chosen exactly what you want. It favors the web user who's prepared & lucky and is simple for Ko to implement and maintain. That the logic used to produce this simple system takes three paragraphs to explain to an end user is irrelevent. After all, a restaurant dinner is easy to eat but explaining how it came to be that way fills entire books.

This might seem too inside baseball for most readers -- the number of people interested in new NYC restaurants *and* web development is likely quite small, even among kottke.org's readership -- but there's an interesting conflict going on here between technology and customer service. What kind of a problem is this...technological or social? Bruni's correspondent blamed the technology and much of the focus of the discussion has been on the process of procuring a reservation. But the main limiting factor is the enormous demand for seats; tens of thousands of people a week vying for a few hundred seats per week. The technology is largely irrelevent; whatever Ko does, however well the reservation system works or doesn't work, nearly all of the people interacting with the restaurant are going to be disappointed that they didn't get in.

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on April 4, 2008 5:21 AM

a set of fascinating (artistic) information graphics by Stefanie Posavec, depicting the literary organisms, rhythm textures, sentence lengths & structures of Jack Kerouac’s literary space. some of the graphics depict literary components (words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters) as visual elements with color representing content (e.g. travel, character sketch, work & survival, social events), & size representing the relative length of the sentences in comparison to the longest sentence in the book.

[link: notcot.org & sheffieldgalleries.org.uk]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on April 3, 2008 7:57 PM

In case you missed it, Cat Power and her new band played “Metal Heart” on Letterman and absolutely killed it. I could watch this over and over again, and will until this video gets taken down.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on April 3, 2008 6:14 PM

Last month we told you of an effort to improve the performance of Movable Type that involved the entire community. The response has been amazing. We asked for people to contribute data collected by Movable Type's new performance monitoring framework. What we got were log files, entire data sets and even code contributions from numerous members of our open source developer community. The results of this work and collaboration with the community culminates today in the first public beta of Movable Type Open Source 4.15.

But a faster version of Movable Type is not all you have to look forward to. The community has also contributed new features to the product, and with their help and valuable feedback we have added a number of other new features as well.

Threaded Commenting

Arvind was kind enough to donate to MTOS one of Movable Type's more popular plugins: Simply Threaded. With this donation Movable Type will allow commenters to reply directly to one another and for designers to display nested and threaded comment listings on their blog.

Simpler, Easier Default Templates

One thing we have heard loud and clear is that our default templates, while powerful and flexible were too difficult for new users to wrap their heads around. So through interviews with our user community, through a series of focus groups with designers, we have completely rewritten our default templates with an eye to make it easy for people to get up and running quickly using Movable Type.

Beau Smith, the lead behind the architecture of these templates has also been working on documentation to help designers make the most of Movable Type.

» Creating Themes for Movable Type

Updated Navigation and Menus

When we approached the issue of performance we didn't just look at the backend. We also called into question aspects of the front end that we felt didn't make our users as efficient as they could be in completing certain tasks. To help achieve this we made a number of important changes to our navigation, including an vastly improved Preferences Menu, as well as the addition of a Tools menu (available in Beta 2).

New Template and Widget Listing Screens

If you are a designer, then we are especially interested in hearing how you like the new template listing screen. With these changes we hope to achieve some very basic goals for people who live in this part of the application:

1. Further unify widgets and widget sets, or "sidebars" into a single screen to make sidebar management easier and more intuitive.
2. Redesign the template listing screen to show you all of your templates, archives, archive mappings and modules in one place.

Template Previews

Hitting the save button on a template should never be a source of anxiety for anyone, but it can be if there is any doubt as to what your site will look like once the template has been saved. Therefore we have added the ability for you to preview changes you make to your templates before you save them.

Faster, More Powerful Search -- and now with Pagination!

Aside from Movable Type's search feature getting a major overhaul, which in some tests has shown performance increases upwards of two orders of magnitude, we have also made the following enhancements:

• full text search support - Movable Type now properly leverages features native to the database itself to surface more relevant results.
• paginated search - search is one of the key ways people monetize their blog and pagination will go a long way to help increase search related revenue.

Even More Publishing Control

Aside from the raw performance improvements you get just by upgrading to MT 4.15, we also wanted to give users a greater ability to fine tune the performance of their site:

• Server Side Includes - use PHP, JSP, SHTML or ASP to process and include template modules.
• Template Module Caching - cache template modules to reduce database load, and speed up publishing times.
• New Template Publishing Options - now every index template and archive mapping can be configured independently in regards to how that file should be published. Instruct Movable Type for example to publish monthly archives and feeds asynchronously, and everything else synchronously.
• Publishing Profiles - select from a number of different publishing options, like publish everything dynamically, or everything asynchronously, or even build your own.

Download Now

Movable Type Open Source 4.15 Beta 1 is available for download now. Download it, install it, and let us know what you think!

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on April 3, 2008 2:18 PM

The Major League Baseball season has begun and everyone at Apperceptive HQ has a smile on their face. Sure, a new beginning yields boundless optimism from our baseball fans, but it's the launch of MLBlogs that's making us happy.

For the last few seasons, fans have had the chance to create blogs branded with their favorite team's logo and colors, but the system was ready for an upgrade. Apperceptive couldn't pass up the opportunity to help. We moved the bloggers from Typepad to a brand new install of MT4 that is hosting hundreds of active blogs, created four new template sets for each of the 30 teams, built a slew of new plugins to allow instant access to existing MLB.com users (among other features) and paved the way for new features in the coming seasons. Best of all, it's free to anyone with an MLB.com account. Congrats to the MLBlogs team on a fabulous new community.

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from Six Apart News &amp; Events, on April 3, 2008 12:47 PM

So tonight is the big Murakami gala opening at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The show has come here from MOCA. and as in L.A., Louis Vuitton is sponsoring the gala and a "shop." But the most amazing Louis Vuitton idea that Murakami had I read about in WWD this morning. It seems as though the artist is collaborating with LV on an art+commerce piece that is a commentary on FAKES, which as we know, is a huge issue for luxe brands like Vuitton. As part of the exhibit, Murakami and LV will be placing eight "pocketbook" street vendors on the street in front of the museum selling REAL Vuitton bags that were specially designed by Murakami and LV for this particular piece. Of course I am gagging about this and am plotting to go there and get one of these. Isnt that the coolest? Plus HOW AMAZING AND ENLIGHTENED is it that the Vuitton execs agreed to go along with Murakami's preposterous idea of doing this? Ya gotta hand it to them.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on April 3, 2008 12:44 PM

Tonight, DocuClub celebrates its 2008 re-launch by Arts Engine. We will be screening Kimberly Reed’s rough cut of Prodigal Sons; DocuClub founder Susan Kaplan will be facilitating the feedback discussion afterwards. Read more about the new DocuClub on today’s POV blog. A particularly exciting feature of the new DocuClub site is the interactive section "Talk Back." In it, folks unable to attend our screenings can still participate with their feedback by responding to recaps of past sessions. We hope you "Talk Back" often!—posted by Felix

Originally posted by (author unknown) from MediaRights: Staff Blog, on April 3, 2008 12:08 PM

I remember thinking how impressive the roll-out of Subversion was. They reached some magic point where the majority of the development world just flipped and most everyone who've previously been on CVS switched in what seemed like an overnight transition.

Of course it didn't happen like that, but the perception of a sea of developers all collectively deciding to move on and knight Subversion the next savior seemed impressive at the time.

It's not so easy any more. First of all, Subversion is still a great SCM for the paradigm it embodies. It's unlikely to be out-gunned within its sphere any time soon. So any newcomers can't just out-SVN Subversion, like Subversion could out-CVS CVS.

Which means to topple Subversion, you have to bring a new paradigm to the table. The plethora of distributed version control systems seem to be that next paradigm. But it's not purely equitably "better", it's different. Better in many regards for many purposes, but not just better. Like SVN just felt better, period, than CVS.

So given all that, I think the Git move is even more interesting. That camp is competing not only to convince people that a new paradigm is appropriate for many things, but also as that it, one-out-of-many, should be the one to embody it.

I think they're going to get it. Killer apps makes or breaks any platform. With Github, I think the Git hub just scored one. Rails is going to be hosted there for the launch. Capistrano, Prototype, and Scriptaculous already moved there.

Go, go, Git.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Loud Thinking by David Heinemeier Hansson, on April 3, 2008 11:47 AM

Kevin Kelly says that people whose fields have been Turing'd -- outsourced in some way to computers -- are in general more receptive to then adopting other potentially disruptive technologies.

We have this long list of tasks and occupations that we humans believe only humans can do. Used to be things like using tools, language, painting, playing chess. Now, one by one they get Turing'd. A computer beats them. Does it better.

So far we've can check off arithmetic, spelling, flying planes, playing chess, wiring chips, scheduling tasks, welding, etc. All have been Turing'd.

Computer scientists are great to work with, because in general they are completely fearless. They were Turing'd long ago. They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers. On the other hand, doctors as a rule are loathed to accept new technology because what they do is hard to delegate to computers. Ditto for a lot of biologists.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on April 3, 2008 10:08 AM

Drivers who take an East River bridge would have to pay the $8 congestion fee when they reach Manhattan, even if they're just passing through on their way to somewhere else. "That's crazy," said City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens), who voted against it Monday. "That's one of the reasons I'm so adamant against the plan. I don't think people understand a lot of the issues around this." -- New York Daily News

Comrie is right -- $8 to drive into mid-Manhattan is nuts. The fee should be at least $40.

To see why, picture traffic as seen from Chopper 880. A car entering a crowded bridge like the Queensboro causes delays to hundreds of cars behind it; each individual car is delayed only briefly, but summed across the herd, it adds up.

I take my car across the Queensboro and thus cause, say, six seconds of slowdown for each of 600 cars behind me. That's 3,600 total delay seconds -- an hour of lost time. Some of those 600 I've held up are commuters, some are using their cars as part of their work, some are truckers making deliveries. So that hour is easily worth forty bucks or more.

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Originally posted by Charles Komanoff from Streetsblog, on April 3, 2008 9:20 AM