randomwalks/dj

Do you remember Godflesh? I remember Godflesh.

I remember Pure. I still speak of it, without irony, as an album that changed my life. I remember the relentless grinding of the first self-titled album, the utter despondency of Streetcleaner, the uneasy paranoia of Slavestate, and the ups and downs of the rest of the catalog. I also remember grabbing every other project I could find that had Godflesh frontman Justin Broadrick credited somewhere on the jacket: Final, Jesu, Techno Animal, God, all of it.Broadrick eventually killed Godflesh and replaced it with Jesu, but the side projects continued to roll along.

Enter Greymachine, which is worth getting excited about due to the presence of a few other people of note: Aaron Turner, of Isis (another metalloid band that someone else once described as “a happier Godflesh”); Diarmuid Dalton, of ‘Flesh and Jesu and Final, as well as the underrated Cable Regime; and Dave Cochrane, most notably of the also-underappreciated Head of David (where Broadrick served as drummer for a time). The end result is a filthy mess of twisted wreckage that brings to mind everything from Broadrick’s early outfit Fall of Because—they existed in parallel with Napalm Death, where Broadrick also briefly appeared, and that alone should tell you what level of ferocity is at play here.

One of Fall of Because’s songs was named “Grind”, and that’s a good summary for what Greymachine sounds like: grinding, shearing instrumentation, played at a positively funereal pace. The guitars sound like they could be basses, and the basses sound like they could be horns, and the horns could well be vocals—everything’s one giant monstrous murk, with something like a fragment of a melody poking out every so often. There’s not that much differentiation between songs: “Sweatshop” has some frantic-sounding taped-off-TV voices at the beginning, and “Easy Pickings” has some looped guitar samples that wouldn’t be out of place on the more recent Final albums. And a couple of tracks have something approaching melody: “When Attention Just Isn’t Enough” has a fairly prominent guitar line (at least I think it’s a guitar) that I wouldn’t mind hearing in a cleaner mix.

For the most part, though, it’s all one big mass of thundering sonority. And it also reminds me of what I miss most about Godflesh: somehow, through all the roaring guitar lines and bone-breaking drum machines, there was emotion and human connectivity and even heart. Greymachine is all guts but not much soul—albeit fine if you like such things. I know I do; I just like other things, too.

amazon=B002B4F8BY mp3amazon=B002HPA5WY

Originally posted by Serdar from Genji Press, on October 17, 2009 8:30 PM

In the last couple of (or even more :) days Yuval and I have been endlessly discussing what the asynchronous response API would look like in PSGI applications. And that was also becoming one of the most frequently asked questions on my side, since many people from AnyEvent, POE and perlbal (Danga::Socket) land are curious how to port their non-blocking application to let them run on PSGI servers.

Thursday while having frodwith on board in the discussion (that was really helpful since he has a third person view as a POE developer) and we sorted out the nicely done middle ground, which is actually the revive of our original start_response callback we abandoned in favor of IO::Writer-like abstraction.

So, basically the idea is the same as the original Python WSGI's start_response but this callback is NOT an optional parameter to the app because that stands in the way of everybody in the chain including middleware and that sucks. Instead, an app can optionally return a callback that accepts another callback to which you can return the response array ref (code, headers and body) if you want to delay your response.

my $app = sub {
  my $env = shift;
  return sub {
    my $respond = shift;
    # do some event stuff
    $event->callback(sub { $respod->([ $code, $headers, $body ]) });
  };
};

If you also want to delay the content body delivery as well (i.e. streaming) you can omit the body, in which case you'll get the writer object that has write(), close() and poll_cb(). 

my $app = sub {
  my $env = shift;
  return sub {
    my $respond = shift;
    my $w = $respond->([ 200, [ 'Content-Type' => 'text/plain' ]]); # no $body here
    # do more event stuff
    $event->callback(sub { $w->write($body) });
    $event->done_callback(sub { $w->close });
  };
};

I plan to update the PSGI specification to address this optional response style in a few days. Yuval also has a nicely summarized blog post on this, and we already added this callback style to our AnyEvent, Danga::Socket, Coro and POE backend as well as most middlewares, including automatic chunking middleware (supposedly used by servers, not apps) which I line-by-line cloned from Rack :)

Meanwhile Yuval is working on his data-pimping REST machine Hydrant and I've been working on Real-Time-optimized web framework Tatsumaki, and both will be built on top of PSGI/Plack from the ground up. This will definitely be how web frameworks in Perl would look like in 2010.

Friday night I was at my friend's party and five people talked to me how awesome Plack is and it's changing the world. (Disclosure: it was a party full of my Six Apart co-workers and alumni like Artur, Randy and Simon, so that's not that surprising :))

Originally posted by miyagawa from bulknews.typepad.com, on October 17, 2009 7:53 PM

Eric Seidman has been doing some great work on velocity and perception, but maybe all of OUR perception has been wrong. Fox just showed a Kevin Jepsen pitch to Derek Jeter that left his hand* at 97 and crossed the plate at 90. Jeter swung and missed weakly.

So, Jeter can’t hit a 90 mph fastball?

Look, we will all call that a 97 mph heater, up in the zone, nasty and hard to hit, but that’s really not what Jeter’s seeing, actually or in his perception. Is it 97? Is it 90? Is it something in between? Or, would it be more accurate to add in the perception and deal with time? Remember that there have always been “hiders” - pitchers who for one reason or another make it tough for hitters to pick up the ball. (Sid Fernandez, I’m looking at you.)

Maybe it will be Eric or someone else, but I think we’re on the verge of a new way of thinking about pitching and velocity, much in the same way that DIPS - whether you agree with it or not - changed how we looked at pitching and defense.
* I have no idea how FoxTrax+ works or how accurate it is. I’m assuming it’s just a rebranded PitchFX and that “left his hand” is an approximation.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on October 17, 2009 7:14 PM

Thoughts:

1. The whole site is Flash.
2. The animation is pretty close to the commercial they showed during tonight’s Yankees-Angels game, which (I’ve heard) will be in heavy rotation during football games tomorrow.
3. Those “iDon't”s, with the straight primes instead of proper apostrophes, make the commercial look slapdash.
4. Seems pretty clear that Verizon isn’t getting the iPhone any time soon.
5. The small print notes that “Droid” is a registered trademark of Lucasfilm Ltd., licensed to Verizon.
6. It’ll be running Android 2.0.

Lastly, the big point: “Droid” is going to be a Verizon-owned brand. It’s purportedly a Motorola-manufactured phone, but Verizon is the licensee of the “Droid” trademark. (Which name, by the way, strikes me as the perfect name for an Android OS phone — sort of implicitly establishes it as the Android phone.) That’s the big thing. Verizon doesn’t see itself as a mere carrier for other companies’ phones. It sees itself as being bigger than the phones. It’s Verizon-vs.-Apple in this spot, not Verizon-vs.-AT&T.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 17, 2009 6:14 PM

Wishing all a joyful Festival of Lights!

See more images of this year’s Diwali.

Photos from Animation Maniac, Catch the dream, Meredith Jones, phalgunp, Shah’91, and rosa_pedra.

Originally posted by Cris Stoddard from Flickr Blog, on October 17, 2009 5:54 PM

Yello! from Smashbox Studios had a chance to interview Where The Wild Things Are storyboard artist Federico D’Alessand. Read it here. Fascinating read, with images of a sequence storyboarded out.

---

Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags:

Originally posted by Ward Jenkins from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on October 17, 2009 4:56 PM

People already complaining the hot chocolate isn't hot.

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on October 17, 2009 3:09 PM

This is the proposed design for Rome's new soccer stadium. I'm not sure if I like it, but it feels like the future.

the stadium's skin is surrounded by a perimeter band and screens. through the use of advanced technology systems messages will be communicated on the exterior using the latest generation LED devices.

More pictures and more information can be found at Designboom.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on October 17, 2009 7:55 AM

I saw Where the Wild Things Are today: it's a movie for adults about what it felt like to be a kid—a deeply considered interpretation of the book, beautifully rendered, but not a terribly good adaptation. There's a huge distinction in my mind between interpretation, which I see as someone's distinct vision of an original work, and adaptation which is a more neutral transformation of work from one medium to another, one that allows space for you to project your own interpretation. Of course a true adaptation of this book is impossible, so a strong interpretation was the way to go and in virtually every frame of this film you are reminded that this is Jonze/Eggers' Wild Things, rather than Maurice Sendak's Wild Things.

I've been asked if I'll take my kids to the movie. I don't think I will. Raul Andres who is almost 5 has a particularly deep love of the book. I'm pretty sure for him the book is about the joy of rebellion, the power of imagination, and the love of home whereas large sections of the movie are about dread, loneliness, and the inevitable messy consequences of things. These emotions are large parts of every childhood, but for me (and I think for my son), these were not the emotions stirred by this particular book. If I were to take Raul Andres to the movie, I'm almost sure he would be scared by the film but love it anyway. Still, I would hate to have the Jonze interpretation of the story overwhelm the one he has in his head. That's the danger of movies for children. They can obliterate narratives which are still being formed. So I'll wait a few years for Wild Things to become his own. I hope by waiting his ultimate enjoyment of someone else's love for this book made real will only deepen.

Filed under: film
Tags: Adaptation, Interpretation, WTWTA

Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Heading East, on October 17, 2009 6:31 AM

Here are my latest magazine covers for Vanity Fair. They appeared in the September issue under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some Shotgun Magazine Mergers You Might Soon See (Second in a Series).” I’m especially amused by how perfectly the Out and Car & Driver logos fit together.

The first installment of “Annals of Our Endangered Medium” appeared in the March 2009 issue.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

Originally posted by Andrew Hearst from Panopticist, on October 17, 2009 5:50 AM

Erik Ruin Collective Punishment (10 Plagues series) $15 Back in Stock! I recently received a long-lost stack of these prints from the play's director Deb Shoval! Originally designed and printed as a part of Liberty Cabbage Theater's play An Olive on the Seder Plate. The series, the Ten Plagues of the Occupation, explores the effects of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. 1 color silkscreen print 17"x22" unsigned/unnumbered White ink on heavy black paper

Originally posted by Erik Ruin from Just Seeds, on October 17, 2009 5:36 AM

As many of you may know, Shepard Fairey has been involved in a law suit with the Associated Press over the photo he used as the basis for his now iconic "Obama Hope" poster. In a recent interview, we spoke briefly about his ongoing court battles which I assumed would be resolved in due course. Now in a bombshell press release Fairey states:

On October 9, 2009, my lawyers sent a letter to the AP and to the photographer Mannie Garcia, through their lawyers, notifying them that I intend to amend my court pleadings. Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garciaphoto I used as a reference to design the HOPE image. The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another. The new filings state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images. I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner.

I have to say I did not see this coming. Right wing pundits are going to have a ball with this. STATEMENT BY SHEPARD FAIREY ON ASSOCIATED PRESS FAIR USE CASE OCTOBER16, 2009 In an effort to keep everyone up to date on my legal battle to uphold the principle of fair use in copyright laws, I wanted to notify you of a recent development in my case against The Associated Press (AP). On October 9, 2009, my lawyers sent a letter to the AP and to the photographer Mannie Garcia, through their lawyers, notifying them that I intend to amend my court pleadings. Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garciaphoto I used as a reference to design the HOPE image. The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another. The new filings state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images.I sincerely apologize for my lapse in judgment and I take full responsibility for my actions which were mine alone. I am taking every step to correct the information and I regret I did not come forward sooner. I am very sorry to have hurt and disappointed colleagues, friends, and family who have supported me in this difficult case and trying time in my life. I am also sorry because my actions may distract from what should be the real focus of my case –the right to fair use so that all artists can create freely. Regardless of which of the two images was used, the fair use issue should be the same.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 16, 2009 8:15 PM

Toys’R'Us will be giving away Arceus, the last pokémon in the pokédex from November 7th to 15th in the U.S. and Puerto Rico
Don’t miss out on this one as this special event pokémon will unlock events in HeartGold and SoulSilver.

Arceus will be at level 100 and will come in a Cherish Ball holding a Rowap Berry and have these moves:
Judgment
Roar of Time
Spacial Rend
Shadow Force

As per usual you will need to have:
• Room for the wonder card (can’t have more than three)
• An North American version of Diamond, Pearl or Platinum and a DS
• Have obtained the Pokedex

Remember, you can only get one Arceus per game chip. You can, however, trade the Arceus to another game and restart your game thus allowing you to get as many Arceus as you can want if you are willing to grind through the intro part of the game over and over again.

Originally posted by Deneves from Poke Farm, on October 16, 2009 8:00 PM

Platinum owners can now travel to Flower Paradise and battle the Gratitude Pokémon, Shaymin by obtaining a Oak’s Letter over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection from now until November 8th, 2009. This letter asks you meet Dr. Oak on Route 224.

If you have received the Member’s Card, the Secret Key to unlock the Rotom forms or received mystery gifts from Pokémon Battle Revolution then you are ready to go. Just click on MYSTERY GIFT on the opening screen, then RECEIVE GIFT, then GET VIA NINTENDO WFC and it will load the Wonder Card on to your game
If you have yet to receive a mystery gift, go to the 3rd floor in Jubilife TV. Talk to the man next to a lady and type in “everyone happy” as a response to his first question and type in “wi-fi connection” to the next question. Save your game and when you restart it the MYSTERY GIFT option box will appear below NEW GAME on the opening screen.
Once you have downloaded the Wonder Card, Oak’s Letter can be picked up from the green dressed delivery man in any Poke Mart. Even if you haven’t beaten the elite four yet you still can receive Oak’s Letter, but to battle Shaymin you must have defeated the Elite Four and obtained the National Dex from Professor Rowan.

The easiest way to access Route 224 is to come down from the Pokémon League to Victory Road as Route 224 can be only reached be going though the caves heading east out of Victory Road. If you have traveled to route 224 previously, you will need to use HMs of Surf, Waterfall, Rock Climb and Defog to navigate this cave. If this is your first time through, Marley will help you battle and heal your pokémon as you go, but you will also need Strength and Rock Smash.
Dr. Oak is waiting for you at the end of Route 224 by the big white rock. Just before you reach there, Marley will join you and Dr. Oak will ask you who you would like to thank. After typing in what you are thankful for, the Seabreak Path will appear and allow you to walk up a long flowery stretch to the Flower Paradise island in the Northeast of Sinnoh.

Shaymin will be waiting for you at the end and will be at level 30 and have the following moves:
Growth
Magical Leaf
Leech Seed
Synthesis
If Shaymini faints, don’t worry, just walk back onto the Seabreak Path and return to Flower Paradise and Shaymin will once again be waiting for you. You can battle it as many times as you like (or flee if you find yourself outmatched) until you capture it.

You can only capture Shaymin once so I recommend bringing a pokémon with the ability of synchronize with the nature you prefer. Shaymin in its Sky forme has its best base stats in Special Attack and Speed so Modest or Timid are usually considered the best natures. In its land form, Shaymin can be a very good defensive and support pokémon and a Bold nature will boost its defense stat.
Unlike most legends that have a very low catch rate, Shaymin has an average one of 45 and can be caught relatively easily compared to other legends. I was catch one at full HP with a Quick Ball. I do recommend that you bring a pokémon with the move Taunt to limit Shaymin from recovering HP and boosting its Special Attack. I do not recommend trying to inflict it with a status as it isn’t necessary and it holds a Lum Berry.

Originally posted by Deneves from Poke Farm, on October 16, 2009 7:01 PM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 16, 2009 5:35 PM

I clean my office every couple of months. Despite a decent filing system for paperwork, a day-of-the-month accordion folder for bills and appointments, and every good intent to organize papers and books out of piles, stuff piles up on my desk until I start to lose things. Right now, if I want to take notes on a manuscript (or outline a book in pen), I have to clear off a section my desk.

Tidiness is important to working effectively. It's easier to do good things if you're not working around random debris.

As this is with my desk, so it is with code.

I can't give you a magic incantation to turning thousands of lines of spaghetti code into a well-formatted program that's easy to read, easy to understand, easy to maintain, and easy to extend, but I can explain a couple of Perl 5 tools which will help.

Perl::Tidy

The Perl::Tidy module improves the formatting of messy Perl code. There are myriad options available, but by default it's pretty good -- so good, in fact, that my ~/.perltidyrc file contains only two lines:

-ci=4
-bl

You can run the included perltidy program from the command-line:

$ perltidy my_messy_code.pl

... or you can add a macro or plugin to your editor to tidy code for you. Padre has a plugin called Padre::Plugin::PerlTidy. I have two Vim macros:

map ,pt <ESC>:%! perltidy<CR>
map ,ptv <ESC>:'<,'>! perltidy<CR>

If I type ,pt, Vim will run perltidy on the entire file. If I select a region and type ,ptv, Vim will run perltidy on the selection.

This is my first line of defense against poorly-formatted code. Better formatting often helps clarify logic and logic errors.

B::Deparse

Sometimes it's more important to see how Perl interprets code than to suss it out for yourself, especially given complex expressions. The core module B::Deparse takes a program that Perl 5 has already parsed and turns it back into source code.

You can run it from the command line:

$ perl -MO=Deparse some_bad_program.pl

... or on a specific subroutine within a file:

$ perl -MO=Deparse,a_real_mess some_bad_program.pl

... or within a Perl 5 program itself:

use B::Deparse;

my $bdp  = B::Deparse->new();
my $code = $bdp->coderef2text( \&some_awful_function );

Email::Send->new({
    mailer      => 'SMTP',
    mailer_args => [ Host => 'my.example.com' ]
})->send(<<'END_MESSAGE');
From: a_kind_person@my.example.com
To: mortified_perl_programmer@your.example.com
Subject: Here's What Your Code Really Does

$code
END_MESSAGE

Of course, you might not want to mail deparsed code to people instead of talking to them first -- but you can if you must.

Perl::Critic

After you can read the code in a proper format and understand complex expressions well enough to consider rewriting them, the Perl::Critic toolset can help you identify and avoid well-understood problems in code -- both stylistic and substantial.

The perlcritic utility runs from the command line and can identify the most egregious potential errors in a program or module:

$ perlcritic MyAwfulModule.pm my_nifty_program.pl

There are many command-line options. I like --top which finds the 20 worst violations. Severity levels range from 5 (the default) to 1 (the pickiest); select your preferred range with -n. You can customize P::C policies for your project or organization and you can add other policies as you wish.

P::C policies tend to explain themselves. That is, Perl::Critic::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitUniversalCan has a brief discussion of why the policy exists and what to do instead. If you take the time to explore various policy violations for a codebase and consider the arguments, you'll learn a lot about writing effective Perl 5 code.

If you want to enforce site policies, the Test::Perl::Critic module is useful. The criticism pragma is another approach worth considering. Gabor Szabo also pointed out the Padre Perl::Critic plugin.

All three of these utilities have options and suggestions and nuances ripe for discovery, but all three of them can provide you an immediate benefit without requiring arduous or tedious customization.

If you want to write better Perl 5 code, start here.

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog, on October 16, 2009 2:21 PM

Justin Elliott interviews Chris Gaubatz, the insurance salesman turned fake Muslim intern:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Change your name. Grow a beard and learn the ways of Islam. Present yourself at the Council on American Islamic Relations. Acquire an internship. Wear a wire. Take whatever isn't bolted down.

Read the rest of Justin's report ...

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 16, 2009 1:08 PM

via knowyourmeme.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 16, 2009 12:48 PM

Here's what everyone has been most interested in on kottke.org this week:

The best flag in the world (#1 by a wide margin)
From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome)
Bullets are slow
The Rape Tunnel: FAKE
The most beautiful suicide
Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose
Cool cats
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking)
Parkour on a bicycle
From the desk of Mr. Jagger
Inventing the past
Minna Kottke
Dogfighting vs. football in moral calculus
The no control cafe
Drinking like Mad Men
George Saunders plays house(less)
Airlines nickel and diming themselves to death
Are you moving to San Francisco?
Wooden skyscraper
Huge Pepsi Throwback news
Flat-earthers
Rare hour-long Alfred Hitchcock interview
Popes, they don't make 'em like they used to
The most famous unkindness
Pizza pi

Again, the data is from Google Analytics and only includes URLs that were directly accessed...no search or referral traffic. Compare those to the most liked posts in the kottke.org RSS feed from roughly the same period of time, data courtesy of Google Reader:

The best flag in the world (174 likes)
From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome) (150 likes)
The no control cafe (98 likes)
Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose (84 likes)
Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking) (81 likes)
Bullets are slow (71 likes)
Michael Pollan's food rules (43 likes)
From the desk of Mr. Jagger (38 likes)
Pizza pi (37 likes)
Vivian Maier, recently discovered street photographer (37 likes)
The most famous unkindness (35 likes)
Airlines nickel and diming themselves to death (30 likes)
The vomitorium myth (29 likes)
Totally not burying the lede (29 likes)
Drinking like Mad Men (25 likes)
Thirty dumb inventions (25 likes)
Rare hour-long Alfred Hitchcock interview (24 likes)
Complaining about the inevitable (23 likes)
Glaciers from space (23 likes)
Cool cats (22 likes)

This only includes posts from the past week so the older stuff isn't represented. Interesting differences. The stuff with images or videos tends to do better with likes on Google Reader than just text. If Google Reader had an API, you could use that and the Analytics API to make a pretty decent "here's what's popular on the site" sidebar thingie a la the NY Times and most other publications.

Tags: kottke.org

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 16, 2009 12:30 PM

Awl pal Alex Ross, who is almost certainly better known as the classical music critic of the New Yorker and the award-winning author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century (which is AMAZING), has a new blog! Bookmark it or put it in your RSS reader or whatever you do with these things.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on October 16, 2009 12:10 PM

I’ve always been outspoken of my love for The Wire and even Bill Moyers. So I could I keep it to myself that I found video of David Simon, creator of The Wire, on Bill Moyer’s The Journal. The video may be from April but it is still so relevant.

The two discuss politics, crime, drugs, the street and more.  Watching the interview might be the best thing you could do today--or at least the most informative.

Part 2 below.

Originally posted by blair@takepart.com from TakePart Social Action Network™, on October 16, 2009 11:53 AM

Flickr is a creators’ community. This informs a number of the decisions we make. Including the question of “who owns the meta-data?” (where own is defined as who can operate on it).

On Flickr a photo tag can be removed by a photo’s photographer whomever added it. And a tag only has a single instance. This is profoundly different then del.icio.us which is a curators community, where I can make any statements I want about an object in the world, and all the curators voice can be conglomerated towards consensus. Flickr privileges the creator, del.icio.us the consensus.

Even when we launch curatorial features, like the recent galleries launch, the content creator has final say about how their work is described, including membership in a gallery. You can not only remove your photo from a gallery, it can’t be re-added once you’ve done it, and you can block that curator from operating on your photos again.

This is all been a fairly rudimentary discussion by way of explaining my biases.

I’m excited by the Twitter lists feature, it’s a create example of enabling powerful interactions by offering stripped down bare minimum organizational tools. (in fact its almost identical to galleries in that aspect)

But interestingly, and frankly surprisingly to me (possibly given my biases), Twitter is positioning itself as a curatorial community, not a creator community. This might actually make sense in social media sphere of experts, and re-tweetings, but its a fundamental mismatch with my expectations as a very early member, and not someone who is trying to shill a product (beyond perhaps a slice into my own routine life)

Thankfully I was saved from having to make the effort (via buzz and meowrey)

Originally posted by Kellan from Laughing Meme, on October 16, 2009 11:40 AM

Shared by ginevra
whoohoo!

Blogging is a fun, social activity. It’s even more fun when you get feedback, so we have added the ability to “Favorite” a post as an option for you and your readers. For your readers, it’s an easy to use, simple, way to give praise and appreciation without having to come up with a witty rejoinder.

 
How Does it Work?
From a reader’s perspective, the Favorite feature has two main benefits. First, it is a great way to collect your favorite blog posts so you can read, comment or blog about the topic at a later date or share with your Followers. Second, it’s a great way to recognize and give feedback to a blogger for a great article or photo post they created.

 
For bloggers, Favorite helps you receive feedback and increase your traffic. When your post is recognized as a “Favorite” by a reader, a Favorite update shows up in your TypePad Dashboard, as well as the Dashboard of the person that Favorited your post. (Yes, I know Favorited is not a word. :))  
 

The Favorite feature is also a great way to drive awareness of you blog and to improve the social media optimization of your blog. When someone adds your blog post as their Favorite list, it will appear on the TypePad Dashboard of everyone that is following them, alerting a new audience to go check out your blog.

How to Add Favorite on Your Blog

Favorite is an optional addition to your blog. For a reader to “Favorite” a post, they will need to sign in using TypePad, Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID.  The Favorite feature will help you build a relationship with your readers and discover other things they are interested in.

To add it to your blog, go to Design > Organize Content > Post Footer > and click “Favorite.”

 

When your post is Favorited, you’ll receive an email notification. You can manage these updates, go to http://www.typepad.com/account/notifications.

So, give it a try and let your readers know about it. We’re sure it will become you a Favorite tool – sorry, had to do it – of your readers. 

And when you see something you like on TypePad, let the blogger know by making it A Favorite.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Everything TypePad, on October 16, 2009 11:40 AM

"For over 42 years we have built a brand based on quality and integrity. After further investigation, we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman's body. We have addressed the problem and going forward will take every precaution to ensure that the caliber of our artwork represents our brand appropriately." --a statement issued by Ralph Lauren about the ad we're all discussing.

Sponsored Topics: Ralph Lauren - Photo manipulation - Brand - Business - Advertising

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on October 16, 2009 11:34 AM

This weekend, director Sam Bassett is presenting his documentary, Stanley Bard, about Bard's 50 years as the general manager of the Chelsea Hotel. During his employment there, Bard fostered artists and writers who lived in the iconic hotel including Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clark, Roy Lichenstein, Bob Dylan, Arthur Miller, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol. Sunday, October 18th at 6:30 p.m., Bassett presents his film at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Ave.) as part of the Royal Flush Film Festival. A Q&A with the director and Bard himself follows.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 16, 2009 11:20 AM

The Meme Party is back for Halloween!

RSVP on Facebook or Going

For costume ideas, head to Know Your Meme’s HallowMEME Costume Builder

via: knowyourmeme: memeparty

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on October 16, 2009 10:06 AM

As has happened on more than one occasion the last few years, news of the closure and/or demise of Bungalow 8 dropped this morning. This latest report focused on the fact that the club is currently closed for renovations and has been, without anyone really noticing, for the last three months. Given the history, it is not an unreasonable conclusion that the club's epic run has finally ended. We have just reached Sacco directly, however, and she assures us that Bungalow 8 will live on. Being that Bungalow 8 is a giant, an aught years icon, we're more than a little motivated to take her at her word. Sacco on the record, via email:

"I just finally got the blockade reopened on the block after 3 long years! I am redoing the entire space to give it a facelift, that's really all. I am not closing. After all, I am one of the last places left on the block ... everyone else has closed except Marquee and Cain, the "good" neighbors. Pink Elephant is moving as well. People have said I have been closed for the last 5 years. It's a running joke. I will be launching Amsterdam as well in the next few months."

Exhale. And so our massive Bungalow 8 memorial service will have to wait. We'll see you at the door, when we all get denied entry at the re-opening party.
· Bungalow 8, 2001-2009 [Cityfile]

Originally posted by Ben Leventhal from Eater NY, on October 16, 2009 9:44 AM

10/GUI is a new proposal for a way of interacting with personal computers using all ten fingers in a multitouch scheme. Very Minority Report.

(thx, david)

Tags: video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 16, 2009 9:39 AM

Silly to quibble with someone who’s declaring himself a maniac, but the chorus to Lil Boosie’s new single, “Mind of a Maniac” seems to contradict itself. “I ain’t got no mind,” Boosie begins. But then, immediately, he says, “Welcome to the mind of maniac.” So, apparently, he does in fact have a mind. Just not a normally functioning one. Today though he is on his way to the big house, where he will have the better part of a year to think about these issues.

Besides, the Talking Heads, of course, has already advised us on these matters. And the song is still pretty great.

Deeply indebted to southern rap forefathers Scarface and the Geto Boys, it has a mournful piano-based beat that opens up into a fried, Maggot-Brain-style guitar line. And Boosie, from Baton Rouge, has one of the most distinctive voices in rap—raspy, high-pitched, over-caffienated (a little like old Flava Flav, maybe, or Chris Tucker?) On the 2007 hit “Wipe Me Down” he sounded like he was about to jump through the speakers, grab the moist towelette out your hands and do the job himself.

And yes, today, unfortunately, he’s about to go to jail for possession of drugs and weapons. But he’s already finished his next album, to be called Free At Last, which he plans to release upon his release: “I gotta go away for, like, 10 months to a year,” he said to MTV. “It’s just a minor setback for a major comeback. I was gonna take ‘em to trial, but I’m not gonna take them to trial. They offered me a deal. In Louisiana, you can’t really win, bruh. So I’m gonna do my year, come back home, step it up even more.”

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on October 16, 2009 8:04 AM

Part 1 of our series set-up our "test"  application and looked at boosting performance of the application by buffer MySQL with memcached.  Our test application is simple and requires only 3 basic operations per transaction 2 reads and 1 write.  Using memcached combined with MySQL we ended up nearly getting a 10X performance boost from the application.  Now we are going to look at what we could achieve if we did not have to write to the database at all.  So let's look at what happens if we push everything including writes into memcached.

Wow that's shockingly fast isn't it! I guess being completely in memory helps for this app.  What is very interesting is accessing 100% of the data in memcached gives very similar numbers to accessing 100% of the data in memory in the DB ( part 1 benchmarked a 4GB bp as being able to handle 7K TPS)... something is not 100% right here.  It stands to reason that memcached should be faster for this application then the DB.  Its just doing two gets via key and 1 set.  So why the similar numbers?

Well glad you asked.  It's the API.  The api in this case was Cache::Memcached, by switching to using Cache::Memcached::Fast look what happens:

That is a nice jump in performance!

Using Memcached::Fast was kind of a mixed bag when looking at the benchmarks for mixing MySQL and Memcached in my tests:

In this case I think the Fast api was slower when working with MySQL with a 256m BP because the slower returns from memcached acted as a bottleneck to thin the demands on MySQL to write data, smoothing out the work load.  When we eliminate this bottleneck with the Fast api, MySQL gets hammered.  This type of thing happens a lot.  For example an application is CPU bound, so you add more processing power, but then you hit disks harder and  now your disk bound.

A couple of good things to remember here:  #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse.  #2  is to understand that not all API's are created equal.  Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another.  Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table.  Don't just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

So adding Memcached on top of MySQL for our test application can significantly boost performance. But you notice that if we were running 100% in memcached and could cut out MySQL we could get 2.5x more performance over a mixed solution and 100X over just stock MySQL.  As the number of writes against the database increase this gap will increase.  So let's ditch the database!  But wait!  you need the DB for  persistence, right?

It depends.  A database may not be the best fit for every application.  There are several “NOSQL”  solutions out in the open source space that can give you some of the ease of a Memcached but with persistence most people use their database for.   Each application is different and understanding the application's requirements is key to picking an appropriate solution.   I am going to look at several database alternatives over the next few months.  I need to start somewhere, so I decided to start with Tokyo Tyrant and Cabinet.    So stop in next time for part 3 of this series where we will focus on running the same tests against Tokyo Tyrant.

Wow that's shockingly fast isn't it! I guess being completely in memory helps for this app. What is very interesting is accessing 100% of the data in memcached gives very similar numbers to accessing 100% of the data in memory in the DB... something is not 100% right here. It stands to reason that memcached should be faster for this application then the DB, two gets via key and 1 set. So why the similar numbers?

Well glad you asked. It's the API. The api in this case was Cache::Memcached, by switching to using Cache::Memcached::Fast look what happens:

That is a nice jump in performance!

Using Memcached::Fast was kind of a mixed bag when looking at the benchmarks for mixing MySQL and Memcached in my tests:

In this case I think Fast was slower when working with MySQL with a 256m BP because the slower returns from memcached acted as a bottleneck to thin the demands on MySQL to write data, smoothing out the work load. When we eliminate this bottleneck with the Fast api, MySQL gets hammered.

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API's are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don't just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

So adding Memcached on top of MySQL for our test application can significantly boost performance. But you notice that if we were running 100% in memcached and could cut out MySQL we could get 2.5x more performance. As the number of writes against the database increase this gap will increase. So let's ditch the database! But wait! you need the DB for persistence, right?

It depends. A database may not be the best fit for every application. There are several “NOSQL” solutions out in the open source space that can give you some of the ease of a Memcached but with persistence most people use their database for. Each application is different and understanding the application's requirements is key to picking an appropriate solution. I am going to look at several database alternatives over the next few months. I need to start somewhere, so I decided to start with Tokyo Tyrant and Cabinet.

---

Entry posted by matt | One comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by matt from MySQL Performance Blog, on October 16, 2009 8:00 AM

Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" compressed over and over as an mp3 666 times

Originally posted by John Michael Boling from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on October 16, 2009 8:00 AM

From Recipes

Note: Throughout October, Kerry's secret ingredient is liquid smoke.

[Photographs: Kerry Saretsky]

Previously

Black Bean Soup with Smoked Sour Cream »
All Secret Ingredient coverage »

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of liquid smoke is how it's made. It may seem like some magic potion corked inside a bottle, since how could smoke ever become a liquid? But in fact, the process is so sensible and straightforward that I am not surprised by how inexpensive the product is, but rather by how obscure it remains.

Liquid smoke starts with wood. The two most popular varieties are mesquite and hickory, but apple and pecan woods are also used. The wood is heated to a slow smolder until smoke begins to waft from the hot wood. The smoke, and its flavor, is trapped in tiny particles of water vapor. Once cooled, the water vapor condenses back into liquid form, still containing all the flavor. Liquid smoke is then aged, and finally filtered before being bottled.

I have been raving extensively about the benefits of bison meat, and in this recipe, I marinate the bison in liquid smoke, then crust it in spicy black pepper. Then, I simply roast the steak, slice it, and place it in a French roll with horseradish crème fraîche and baby arugula.

The result is, as with last week's experiment, fascinating. The peppery spice comes through from the black peppercorns and the arugula leaves, while a cold heat comes from the horseradish crème fraîche.

But in that background of the meat is this sweet, subtle smokiness, and yet the meat has the tenderness of just being roasted high and fast in the oven, not crusted on a grill. The whole sandwich takes on a delicacy and complexity that I know you'll admire, and will have those you feed demanding, "what's in there?"

Smoky Bison Sandwich

- serves 2 -

Ingredients

1 1/2-pound buffalo/bison top loin steak 1 teaspoon Liquid Smoke Salt 1 tablespoon chunky-ground black peppercorns Vegetable oil 2 tablespoons crème fraîche 1 teaspoon prepared white horseradish 2 French rolls, sliced in half horizontally 1 handful baby arugula leaves

Procedure

1. Place the bison steak in a baggie with the liquid smoke, and marinate in the fridge for 2 hours.

2. Preheat the boiler.

3. Season the bison steak with salt, and then crust it with the smashed peppercorns. Drizzle with vegetable oil, and place on a small baking tray.

4. Broil the bison 5 to 6 minutes per side, right up under the boiler. Allow to rest 10 minutes, then slice about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick.

5. While the bison is broiling, whisk together the crème fraîche and the horseradish.

6. To assemble the sandwiches, slather both sides of the rolls with the horseradish crème fraîche. Arrange the sliced bison on the bottom of the roll, and top with a smattering of baby arugula leaves. Crown with the top of the roll.

About the author: Kerry Saretsky is the creator of French Revolution Food, where she reinvents her family's classic French recipes in a fresh, chic, modern way. She also writes the French in a Flash series for Serious Eats.

Originally posted by Kerry Saretsky from Serious Eats, on October 16, 2009 8:00 AM

A long and meaty conversation about the work of Errol Morris.

The thing is, truth is always at the center of Morris' films, as you'd expect of a documentary filmmaker, but he also acknowledges that truth is a complicated thing; he's always toying with questions of truth and fiction. Morris' films aren't about The Truth; they're about our personal, private truths, as well as the lies and rationalizations we create for our actions. So fiction and lies and manipulation are also at the center of Morris' films. Fiction is as much the spine of his work as truth.

Tags: Errol Morris   movies

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 16, 2009 7:59 AM

Not only does Nick Denton not read The Awl, he doesn’t even have a Google alert out on his name.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on October 16, 2009 6:38 AM

printed circuit board, wire, components, LEDs (4.5" x 14.5")
"I found a way to translate bitmap images into the circuit design program I was using, and converted actual and recreated images that I made when I was a toddler and a rebellious youth. The drawings are rendered in tin-plated copper on standard circuit board material, and were produced at a professional circuit board manufacturing shop using the same process as any electronic prototype board. The lines in the images are integrated with very simple circuits that illuminate LEDs and a neon lamp."

-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION

Originally posted by John Michael Boling from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on October 16, 2009 6:00 AM

From A Hamburger Today

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

The Fake Shack Recipe

Want to get straight to the burger-making? Here's the recipe for the Fake Shack »

I admit it: my tastes are not strikingly original. I'm obsessed with the Beatles, Beethoven is my god, and I even think Bono is a pretty neat guy. Nevertheless, I've consciously tried to avoid all things at the intersection of over-hyped and New York, until a couple years ago when I finally forced myself to stand on line for a hamburger in the name of research—a hamburger that changed my life.

Yes, I'm talking about the Shack Burger from Shake Shack, of which more than enough has been written about already. I'm not here to wax poetic about what Josh Ozersky has dubbed "the platonic ideal of a hamburger"—rather, I'm here to talk about a way to skip the line that doesn't involve standing outside at 9 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday night: Just make the Shack Burger at home. Easier said than done.

There's nothing special about the burger—regular squishy bun, a 1/4-pound patty of griddled meat, lettuce, tomato, and sauce—but like all good burger experiences, the sandwich is far more than a sum of its parts. To recreate the experience at home, I had to eat it, dissect it, deconstruct it, research it, eat it some more, rebuild it, break it down again, reconfigure it, taste it, eat it one more time, and finally reconstruct it again. Here are the results of my labor, from the ground up.

The Bun

This one's easy. The soft, squishy buns have the unmistakable sweetness and pale yellow hue of Martin's Potato Rolls, the sandwich roll size. East coasters can buy these in pretty much any supermarket, or you can order them online by the case (that's 48 buns, which you can freeze and toast straight out of the freezer) at their website. The buns are very lightly buttered, then toasted to a light golden brown.

The Meat

According to Adam's sources, the meat is a 50:25:25 blend of sirloin, chuck, and brisket. On the other hand, according to Ozersky, the mixture is actually mostly brisket, with chuck and short rib mixed in.

I did a side-by-side comparison of the two purported blends next to a Shack Burger, and found that Adam's mix is closer in flavor, offering the right level of tenderness from the sirloin, rich beef flavor from the chuck, and slight sour/metallic notes from the brisket.

Even the most casual of Shack fans knows the smash and scrape technique: forming the patties into hockey puck-shaped disks, placing the on the griddle, smashing down with the back of a spatula, then scraping them off when it's time to flip. But despite the right meat blend and following this technique, I wasn't getting the right texture. The crust on a Shack Burger forms a sort of flat sheath over the top of the burger, rather than the crispy nooks and crannies I was getting on my burgers at home. What was I doing wrong?

At first, I thought it was my grind size. I was passing the burger once through a 1/4-inch die, which was giving me a rather coarse grind. Doing a double pass helped the texture come closer to Shack standards, but I still wasn't getting the right crust.

After closely examining the highly informative behind-the-scenes video from the Feedbag, I discovered the secret: don't use too much oil. Normally, when I cook in a traditional (IE, not nonstick or cast iron) skillet, I'll add a generous amount of oil to prevent food from sticking. With a Shack Burger, you want the meat to stick to the pan—that's how it gets that flat, sheath-like crust.

The Toppings

This part was also a snap. Neon-yellow American cheese, placed over the patty soon after flipping to give it ample time to melt into the meat is a given. The shack uses two slices of ripe plum tomato in each sandwich—always cut from the center of the fruit—and one piece of green leaf lettuce, the tender green ends of the leaf only.

The Sauce

I would argue that the Shack Sauce is almost as important on a Shack Burger as the patty itself—it's what differentiates the Shack Burger from Shake Shack's regular cheeseburger. It's by all accounts a "secret" recipe that was going to take a bit of hard core investigative journalism to uncover.

My first attempt was to play the Shack-virgin card. When I got to the front of the line at the Upper West Side location one Monday afternoon, I innocently asked the cashier, "So, what's the Shack Sauce?"

Her response: "It's mayo-based. Sweet, sour, hot."

I went fishing: "How spicy is it? Like it's got hot sauce in it or something?"

But she didn't take the bait: "A little spicy. But also sweet and sour."

One last try: "So, sweet like thousand Island? Like it's got relish in it?"

She's an inscrutable blank wall: "No, no relish. Mayo-based, sweet, sour, hot."

I give in: "Okay, give me a Shack Burger, extra Shack Sauce on the side."

Upon tasting it, my immediate thoughts are mayo, ketchup, a little yellow mustard, a hint of garlic and paprika, perhaps a touch of cayenne pepper, and an elusive sour quality that I can't quite pinpoint. It's definitely not just vinegar or lemon juice, nor is does it have the cloying sweetness of relish. Pickle juice? Cornichon? Some other type of vinegar? I can't figure it out. This was going to take a little more effort.

My next strategy was a little more drastic: "accidentally" walking through the hidden door in the downstairs rec-room that leads to the kitchen in the hopes of taking a sneaky glance at their pantry for hints. No good. I got halfway through the door, only catching a glimpse of a few cans lining the right-hand wall before it was pointed out to me by a friendly employee that the restrooms were actually behind the doors clearly labeled "restroom."

I sat on the bench outside contemplating a bit of dumpster diving when a thought struck me: Maybe I was going about this all wrong.

I walked back into the restaurant, went straight up to the manager, and asked point blank: "Is the Shack Sauce a secret, or can you tell me what's in it?"

A little laugh, and then, "It's mostly mayo, with some ketchup, mustard, a few spices, and pickles blended in."

"So, pickle relish, or pickles?"

"Actual pickles—the sliced pickles we serve with the burgers. I couldn't give you exact tablespoon measure or anything because I don't know them off hand, but that's the general idea."

Note to self: always ask nicely before moving on to breaking-and-entering.

The rest was easy: I brought the extra sauce home, the tinkered around with a blender and my spice rack until I got a pretty damn-close approximation. Can you pick out which is the real sauce in the pic above?

As for applying the sauce, the key here is generous, even coverage. For the sake of absolute authenticity, I transferred the sauce to a squeeze bottle, and squeezed out three lines onto the top half of the bun, going back and forth three times along each line.

The Assembly

Final phase of construction: place patty with cheese on toasted bun bottom. Close bun to encase patty, cheese, tomato, lettuce, and sauce. Slip into a wax-paper sleeve (or in this case, a jury-rigged parchment paper sleeve), wait 30 seconds for steam from patty to penetrate and soften bun, then consume. A perfect taste-alike.

Continue here for The Fake Shack Burger recipe »

About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org.

Related

The Burger Lab: Mastering the Art of Burger Blending with Eight Cuts of Beef
Shake Shack: A New York Spin on the West Coast-Style Burger

Originally posted by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt from A Hamburger Today, on October 16, 2009 5:30 AM

Nokia and Accenture today announced the completion of Accenture's acquisition of Nokia's Symbian Professional Services. With this transfer, Accenture assumes full ownership of Nokia's Symbian Professional Services unit responsible for Symbian OS customer engineering and customer support.

The deal was initially announced on July 17, 2009.

Effective October 16, the acquisition is a natural continuation of Nokia's Symbian acquisition in 2008, creating an independent provider of professional services in the Symbian ecosystem. As a result of the transaction, 157 people transfer from Nokia to Accenture.

Originally posted by MobileMonday from MobileMonday News, on October 16, 2009 5:09 AM

On December 1, 1964, Ursula Nordstrom wrote a letter to Nat Hentoff, who was on assignment for the New Yorker. (Hentoff’s piece on Maurice Sendak ran January 22, 1966—well over a year later.) Nordstrom—who had never been a teacher, a librarian or a college graduate—published Sendak, Gorey, Silverstein, White, Wilder and Brown from 1940 to 1979, at which time she and her partner Mary moved up to the country.

Dear Nat:

Yes, I think A Hole Is to Dig was something new. It came from Ruth Krauss’ listening to children, getting ideas from them, polishing some of the thoughts, exploring additional “definitions” of her own. It really grew out of children and what is important to them. (A brother is to help you.) Some of the definitions seem quite serious to children but those aren’t the once the adults smile over and consider “cute.” For instance, “Buttons are to keep people warm.” Adults think oh isn’t that darling, but it makes perfectly good sense to children…. A Hole Is to Dig was the first of all the Something is Something books, and has been mushily imitated ever since it was published….

You asked me how “revolutionary” Where the Wild Things Are is. There have been a good many fine picture books in the past. (Some by Margaret Wise Brown, and illustrated by one of two or three or four talented artists.) But I think Wild Things is the first complete work of art in the picture book field, conceived, written, illustrated, executed in entirety by one person of authentic genius. Most books are written from the outside in. But Wild Things comes from the inside out, if you know what I mean. And I think Maurice’s book is the first picture book to recognize the fact that children have powerful emotions, anger and love and hate and only after all that passion, the wanting to be “where someone loved him best of all.” I’m writing this in a terrible hurry, so forgive me, please. A lot of good picture books have had fine stories and lovely pictures (Peter Rabbit, the best of Dr. Seuss, Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats), and some have touched beautifully on basic things in a child’s life, physical growth, going to bed, coming to terms with a new sister or brother (this is making them sound sappy but they are far from that—I’m thinking of Ruth Krauss’ The Growing Story, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, Charlotte Zolotow’s Quarreling Book, the Hobans’ Baby Sister for Frances). But it just seems to me that Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are goes deeper than previous picture books. And of course his use of three consecutive double-spreads to show what happened when Max cried, “Let the wild rumpus start!” has never been done in any book.

Yours,

From Dear Genius, the collected letters of Ursula Nordstrom.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 16, 2009 5:02 AM

With Street View on Google Maps, you can take a virtual drive over the Golden Gate Bridge or see the bustle of Times Square from the comfort of your own home. But some of the country's most interesting and fun places aren't accessible with our Street View car. What if you want to tour the campuses of prospective universities, scout a new running trial, or plan the most efficient route to your favorite roller coasters in a theme park?

I first started thinking about this question around two years ago. My day job is working as a mechanical engineer on the Street View team, but I do a lot of mountain biking in my spare time. One day, while exploring some roads less traveled, I realized that I could combine these two pursuits and build a bicycle-based camera system for Street View. The result? The Street View trike:



I've already had a chance to take the Street View trike out to photograph some hard to reach places for Google Maps, like the Arastradero Open Preserve and LEGOLAND California. When I'm out riding — and once people understand what exactly I'm up to — I'm often asked if we can come to their alma mater, local bike trail or favorite beach boardwalk. Now, we're giving everyone a chance to tell us exactly where in the U.S. they'd like the trike to go next.

At www.google.com/trike, you can suggest interesting and unique spots in six categories:

• Parks & Trails
• University Campuses
• Pedestrian Malls (e.g., outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks)
• Theme Parks & Zoos
• Landmarks 
• Sports Venues (e.g., golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)

Nominations will be open until October 28. We'll then comb through all of the suggestions and let all of you cast your final votes on a winner from each category for the Street View trike to visit. For any privately-owned or operated location, like a campus or theme park, we'll work directly with the relevant organization prior to collecting the imagery.

When we unveiled the Street View trike in the U.K., we received more than 10,000 nominations and 35,000 votes; Stonehenge and Warwick Castle were two of the top vote-getters. We can't wait to see what you'll come up with in the U.S. — head to www.google.com/trike to submit your most inspired ideas.



Posted by Dan Ratner, Senior Mechanical Engineer

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 16, 2009 5:00 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ryan Catbird's Tumblr, on October 15, 2009 8:42 PM

The VC business is not about grabbing the largest slice of the pie. It is about getting involved with very big pies. If you let your need for the biggest piece keep you out of the pie eating contest, you will lose eventually. via www.avc.com I think this is true for all businesses.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 15, 2009 2:02 PM

From Apple, via a developer mass-mail:

Now you can use In App Purchase in your free apps to sell content, subscriptions, and digital services.

You can also simplify your development by creating a single version of your app that uses In App Purchase to unlock additional functionality, eliminating the need to create Lite versions of your app. Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases.

This could be a big deal if it’s adopted by developers in meaningful volume.

Why now? Apple’s previous reasoning for disallowing this, “free apps should remain free”, still applies just as much as it did yesterday. What was the motivating factor for this change?

My guess is that this is a big response to the $0.99-app problem. (It’s also worth noting that, as far as I know, this is the first time Apple has acknowledged app piracy as a problem.)

For new apps, there’s now little reason to make separate free and paid versions — it now makes sense in many cases to have what I’ll call a “free+” app until someone else thinks of a better shorthand term: free for a limited or ad-supported version, with in-app purchase for premium features or content. But this doesn’t completely solve the separate-app problem for everyone:

• For existing apps with the free/paid split, there’s no practical way to transition the existing paid customers to a new “free+” version without making them pay again like a new customer.
• The policy regarding minimum functionality of an app (without additional purchase) still effectively prohibits time-limited demos. We’re still limited only to paid content or functionality upgrades, not timed trial periods.
• In-app purchase is more complex for developers than paid apps, requiring them to add payment-tracking code in the app and operate a web service (or use some of the commercial hosted services that have cropped up for this purpose).

And it raises other questions:

• Do “free+” apps compete in the Top Paid or Top Free list? Neither choice would seem fair to the “pure” apps in each respective list.
• Will the Top Grossing list include in-app purchases? (Has it been?)

But, if “free+” pricing takes off, it could have a number of positive effects:

• Average prices can go up. People are more willing to pay for (relatively) higher-priced apps if they have free versions. This is a big deal.
• Customers who try the free version and decide to pay for an upgrade no longer need to delete the old app or re-enter their data in the new one. This significantly reduces the friction to upgrade from free versions, which should dramatically increase the proportion of people who do.
• Rankings, ratings, and management for popular apps with free versions no longer need to be split between two separate apps, which is much easier and more fair for developers.

There’s no question that this is a great move for both users and developers.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on October 15, 2009 1:56 PM

Photo by Nivad

Last week we got a little too excited about the impending expansion of cell phone service in the Metro system, but now it's official: T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint Nextel customers should be able to use their cell phones inside Metro's 20 busiest stations starting first thing Friday morning (the Post says it'll be turned on at midnight, but of course the system will be closed by then). Verizon customers could already access their network inside the same stations, and they will continue to have that service after the change.

As a reminder, the stations included in this first phase are: Ballston, Bethesda, Columbia Heights, Crystal City, Dupont Circle, Farragut North, Farragut West, Federal Center SW, Foggy Bottom-GWU, Friendship Heights, Gallery Pl-Chinatown, Judiciary Square, L'Enfant Plaza, McPherson Square, Metro Center, Pentagon, Pentagon City, Rosslyn, Smithsonian and Union Station. The rest of Metro's stations, and eventually, tunnels, will get the expanded service over the course of the next two years.

WMATA is holding a big launch event for the media at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow morning at the Judiciary Square station, with General Manager John Catoe, Board Chairman Jim Graham, WMATA's tech team and reps from all four cell companies expected to be on hand.

In the meantime, be sure to let us know how the service works for you on your morning commute tomorrow. Send us emails at tip@dcist.com or tweet us at @DCist_Updates.

Originally posted by Sommer Mathis from DCist, on October 15, 2009 1:13 PM

Nice insight on Wave’s live-typing feature from SubEthaEdit co-developer Martin Pittenauer:

Google Wave is — in its current form — “next generation wiki”, not “next generation email”. That’s way unsexy as a marketing slogan, but would emphasize collaboration instead of communication.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 15, 2009 12:48 PM

Here are the ten classic album covers that will be on the new series of British stamps.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on October 15, 2009 11:45 AM

Werner Herzog is doing something called The Rogue Film School.

The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature. The focus of the seminars will be a dialogue with Werner Herzog, in which the participants will have their voice with their projects, their questions, their aspirations.

Tags: education   wernerherzog

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 15, 2009 11:28 AM

I should agree with Andrew that it's suddenly winter, but that only makes the past couple days unseasonably warm. Back east I remember it happening at the end of October, making Halloween not only a scary night when people are out in the dark, but the first time to notice how cold it's getting. At least we'd have a transition, though; given Chattanooga's at roughly the same latitude, I guess it's the moderating effect of the ocean and the bay.

I'll be as sick of the rain as anyone come spring, but the next morning after the big rain this week, I was trying to think of the opposite of "Rain, rain, go away." Maybe it's Rain, rain, come again, interfere in works of men.

Originally posted by markpasc from Best Endtimes Ever, on October 15, 2009 11:21 AM

Brad Stone:

On Thursday morning, Amazon.com took another step in its effort to bring instant gratification to its customers, introducing a new “Local Express Delivery Option.” If an eligible item is ordered between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. (depending on the city) Amazon will have it delivered on the same day. To start out, the e- commerce giant is rolling out the service in seven cities — New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Baltimore, Las Vegas and Seattle. (With Chicago, Indianapolis and Phoenix to come soon).

Costs just $6 if you’re a Prime member.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 15, 2009 11:15 AM

A former rival of RNC chair Michael Steele and one of the men behind the GOP's new media revolution said it will be a month before the party's new website is ready for prime time.

Saul Anuzis, the former chair of the Michigan GOP, challenged Steele for the RNC chairmanship last year. A central plank of his campaign platform was a new focus on social media and Internet outreach. After he lost the chairmanship, Anuzis became a transition adviser to Steele on transition issues.

"Overall, I think the roll out has been a success," Anuzis said of the relaunch of GOP.com, which has led to days of criticism of Steele from the left. "As with any massive project like this, there were some technical glitches, which is to be expected."

Anuzis said Republican activists across the country have been instrumental in tweaking the numerous mistakes critics have found on the site since it launched. "There have been lots of suggestions, improvements and "catches" of issues/problems that will allow us to build a better end product," he said.

Anuzis did not have a role in the creation of the site, according to Republicans. Though his committee had an advisory role in the early stages, the site was wholly created by Steele and his new media director Todd Herman. Anuzis said that despite the high-profile roll-out this week, critics should give the site a month before they pass final judgement on it.

"We'll be able to judge the true success or failure of the site in 30 days or so as we see how many folks become part of the community and actually take advantage of the tools and applications," he said.

Originally posted by Evan McMorris-Santoro from TPM Election Central, on October 15, 2009 10:33 AM

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why?  Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application?  Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who use their database like most people use memcached .  Lookup a row based on a key, update the data in the row, stuff the row back in the database.  Rinse and repeat.  Sure these setups vary sometimes, throwing in a “lookup” via username, or even the rare count.  But for the most part they are designed to be simple.

A classic example is a simple online game.  An online game may only require that an application retrieve a single record from the database.  The record may contain all the vital stats for the game, be updated and stuffed back into the database.  You would be surprised how many people use this type of system as I run into this type of application frequently.  Keeping it simple, ensures that application is generally mean and lean and performs well.  The issue is even this simple design can start to have issues as the data size increases and you blow through your available memory.  Is there a better architecture?  Is there a way to get more scalability out of your database?  Is the database even the best place for this data?

I decided to walk through setting up a very simple application that does what I have seen many clients do.  Using this application I can then compare using MySQL to using MySQL + Memcached, and then to other solutions like Tokyo Tyrant or Cassandra.   My Application does the following:

A.)  read a row from a database based on an integer based primary key
B.)  Update data from that row and replace the stored contents on disk
C.)  Use the data from that row to lookup up a row in another table based on a text field ( called email address ).

Seems simple enough right?  My two tables each contain 5M rows of data.  let’s see what happens:

You can see a dramatic drop off in performance as my data falls out of memory, that’s not cool is it?  After all database sizes tend to always grow and very rarely shrink.  Which leads to a challenge faced by almost everyone how do you maintain your performance in the face of increasing data size?

Here is where people start to scratch their heads.  They naturally assume they need to scale more, we need more memory!   If performance sucks, we must need more.  So here comes the bigger boxes, the read-only slaves,  the complex sharding systems, the discussions on cluster, more memcached.  We need to cover up the databases inefficiencies to ensure that our application scales.

The problem is for some applications, we are fixing symptoms, not the problem itself.  No matter how much you want it to fit,  some things may not work (like the Godfather 3).    The issue is people assume that data storage has to be in the database.  “It’s data, it needs to go into the database.” is often the battle cry.   But hold on to your hat,  I  am going to shock you.  For some applications, putting your data in the database is silly.  Yes the guy who blogs on bigdbahead.com and is writing this on the mysqlperformanceblog is saying you may not want to use a database.  Heresy I know!  But for many of us we already accept storing data ( at least temporarily ) outside the DB.  Think memcached.

Almost everyone loves memcached, it’s simple, fast, and just works.  When your dataset exceeds your memory limitations or the database can simply not keep up any more this solution can really boost performance.  I know you’re thinking my simple key lookup should really benefit from memcached. So let’s try it!  I took the simple app I created that reads two rows, and update one of them to read from memcached if available, remove on update, and read from the db only when required.  I tested with a memcached size of 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB.  For these tests I left Innodb with a 256M buffer pool, or roughly with 9% of the total data in memory.

let’s look at the 1GB Setting:

What, a performance regression?  But we threw more memory at it!!   How can that be!

Memcached is not a cure all.  I have talked to many client’s who say “we will just throw memcached as it”.   Sometimes an app will scream other times it won’t… and yet others require lots and lots of memory allocated to memcached to be successful.    This application selects a random # between 1 and 2 Million and looks up the result via that key.  It then uses data from that random row to look up a second piece of information via email address.  Because the entire dataset  is about 4GB and only 1G is in memcached, I keep pushing data out of memcached to make room for new records I am reading from the database. Remember memcached needs repeatability to be helpful.   I am still getting a really solid # of hits in memcached, but the # of writes in MySQL coupled with the still large # of reads takes its toll.  Another place where I have seen this kill clients is in apps that do some sequential scanning and do not have enough memory for memcached.  For instance, if you have 1,000,000 rows of data, but enough memory to only store 500,000 rows… sequentially accessing this data will destroy the use of cache:

get record 1, miss, read from disk, cache record 1
….
get record 500,001, miss, read from disk, expunge record 1, cache record 500,001
….
get record 1, miss, read from disk, expunge record 500,001, cache record 1

you keep overwriting the cache before you can use it.  So here the complexity of adding memcached hurts us, because the cache is not actually buying us anything.

Now bumping this up to 2GB actually makes the TPS jump around a lot, sometimes hitting 400 or 500 TPS and other times hitting as high as 1800 TPS.  My guess is the movement is caused by the random #’s being generated and simply the luck of the draw.

Finally let’s look when we have 4GB of memory allocated to memcached (full dataset fits ):

Here you can see that our “transactions”  per second for this app increased almost 10Xby using memcached.  The TPS I get here vary from 1100 TPS to just under 2000TPS with the average around 1400TPS.   I think we would all be very happy if we could get a 10X performance boost from your application.

But wouldn’t it be great if we could get more?  I mean our reads are going pretty fast, but our writes leave a lot to be desired:

Over 17 MS to do an update.  Wouldn’t be great to just eliminate all the updates as well?  What sort of throughput would we get?   I will show you in part 2.  Part 2 of this post will talk about performance in a 100% pure memcached environment. Part 3 will focus on these same benchmarks in Tokyo tyrant.

All to often people force themselves into using a database like MySQL with no thought into whether if its the best solution to there problem. Why? Because their other applications use it, so why not the new application? Over the past couple of months I have been doing a ton of work for clients who use their database like most people use memcached . Lookup a row based on a key, update the data in the row, stuff the row back in the database. Rinse and repeat. Sure these setups vary sometimes, throwing in a “lookup” via username, or even the rare count. But for the most part they are designed to be simple.

A classic example is a simple online game. An online game may only require that an application retrieve a single record from the database. The record may contain all the vital stats for the game, be updated and stuffed back into the database. You would be surprised how many people use this type of system as I run into this type of application frequently. Keeping it simple, ensures that application is generally mean and lean and performs well. The issue is even this simple design can start to have issues as the data size increases and you blow through your available memory. Is there a better architecture? Is there a way to get more scalability out of your database? Is the database even the best place for this data?

I decided to walk through setting up a very simple application that does what I have seen many clients do. Using this application I can then compare using MySQL to using MySQL + Memcached, and then to other solutions like Tokyo Tyrant or Cassandra. My Application does the following:

A.) read a row from a database based on an integer based primary key

B.) Update data from that row and replace the stored contents on disk

C.) Use the data from that row to lookup up a row in another table based on a text field ( called email address ).

Seems simple enough right? My two tables each contain 5M rows of data. let’s see what happens:

You can see a dramatic drop off in performance as my data falls out of memory, that’s not cool is it? After all database sizes tend to always grow and very rarely shrink. Which leads to a challenge faced by almost everyone how do you maintain your performance in the face of increasing data size?

Here is where people start to scratch their heads. They naturally assume they need to scale more, we need more memory! If performance sucks, we must need more. So here comes the bigger boxes, the read-only slaves, the complex sharding systems, the discussions on cluster, more memcached. We need to cover up the databases inefficiencies to ensure that our application scales.

The problem is for some applications, we are fixing symptoms, not the problem itself. No matter how much you want it to fit, somethings may not work (like the Godfather 3). The issue is people assume that data storage has to be in the database. “It’s data, it needs to go into the database.” is often the battle cry. But hold on to your hat, I am going to shock you. For some applications, putting your data in the database is silly. Yes the guy who blogs on bigdbahead.com and is writing this on the mysqlperformanceblog is saying you may not want to use a database. Heresy I know! But for many of us we already accept storing data ( at least temporarily ) outside the DB. Think memcached.

Almost everyone loves memcached, it’s simple, fast, and just works. When your dataset exceeds your memory limitations or the database can simply not keep up any more this solution can really boost performance. I know you’re thinking my simple key lookup should really benefit from memcached. So let’s try it! I took the simple app I created that reads two rows, and update one of them to read from memcached if available, remove on update, and read from the db only when required. I tested with a memcached size of 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB. For these tests I left Innodb with a 256M buffer pool, or roughly with 9% of the total data in memory.

let’s look at the 1GB Setting:

What, a performance regression? But we threw more memory at it!! How can that be!

Memcached is not a cure all. I have talked to many client’s who say “we will just throw memcached as it”. Sometimes an app will scream other times it won’t… and yet others require lots and lots of memory allocated to memcached to be successful. This application selects a random # between 1 and 2 Million and looks up the result via that key. It then uses data from that random row to look up a second piece of information via email address. Because the entire dataset is about 4GB and only 1G is in memcached, I keep pushing data out of memcached to make room for new records I am reading from the database. Remember memcached needs repeatability to be helpful. I am still getting a really solid # of hits in memcached, but the # of writes in MySQL coupled with the still large # of reads takes its toll. Another place where I have seen this kill clients is in apps that do some sequential scanning and do not have enough memory for memcached. For instance, if you have 1,000,000 rows of data, but enough memory to only store 500,000 rows… sequentially accessing this data will destroy the use of cache:

• get record 1, miss, read from disk, cache record 1

• ….

• get record 500,001, miss, read from disk, expunge record 1, cache record 500,001

• ….

• get record 1, miss, read from disk, expunge record 500,001, cache record 1

  you keep overwriting the cache before you can use it. So here the complexity of adding memcached hurts us, because the cache is not actually buying us anything.

Now bumping this up to 2GB actually makes the TPS jump around a lot, sometimes hitting 400 or 500 TPS and other times hitting as high as 1800 TPS. My guess is the movement is caused by the random #’s being generated and simply the luck of the draw.

Finally let’s look when we have 4GB of memory allocated to memcached (full dataset fits ):

Here you can see that our “transactions” per second for this app increased almost 10Xby using memcached. The TPS I get here vary from 1100 TPS to just under 2000TPS with the average around 1400TPS. I think we would all be very happy if we could get a 10X performance boost from your application.

But wouldn’t it be great if we could get more? I mean our reads are going pretty fast, but our writes leave a lot to be desired:

Over 17 MS to do an update. Wouldn’t be great to just eliminate all the updates as well? What sort of throughput would we get?

---

Entry posted by matt | One comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by matt from MySQL Performance Blog, on October 15, 2009 10:24 AM

Having completed his tech training, my son is now stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho.  In between, he took some leave, visited home and friends in NC and Virginia.  Having a number of possessions he needed to get to his new base, including a car, he opted to drive.  It is a tough trip, and doing so alone would have made it tougher, so I surveyed my options and decided to take the opportunity travel with him.  I’m glad I did.

Technology made a big part of my decision.  We had three GPS capable devices, one a dedicated device that was the one we mostly used, and two cell phones that have GPS capability that we used to plan minor excursions such as finding gas, food, and lodging.  I also have a MIFI and was on-line much of the time when I wasn’t driving.  I generally took the morning shift... roughly 6am to noon, and he took the afternoon shift noon to 6pm.  After 6pm we switched off.  This allowed me to be on-line a good portion of the work day.

Our trip started through Greensboro which is a place we visit occasionally as it contains a number outlet malls.  Not much new there, at least not to me.

From there, we headed up to Charleston, which was the first time I had been there.  We didn’t stop, and based on the view from the highway it appeared that Charleston largely consists of all of the chain stores that you see in pretty much every US city.  Note: I have good friends who are from there and are proud of their city who just may end up reading this, so take this review with a grain of salt.  :-)

Next up was Louisville which was the biggest surprise.  Again we didn’t stop, but from the road, we saw a city with lots of cranes (implying a vibrant city and growth) and most of the buildings looked like they had interesting architectures, bordering on whimsy.  And there was even a sky-scraper sized baseball bat.  Co-existing with all of this was plenty of bridges that once served trains or car traffic, but now were abandoned, in disrepair, and often incomplete.  In all, it looked like a city worth getting to know.

On to St. Louis.  30 minutes east of St. Louis there essentially is nothing.  Inside of St. Louis is a large thriving city with everything you would expect, including at least one large casino.  The Mississippi river wasn’t as large here as I would have expected.  West of St. Louis there are sprawling suburbs.  In all, St. Louis looked like a city worth visiting as it has something for everyone.  And, yes, Shelley, I did wave.  I hope I got the direction right.

Next up was Kansas City where we spent the night.  Kansas City looks to be at least three cities... two on the Missouri side, and one on the Kansas side.  We slept at an embassy suites, which allowed me to check my email in the morning while allowing my son to sleep in a bit.  The surrounding area was an eclectic mix of buildings from the 1960s, 1920s and nineteenth century, much with a theme of stagecoaches and other western themes.  That didn’t match our tastes, but as we headed out in the morning, we saw a more modern city (with skyscrapers) and then onto Kansas (the state) where there was a smaller city.

Instead of heading onto Omaha and then across all of Nebraska and Wyoming without much of a chance for a break, we headed to Topeka.  East of Topeka there are some gentle rolling hills and trees.  West of Topeka there is straight road, amber waves of grain as far as the eye could see in 360 degrees, with an occasional random tree.  Driving this was mind numbing.  The only breaks were unintentional humor (Leavenworth being the last “free exit”, and random signs by the religious far right interspersed by signs for Brown vs the Board of Education museum).  That and a few windmills.  Kansas also had long stretches of road where one lane was blocked off by cones, with lowered speed limits dire warnings about fines and jail time if you hit a worker... and not a worker to be seen anywhere.  All in all, a bit maddening in every sense of the word.

Next up: Denver.  Again, 30 miles east of the city you see virtually no signs of civilization.  Get to the city, and you have a mix of blue collar and fine arts.  From what we saw, however, the city was mostly a meh.  Biggest surprise was that we still hadn’t seen any mountains.  North of the city apparently is a bit more affluent... we saw Wal-Marts housed in impressive stone buildings as well as majestic overpasses.

The plans were to spend the night at Cheyenne, but those plans changed.  The first hotel I went into I stood in line, and when it got my turn, the phone rang, the clerk asked me to wait a minute, and then proceeded to give the last room in the hotel to the person on the phone.  I went to the next hotel, and was told that there was no rooms.  I asked for recommendations, and the clerk there looked at me like this was the first time anybody had ever asked her this question, and told me she didn’t know.  It didn’t help that there was snow on the ground, it was 38 degrees and dropping, with 100% humidity in the form of dense fog.

We continued on to Laramie.  This was a white knuckled affair - dark, foggy, down hill, high speed, and there seldom were guard rails.  Hotel was fine, and we slept soundly.  In the morning we continued on and if anything it was worse.  At this point it was raining, and being able to see only triggered my acrophobia.  That’s not hyperbole: I was terrified, and often driving 45 MPH in a 75 MPH zone, getting routinely passed.  By Rawlins, the road mostly straightened out, and what we saw was a tundra and hilly version of Kansas, without the humor.  And we realized then that we nearly had made a significant tactical error.  Not only did we risk our lives on this road, we could have gotten stuck there.  Unlike in the north east where the policy is to plow the roads when it snows, here the policy is to shut down the highways.  But apparently we were lucky enough to plan our trip between snowstorms.

My final stop was Salt Lake City, a city that I regret that I didn’t get to see more of as I had a plane to catch.  The scenery was gorgeous, a stark contrast to the portions of Colorado and Montana that we got to see.  My son’s parting words when he dropped me off was “that was more fun than I thought it would be”.

I have to agree.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Sam Ruby, on October 15, 2009 10:13 AM

Andrew Anker on the death of investment banker Bruce Wasserstein. Frank Stella returns to the Philip Johnson Glass House. The NYTPicker tears into the Times for expanding into local coverage of San Francisco ("Someday, we fear, it will be the New York Times in name only."). Bill Gates' open letter to hobbyists ("Most directly, the thing you do is theft.") Merlin Mann on the making of 'Born to Run' ("This song's a fucking swiss clock, and it still gives me shivers every time I hear it. Which is a lot."). A vi clone written in JavaScript (my head just exploded.) Ben Fogarty's stacked area chart of his life (via). And, finally, Ben Trott on why he loves PSGI/Plack (I love it when Ben blogs about the stuff he builds).

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 15, 2009 10:06 AM

Apparently there is now a mass inability to remember anything. I have it bad. But yesterday Rex Sorgatz couldn’t remember the first blog-to-book thingie that happened, while he was looking at Urlesque’s timeline. One of his commenters notes: “The Suck.com book (Suck: Worst-Case Scenarios in Media, Culture, Advertising, and the Internet’), came out in 1997.” What a wonderful world.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 15, 2009 10:01 AM

Some folks from the web magazine Double X wondered what it would be like to drink as much in the workplace as the characters do on Mad Men. So they spent the day getting hammered and tried to do some work. The results are somewhat different than on the show.

Tags: alcohol   Mad Men   TV   video   working

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 15, 2009 9:50 AM

i saw the figure 5 in gold

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 15, 2009 9:45 AM

Huh. A-Ha is breaking up next year.

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on October 15, 2009 9:39 AM

via roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com

Interesting group of essay on digital reading The thing I loved and didn't expect was David Gelernter's essay on The Book Made Better:

All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to “read” from outside (What kind of book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last week? Let’s flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe operation from beaches to polar wastes and — above all — beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles.

I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.

MT for objects :) Now that would be interesting. When I was at Voyager we had a summer institute with ITP where a few academics came into to work on projects. One of them was for Ulysses and the thing I remember from being around it was that it takes five or six companion books to really read it. If these were built into the binding, or a thin digital companion  which knew what book you were reading and assembled things like a map, search, timeline, comments etc. You could still read the book while taking advantage of the web and its resources. Of course nothing really stops you from reading next to your laptop and doing this too but right now we seem to be having either/or debates.

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on October 15, 2009 9:27 AM

Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software. via www.lettersofnote.com From "Most of you Steal Your Software," via kottke.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 15, 2009 9:11 AM

Here is a little boy dancing after he takes his first bite of deep-fried butter at the Texas State Fair. It is ADORABLE. And hypnotic. Abe Sauer is probably writing an angry essay about it right now.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on October 15, 2009 8:50 AM

You are still reading Letters of Note, yes? A couple of recent letters include Bill Gates' infamous An Open Letter to Hobbyists -- "most of you steal your software" -- and a letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol about the design of an album cover in which Jagger gives the impression of being the perfect client...do whatever you want and let me know how much to pay you.

Tags: Andy Warhol   Bill Gates   mickjagger   weblogs

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 15, 2009 8:36 AM

Filed under: iPhone, iPod touch

Some time ago, I looked around for a way to access my iPhone to use it as a portable hard drive, almost like a generic USB device, for copying files back and forth between computers. I decided on PhoneView. At the time I didn't even care too much about the other features it offered. As time has passed, I've liked it even better and better.

The application has been polished with each release and now includes a very substantial feature list. In no particular order, here is what the just-released PhoneView 2.3 brings to the table:

1. View pictures on the iPhone. This was a lifesaver to me when iPhoto suddenly refused to import any of the pictures I had taken on my iPhone. It includes a thumbnail of the pictures (and videos) as well the time-stamp. You can even import them directly into iPhoto.
2. Displays Safari's history, bookmarks, and open windows (ever visit a site on your iPhone and then wish you could remember where it was?). It also includes the ability to search the browsing history (URLs and Titles).
3. View/Play/Export Visual Voicemail. Got a message you want to save? You can copy it as an .mp4 (or add it to iTunes, although I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that). The filenames include the date, time, and name (if known).
4. Shows you a list of music, ringtones, videos, podcasts, and audiobooks on your iPhone, and allows you to copy them off the iPhone if you need to (preserving metadata)
5. Use iPhone (or iPod touch) as a portable drive
6. Access the full "Media" folder on non-jailbroken devices (jailbroken devices will have the full file structure displayed)
7. Allows you to view/export SMS and MMS messages (MMS support is new in 2.3)
8. View, Edit, and Create Notes
9. View call log, including whether the call was incoming or outgoing, completed, missed, or cancelled (it also integrates with your address book, so you will see who those calls came from
10. Play/Export/Delete Voice memos

The best part of PhoneView is that it does not require you to jailbreak your iPhone, and it is quickly updated to support each new version of the iPhone OS. I've never found myself unable to access my iPhone through PhoneView.

PhoneView can only be used over USB. I wish they would come up with a way to access the iPhone over Wi-Fi, but my guess is that is not possible because they would have to have an iPhone app to serve the phone's data, and I have a hard time believing that Apple would approve such a thing. Fortunately, I have an iPhone cable around most of the time.

The application costs $19.95, but that includes free upgrades for life. If you ever find yourself wanting more access to your iPhone, PhoneView provides the easiest way to just about every corner of your iPhone.

TUAWPhoneView gives you an inside look at your iPhone data originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by TJ Luoma from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on October 15, 2009 8:30 AM

It doesn't have to be a wise decision or a perfect one. Just make one.

In fact, make several. Make more decisions could be your three word mantra.

No decision is a decision as well, the decision not to decide. Not deciding is usually the wrong decision. If you are the go-to person, the one who can decide, you'll make more of a difference. It doesn't matter so much that you're right, it matters that you decided.

Of course it's risky and painful. That's why it's a rare and valuable skill.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on October 15, 2009 7:47 AM

I never met Bruce Wasserstein but he had a strong influence on my early career as an investment banker and I had a huge admiration for him from afar. Sadly, he died yesterday at 61. He helped turn First Boston into the investment bank of the 1980's (famously one year, a third of Yale Business School applied for a job at First Boston) and a huge M&A powerhouse.

Alas, they wouldn't hire me out of Columbia so I ended up joining PaineWebber instead. But less than a year after I joined, Wasserstein took a whole bunch of folks out of First Boston and started a new bank, Wasserstein Perella (he wanted more control than anyone would give him at First Boston). First Boston responded by hiring whole groups out of other investment banks to help rebuild its practice.  My four person group at PaineWebber was one of those groups and in February 1988, I found myself working for the storied firm (and in M&A, no less).

The legend of Bruce permeated every thing I did for the three years I was there. I learned a lot about deal making from him without ever once meeting him.

To Mr. Wasserstein, deal-making was a chess game, one ripe for unusual strategies — that often came at high cost. Never one to easily lose a deal, he often urged clients to reach deep into their pocketbooks to win, often stroking their egos with what became known as his “Dare to be Great” speech. Critics bestowed upon him a sobriquet he detested: Bid-’em-Up Bruce.

via The New York Times

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from quid.pro, on October 15, 2009 6:55 AM

From A Hamburger Today

[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

Prime Burger

5 East 51st Street, New York NY 10022 (b/n Madison and 5th; map); 212-759 4730; primeburger.com
Cooking Method: Broiled
Short Order: Order correctly and you can get one of New York's great burgers in a unique setting.
Want Fries with That? No; they're not fresh or crisp.
Price: Hamburger, $5.25; cheeseburger, $5.95
Notes: Specify that you want your burger salted and made from scratch.

I walked into Prime Burger the other day around 1:30 p.m., and my heart sank. It was half-full. "This is not right," I thought to myself. We're talking about Prime Burger, the last remaining old-fashioned burger joint in New York City.

How old-fashioned? It's been around since 1938, when it was called Hamburg Heaven. Back then it was open 24 hours and it catered to movie stars and politicians. Its location across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral led its owners to proclaim on its menu, "The Gates of Heaven Never Close." Don't you love that? Hamburg Heaven's customers did too, but the good folks at St. Patrick's didn't, so the line was removed from the menu. Although it's no a 24 hour restaurant, it's still open for breakfast, when they serve a unique breakfast combination, the Breakfast Delight ($5.50): a burger, fried egg, and hot buttered toast.

But nostalgia is not the only reason we must all band together to make sure Prime Burger stays around at least another 70 years. If you order right you can also get one of the greatest classic, small, perfectly sized burgers to be had anywhere. But ordering right is key.

Since taking over in 1965, Prime Burger's owners Michael and John DiMiceli (they're the ones taking money at the register in the front of the restaurant) still get a delivery of fresh 85/15 prime chopped beef every day from one of the city's best wholesale butchers, Master Purveyors. They still make their burgers in two classic huge salamander broilers—one in front of the restaurant, one in the kitchen.

So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.

But that's not the end of your special ordering at Prime Burger. Ask your cheerful and efficient server still elegantly decked out in railroad porter-like white coats to tell the broiler man to salt your burger before he puts it in. Our server, Chester Hawkins, who has been working at Prime Burger for almost thirty years, relayed our request without complaint. The result: a juicy burger that tastes a lot like a Shake Shack burger. Salt, after all, is one of the Shake Shack burger's not-so-secret weapons.

When your burger comes you will want to put on a spoonful or two of the classic sweet red hamburger relish you will find in metal servers. It's not made in-house, but it's another only-at-Prime Burger aspect of eating here.

If you follow the above instructions you will certainly end up with one of New York's great burgers, served on a properly toasted hamburger bun.

Do not order the french fries, which are neither fresh nor crisp. The French Fried Onions ($4.50) are the way to go. It's a tangle of freshly battered and fried sweet onions. They also need salt, so it might be worth asking your server to ask the kitchen to salt the onions before putting them in the fryer.

A year ago I would have told you to have a piece of pie to complete your perfect lunch. But this past March Prime Burger pie baker Eddie Adams, who had been baking pies here for 63 years, retired at the age of 85. The DiMicelis tried without success to keep baking the pies in house—they never found anyone who could replicate Eddie's stunning achievements. Now what you find here are standard diner-like pies.

To make sure you are getting the full Prime Burger experience you must sit in one of the 24 seats with swing-out trays. The tray swings out so that you can climb into your seat. There is no other seat like it anywhere else as far as I know.

New York and the nation need iconic places like Prime Burger to survive—even thrive. They're part and parcel of our nation's cultural fabric.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from A Hamburger Today, on October 15, 2009 6:00 AM

At the beginning of his 13-hour television docu-essay Civilisation, a "personal" telling of the history of Western civilization, Kenneth Clark quotes John Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

The quote tells us where Clark is going, why he's going there, and in whose tradition he hopes to follow. Civilisation, which turns 40 this year, is the best kind of epic relic: It's 13-part, appointment-viewing, single-teller, great-man history, told broadly, with a ridiculously huge sweeping arc -- and in colour, a near-first. It's personal, it's opinionated and it dared to make mistakes. This weekend the National Gallery of Art will celebrate Civilisation with two days of programming. Earlier this year the BBC celebrated its own programme with Civilisation: A Television Landmark at 40 (which the NGA will screen on Saturday).

The program (and the accompanying book) are notably imperfect. Women are almost totally absent. Clark is strikingly western European Christian-centric, at the expense of Judaism,  the Orthodox church and Islam. He misses artists and important developments in art: Mannerism, from El Greco to the Florentine portraiture of Bronzino and Pontormo, is absent. Venetian painting, in the persons of only Bellini and Titian, gets no more than a few dozen words. Goya, Velazquez and Cranach surface for only the briefest mentions -- part of the program's bias for Italian, French and British figures at the expense of Spaniards and Germans. Apparently civilization ends with impressionism, a nearly incomprehensible, indefensible endpoint. In failing to include Dada, Clark failed to chronicle the greatest impact art had on civilization in the 20thC: It enabled the first anti-war movement.

Even with all that -- and I could have kept going -- there's still something fantastically ambitious about the series. It is grounded in a certain middlebrow belief in self-improvement through broader understanding. It resolutely insists on the centrality of non-political developments in the development of man, of societies and of nations. It reminds us that great art lasts in a way that almost nothing else does. And, best of all, it's a lot of fun.

Related: The BBC looks at the influence the programme had on television. David Attenborough on the impact the programme had on him and on the BBC. The DVD of the entire series is $57.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Modern Art Notes, on October 15, 2009 5:56 AM

Spacewar was one of the first video games and in 1972, Rolling Stone sent a 33-yo Stewart Brand to document the early days of computing as entertainment. The photographs were taken by a 23-yo Annie Leibovitz.

"We had this brand new PDP-l," Steve Russell recalls. "It was the first minicomputer, ridiculously inexpensive for its time. And it was just sitting there. It had a console typewriter that worked right, which was rare, and a paper tape reader and a cathode ray tube display, [There had been CRT displays before, but primarily in the Air Defense System.] Somebody had built some little pattern-generating programs which made interesting patterns like a kaleidoscope. Not a very good demonstration. Here was this display that could do all sorts of good things! So we started talking about it, figuring what would be interesting displays. We decided that probably you could make a two-Dimensional maneuvering sort of thing, and decided that naturally the obvious thing to do was spaceships."

You can play the original version of Spacewar in your Java-enabled browser.

Tags: Annie Leibovitz   Spacewar   stewartbrand   videogames

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 15, 2009 5:46 AM

Today is that awesome panel at this magazine media thingy, at which Awl pals Nick Denton and Simon Dumenco will tell you what to do with your magazine. It is a great time to do this for two reasons: one of which is that, overnight, Gawker just digested and extruded Twitter in some weird hashtaggy way. And also, this Gawker memo from the other day! Subject line: “We’re not running a newspaper.”

——— Forwarded message ———-
From: Nick Denton
Date: Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 6:33 PM
Subject: We’re not running a newspaper

A few cases recently where we’ve thought *way* too much before publishing. Even when we’ve had exclusive information or even documentary evidence.

There’s always a good argument for waiting. Let’s check to see whether the associated claim is true; oh, the source might be exposed.

But we should publish anyway, making clear what we know to be true and what remains up in the air. Or even just publish a headline or quicklink and fill the story in later. We can always update. We can always write a second post when we’ve established more of the facts.

We’ve brought in some of the better traditions of newspapers. We’re breaking more stories than we ever have. That’s awesome.

But there’s no way we’re going to slow our publishing schedule to that of a ponderous newspaper-style organization — where everything has to go through layers of edit and approval and checking and legal. If we did that, we’d be neither as authoritative as a newspaper nor as nimble as the smaller blogs that *do* indeed publish as soon as they get something.

At some media organizations you might get rapped for running a premature story. At Gawker Media, you’ll lose way more points for being scooped on a story you had in your hands.

Nick

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on October 15, 2009 5:40 AM

Psychologists show that people turn nasty when influence and incompetence collide

Originally posted by (author unknown) from New Scientist - Online News, on October 15, 2009 5:28 AM

One of the most wonderful things about having a President who has an afro and is the leader of a population where 90% don't have an afro, is that virtually nobody knows:

- what is a joke,

- what is a parody,

- what is an insult

- what is an act of ethnic bigotry

- what is a respectful honor

- what is pure racism

- or what the hell to do when confronted with a test of all this rolled into one perplexing situation.

If you haven't seen this TV commercial made by a San Francisco firm, you've got to see it now.

At this point Walgreens drug stores have refused to sell the ChiaObama and CVS is selling it, but there have been no other reactions. The issue is too complex for the body politic to process.

The commercial has been rolled out first in the liberal cities of San Francisco and Chicago. Great twist. 

I just love the physical quality of this irony.  Insult and adoration combined in one object.

Originally posted by Michael Phillips from Pro Commerce, on October 15, 2009 3:19 AM

Reflections on FDR's public option: government-sponsored electrical service for rural America.

Investor-owned utilities, who rejected the farmers for years, wanted them dearly once the competition showed up. They fought in legislatures and courts and newspapers to keep the Rural Electric Coops from lighting the back roads.

And omigawd were [the coops] evil. Socialistic, un-American, undermining the very fabric of democracy. Legislators, businessmen, members of Congress, editorial page editors all over the country railed at the specter of Big Government shouldering into private enterprise, when everyone knew Government couldn't do it right.

Most infuriating of all, government did it right. The cooperatives became the pricing yardstick for electrical power. Investor-owned utilities had to lower their rates to compete.

Originally posted by Rebecca Blood from Rebecca's Pocket, on October 15, 2009 3:15 AM

color blind? 'the clock I can't see' is a new product from sonodesign.
upon first glance, the congested dot patterning on the face of the time-teller makes it difficult to
recognize as a clock. take a closer look and you will see numbers hidden in amongst the spots.
this clock is made of double thickness high quality acrylic and will hang on a standard picture hook.




the number '12'(left) and the number '3'(right)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on October 15, 2009 2:08 AM

http://twitter.com/ChelseaVPeretti

DON'T FORGET THE "V" in the middle. A spammer has my name so I had to add middle initial.

THANKS!

Bye!

Chelsea V. Peretti

Originally posted by Chelsea Peretti from Chelsea Peretti, on October 15, 2009 12:48 AM

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's PSGI/Plack have been on my mind a lot, lately, as a great example of taking a common problem and solving it in the simplest possible way.

I used Plack today, actually; here was my use case:

• I'd written a 15-line Perl script that, run from the command line, produced JSON output with the coordinates of some photos.
• I wanted to plot those photos on a Google map, and in fact had already written the Javascript to do so, given a copy/paste JSON dump of the output of my script.
• I wanted to connect the Perl script and the Javascript using something other than copy/paste of the JSON output.

Here's what I did: I converted my Perl script into a PSGI app by adding around, oh, 4 lines of Perl code. I then ran that script as a webserver using plackup, and converted my Javascript to pull the JSON data via Ajax (using jQuery) from that webserver.

This was something like 10x easier than writing a CGI script, and probably 100x easier than writing an Apache/mod_perl app. And here's the amazing part: by writing it with PSGI, I wrote both a CGI and Apache/mod_perl app, as well as an app that'd run cleanly in a non-blocking server like Perlbal, since it does no I/O.

This is really good.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 14, 2009 9:32 PM

Most of my career has been dedicated to communications, either in making tools for enabling it, or in trying to practice the art myself. My friends tend to be people of conscience, so they often question why I waste my time on activities that could be described as "marketing" or even as hype when there are much bigger challenges that my talents could be applied to.

Perhaps the best articulation of why I think communications matters is in this short TED talk by Rory Sutherland:

In short, Sutherland argues that we need to start to value intangible, emotional experiences and that marketing, communications and, yes, even advertising can help bring that about. By starting to place importance on experiences and appreciation instead of objects and consumption, we become more sustainable as a society while also becoming more creative as a culture.

A lot of people offered up criticism when I launched Last Year's Model, asking why I was just encouraging people to talk to each other instead of actually doing something. As it turns out, talking to each other is doing something.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on October 14, 2009 8:35 PM

Dogfighting vs. football in moral calculus orig. from Oct 12, 2009
Puddleblog orig. from Mar 12, 2008
The Rape Tunnel: FAKE orig. from Oct 14, 2009
Are you moving to San Francisco? orig. from Jul 07, 2009
The baked bean index and other economic indicators orig. from Sep 21, 2009
Inventing the past orig. from Oct 13, 2009

* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

Tags: post updates

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 14, 2009 8:11 PM

If you've been following the Wooster Collective website for any amount of time, then you know we're massive supporters (and fans) of how artists are incorporating video content into their work. Over the last few years, we've showcased hundreds and hundreds of amazing videos on our site.

So today, working with our good friends over at YouTube, we're launching an official Wooster Collective video channel that archives and curates some of the best art videos on the web.

Each week we'll be adding new videos as we find them. From time to time we'll also be uploading videos of our own. We hope the Wooster channel becomes a "one-stop shop" for people who want to discover amazing artist videos and then be able to follow the work of those artists afterwards. Like the Wooster site, our goal is to lead people to great content that inspires them. We'll be putting videos into playlists so if you want to immerse yourself in, say, timelapse films or artists interviews, you can.

So late last night we recorded a short intro for the channel that presents our thoughts. Check out the channel when you can and let us know what you think.

Finally, we'll be in the YouTube offices on Monday morning, so if you work at YouTube, come find us and say hello.

Best,

Marc and Sara

You can subscribe to the Wooster Collective video channel by clicking here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on October 14, 2009 6:40 PM

Originally posted by Curtis from Hey Okay, on October 14, 2009 5:03 PM

Originally posted by The Sartorialist from The Sartorialist, on October 14, 2009 4:02 PM

Matt built a Canabalt High Scores site, which makes me very happy (I love Canabalt)! Now all he needs to add is pagination past the top 25, so that my high score can be on the list.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 14, 2009 2:41 PM

In this amazing Daily Mail article, nature photographer Kim Taylor rigged an entire batcave’s worth of gadgets just to capture these eeety-beety bat tongues as they skimmed his backyard pond.

Terrific bat-find, Catalina S.

Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Unusual animals

Originally posted by Not That Mike The Other Mike from Cute Overload, on October 14, 2009 1:33 PM

I spent last week in San Francisco attending 3 back-to-back conferences: the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES), International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), and the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG)…thanks to the Library of Congress and to Kesa Summers for letting me go. Also, thanks to the 3 conference for deciding to co-locate in San Francisco at the same time, which made this sort of tag-team-digital-preservation-event-week possible. I hadn’t been to either iPRES, IIPC or PASIG before, so it was a lot of fun being able to take them all in at once…especially since given the nature of my group at the Library of Congress, these are my kind of people.

Each event had a different flavor, but the topic under discussion at each was digital preservation. iPRES focused generally on digital preservation, particularly from a research angle. IIPC also had a bit of a research flavor, but focused more specifically on the practicalities of archiving web content. And PASIG was less research oriented, and much more oriented around building/maintaining large scale storage systems. There was so much good content at these events, that it’s kind of impossible to summarize it here. But I thought I would at least attempt to blurrily characterize some of the ideas from the three events that I’m taking back with me.

Forever

Long term digital preservation has many hard problems–so many that I think it is rational to feel somewhat overwhelmed and to some extent even paralyzed. It was important to see other people recognize the big problems of emulation, format characterization/migration, compression — but continue working on pragmatic solutions, for today. Martha Anderson made the case several times for thinking of digital preservation in terms of 5-10 year windows, instead of forever. The phrase “to get to forever you have to get to 5 years first” got mentioned a few times, but I don’t know who said it first. John Kunze brought up the notion of preservation as a “relay”, where bits are passed along at short intervals–and how digital curation need to enable these hand offs to happen easily. It came to my attention later that this relay idea is something that Chris Rusbridge written about back in 2006.

Access

On a similar note, Martha Anderson indicated that making bits useful today is a key factor that the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) weighs when making funding decisions. Brewster Kahle in his keynote for IIPC struck a similar note that “preservation is driven by access”. Gary Wright gave an interesting presentation about how the Church of Latter Day Saints had to adjust the Reference Model for Open Archival Information System (OAIS) to enable thousands of concurrent users access to their archive of 3.1 billion genealogical image records. Jennifer Waxman was kind enough to give me a pointer to some work Paul Conway has done on this topic of access driven preservation. The topic of access in digital preservation is important to me, because I work in a digital preservation group at the Library of Congress, working primarily on access applications. We’ve had a series of pretty intense debates about the role of access in digital preservation … so it was good to hear the topic come up in San Francisco. In a world where Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe, access to copies is pretty important.

Less is More (More or Less)

Over the week I got several opportunities to hear details from John Kunze, Stephen Abrams, and Margaret Low about the California Digital Library’s notion of curation micro-services, and how they enable digital preservation efforts at CDL. Several folks in my group at LC have been taking a close look at the CDL specifications recently, so getting to hear about the specs, and even see some implementation demos from Margaret was really quite awesome. The specs are interesting to me because they seem to be oriented around the fact that our digital objects ultimately reside on some sort of hierarchical file-system. Fileystem APIs are fairly ubiquitous. In fact, as David Rosenthal has pointed out, some file systems are even designed to resist change. As Kunze said at PASIG in his talk “Permanent Objects, Evolving Services, and Disposable Systems: An Emergent Approach to Digital Curation Infrastructure”

What is the thinnest veneer we can add to the files system so that it can act as an digital object store?

Approaches to building digital repository software thus far have been primarily aimed at software stacks (dspace, fedora, eprints) which offer particular services, or service frameworks. But the reality is that these systems come and go, and we are left with the bits. Why don’t we try to get the bits in shape so that they can be handed off easily in the relay from application to application, filesystem to filesystem? What is nice about the micro-services approach is that:

• The services are compose-able, allowing digital curation activities to be emergent, rather than imposed by a pre-defined software architecture. Since I’ve been on a bit of a functional programming kick lately, I see compose-ability as a pretty big win.
• The services are defined by short specifications, not software–so they are ideas instead of implementations. The specifications are clearly guided by ease of implementation, but ultimately they could be implemented in a variety of languages, and tools. Having a 2-3 page spec that defines a piece of functionality, and can be read by a variety of people, and implemented by different groups seems to be an ideal situation to strive for.

Everything Else Is Miscellaneous

Like I said, there was a ton of good content over the week…and it seems somewhat foolhardy to try to summarize it all in a single blog post. I tried to summarize the main themes I took home with me on the plane back to DC…but there were also lots of nuggets of ideas that came up in conversation, and in presentations that I want to at least jot down:

• While archival storage may not be best served by HDFS, jobs like virus scanning huge web crawls are well suited to distributed computing environments like Hadoop. We need to be able to operate at this scale at loc.gov.
• In Cliff Lynch’s summary wrap up for PASIG he indicated that people don’t talk so much about what we do when the inevitable happens, and bits are lost. The digital preservation community needs to share more statistics on bit loss, system failure modes, and software design patterns that let us build more sustainable storage systems.
• Dave Tarrant’s presentation on Where the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 meet format risk management: P2 registry was a welcome revelation about the intersection of my interest in linked data and digital preservation. His presentation of the PRONOM format registry as linked data, and Kevin De Vorsey’s talk about Obsolescence, Risk Management, and Preservation Planning at the National Library of New Zealand made me think that it might be interesting to explore how the LC’s Digital Formats website could be delivered as linked data, and linked to something like PRONOM. David Pearson also suggested that collaborative wiki-spaces could be used by digital format specialists to collect information…which got me thinking of how a semantic media wiki instance could be used in conjunction with Tarrant’s ideas. How easy would it be to use the web to build a distributed network of preservation information, as opposed to some p2p solution?
• I want to learn more about the (w)arc data format, and perhaps contribute to some of the existing code bases for working w/ (w)arc. I’m particularly interested in using harvesting tools and WARC to preserve linked data…which I believe some of the Sindice folks have worked on for their bot.
• It’s long since time I understood how LOCKSS works as a technology. It was mentioned as the backbone of several projects during the week. I even overheard some talk about establishing rogue LOCKSS networks, which of course piqued my interest even more.
• It would be fun to put a jython or jruby web front end on DROID for format identification, but it seems that Carol Chou of the Florida Center for Library Automation has already done something similar. Still, it would be neat to at least try it out, and perhaps have it conneg to Dave’s P2 registry or PRONOM.

Ok, braindump complete. Thanks for reading this far!

Originally posted by ed from i n k d r o i d, on October 14, 2009 1:15 PM

• Tiny Fish: Eat more sardines, herrings, and anchovies. [Chicago Tribune]
• BananaFail: 7-Eleven product-tests individually-wrapped bananas. [Gothamist]
• Felony Franks: A Chicago hot dog stand hires ex-convicts. [WSJ]
• Now and Laters: Chicken dishes that freeze well. [Washington Post]
• Waste Not: 50 ways to never waste food again. [Planet Green via VV]
• Food DUIs: Eating while driving is a problem. [Boston Globe]
• Bi-Coastal: Cross pollination between New York and San Francisco chefs. [SC]

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 14, 2009 1:15 PM

Holy crap, is this ever good.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on October 14, 2009 12:52 PM

While we’re blogging Wild Things – Headquarters Gallery (Montreal) has posted highlights from a recent art show they had celebrating the Wild Things. I dig the above cross-stitch of Max on a boat by Samantha Purdy and these awesome Wild Things pendants by the amazing Montreal designer, Elaine Ho.

---

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags:

Originally posted by Matt Forsythe from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on October 14, 2009 12:17 PM

I love Canabalt. So the other day I asked (lazy)Twitter for a favor...

dear lazytwitter: pls build a canabalt stats app based on twitter search results.

...and the (not-so-lazy) Twitter listened, in the form of superstar Matt Jacobs, who today launched Canabalt Scoreboard. The site scrapes Twitter search results for the appropriate Canabalt tag line, drops those that were posted from the web (cheaters!), shows the top 25 current high scores and the average of all the scores gathered.

So I now have documented proof that I suck at Canabalt. Thanks Matt!

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 14, 2009 12:15 PM

What are the chances that the day we decided to run the "Name Momofuku Midtown" contest that the actual name would drop? Oh crazy universe.

According to a blurb in the November issue of Vogue, procured this very afternoon by an elite Eater operative, David Chang and chef Tien Ho's new, anxiously awaited Midtown spot will be called Ma Pêche. It is the first in the Chang empire not to have the Momofuku moniker, but they are, naturally, keeping with the whole peach theme.

Also of note, that nutso rendering. The chairs! They have backs! The table, it's crisscrossed! Boom: our brains just exploded. And yes, the contest is still on, but don't expect to win with Ma Pêche.
· All Momofuku Midtown Coverage [~ENY~]
· Win One of 50 (50!!) Autographed Copies of the Momofuku Cookbook [~ENY~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on October 14, 2009 11:50 AM

I am becoming obsessed with the iPhone game Canabalt. In the game, you run and jump for as long as you can before you die. Maybe not revolutionary, but it's damn fun.

My biggest problem with the game is that the only way to share your scores is to tweet them. You have a leaderboard on your phone, but it's not global. And since I'm so awesome at the game and Sippey asked nicely, I built a public leaderboard based on people's tweets.

That's right, the world now has a Canabalt Scoreboard.

For those who are technically minded, I have a script that hits the Twitter search API every few minutes and grabs people's scores. I went back as far as Twitter would allow to grab old data and I'm ignoring scores from people (cheaters) who posted from the web and not the API (which sucks for me as I've gotten 16k+, but didn't tweet it).

That's it! Good luck, Canabalters.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on October 14, 2009 11:31 AM

The new Republican National Committee Web site has been derided for its "GOP Heroes" section -- which teaches us that almost all of the great Republicans lived in the 1800's, and about half of them were black -- but there's another illustrious name on the list: Ronaldus Magnus.

The site's page on Ronald Reagan includes this citation of the party's great hero, giving him a stylized name we might see on a Roman emperor:

Our country has to decide, said Ronaldus Magnus, "whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether to abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives better than we can plan them ourselves."

And to think that the GOP makes fun of the Democrats for allegedly worshiping Obama.

We've called the RNC office for comment on how this got there, giving them the benefit of the doubt that maybe this is a product of those hackers we've been hearing about as a result of the site's security problems. They have not gotten back to us yet.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on October 14, 2009 11:26 AM

"What if all the Large Hadron Collider's recent woes are more than bad luck and technical problems? Two noted physicists speculate that the future may be pushing back on the LHC to avert the disaster of observing the Higgs boson ... they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on October 14, 2009 11:22 AM

For the last week folks across Washington - from the Commerce Department to Senate leadership to left-leaning advocacy groups - have had a bad case of heartburn over a potential floor fight on an amendment Republican senators were pushing to force the Census Bureau to ask immigration status during their 2010 count.

I wrote about the issue last week when Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) and Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) attempted to attach the amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill outlining spending for the next year.

Senate leaders feared the amendment was getting some support from red-state Democrats so the Obama administration worked furiously to get it stripped from the bill, killed or at least pushed down the road to debate when Congress finally tackles immigration reform.

Commerce Sec. Gary Locke made a tough case to senators asking they oppose the amendment, reminding them such a change would cost "hundreds of millions of dollars," and long delays since the 300 million census forms would need to be reprinted and reshipped.

"It is too late to shift gears at this point in the process," Locke wrote in a memo obtained by TPMDC.

Locke added the "exact wording of every question" already was given to Congress in 2008.

"A change will require using untested content in the actual census, which may affect both response rates and data quality and cannot be implemented in time to deliver apportionment counts by the statutory deadline of December 31, 2010," Locke wrote.

Census Director Robert Groves has testified on the Hill that it's a discussion worth having but not now.

A Democratic source with knowledge of the West Wing told TPMDC the White House was "significantly engaged" in trying to block the amendment. It worked, because last night Democratic leadership refused to include it on the list of amendments that could be brought on the senate floor.

After the negotiations broke down last night, the Senate failed to invoke cloture on the overall appropriations bill, meaning it's not happening for awhile at least. Senate leadership aides weren't sure when it will come up again or whether the census amendment would live to see another day.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wasn't happy, and GOP leadership aides told TPMDC the census was the major sticking point.

Others were lobbying individual offices in an attempt to stop them from supporting the amendment, which legal experts and administration officials note seems unconstitutional.

White House aides reiterated the president's desire to start substantial work on a comprehensive immigration bill this year.

Simon Rosenberg of left-leaning group NDN wrote senators a letter urging them to think hard before supporting what might appear to be an innocent amendment. (Read the letter here.)

"There has been significant push to defeat this, once Democrats showed interest in the amendment," Rosenberg told TPMDC. "The senate should go slow rather than fast on this and let a bill come to the floor."

Fox News seems to be the only media outlet paying much attention to the issue, and we clipped a segment:

Originally posted by Christina Bellantoni from TPM Election Central, on October 14, 2009 11:17 AM

In 1973, Tom Snyder interviewed Alfred Hitchcock for the Tomorrow Show. Thought to be lost, the whole thing is now up on YouTube after being transferred from a VHS tape. Here's part one:

To follow: part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.

Tags: alfredhitchcock   interviews   Tom Snyder   video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 14, 2009 10:58 AM

by the way i’ll be dj-ing next friday

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on October 14, 2009 10:10 AM

Mike Wilbon on Danny Snyder:

The Washington Redskins, according to Forbes magazine's tracking of the value of NFL franchises, is the second-richest club among the 32 in the league. The Redskins were first last year, and if it wasn't for the Cowboys moving into that brand new stadium, the Redskins would be first again. You know which team leads the league in operating income by an impossibly wide margin? The Washington Redskins. That, boys and girls, starts with ownership, with Daniel Snyder specifically. Snyder, when it comes to generating income, is the best in the game.

Snyder, when it comes to getting his team to win football games, is closer to the bottom of the league. That, too, starts with ownership.

I think Jerry knows a little bit more about football than Snyder, but not enough. He's not really seeing Ozzie Newsome or Bill Polian. The sooner both these guys realize it, the better. It's great that the team is profitable. I guess. It'd be better if we didn't live down to expectations.

I think I'm still smarting from that Giants loss. All that pomp and circumstance and such a sloppy product on the field. I felt like I was watching someone go on a shopping spree with the rent money. Ugh.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Ta-Nehisi Coates, on October 14, 2009 9:35 AM

The code behind TapLynx and NetNewsWire for iPhone are similar — there is plenty of overlap — but they’re not the same.

Database engine

TapLynx is the engine I originally wrote for NetNewsWire 2 for iPhone. But then, in a decision that’s easily second-guessable, I wrote a new engine for NetNewsWire for iPhone. The TapLynx version is mature: the one in NetNewsWire for iPhone is much less mature.

TapLynx was originally an iPhone OS 2.x project: it uses SQLite (via FMDB) instead of Core Data. But when I went to write NetNewsWire 2, Core Data was newly-available on the iPhone, and I was convinced that it’s the future.

And it is the future, and I plan to switch TapLynx over to Core Data — but the code needs some more work first.

So, in a nutshell, NetNewsWire for iPhone is the more cutting-edge of the two apps in terms of code. But I’m fixing those cutting-edge bugs: and, once fixed, I believe the Core Data version will be great for TapLynx.

The syncing difference

Another big difference between TapLynx and NetNewsWire is how it reads feeds. NetNewsWire syncs with Google Reader; TapLynx reads feeds directly from the source. TapLynx doesn’t have to sync subscriptions or read states or starred items or anything like that.

Syncing and reading feeds directly are very, very different, and will get more so as I make NetNewsWire’s syncing more efficient.

TapLynx has it easy. :)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from inessential.com, on October 14, 2009 9:22 AM

In the intentionally dull world of academic writing, the descriptive word of choice for a thorny issue about race or sexuality is ‘problematic.’ As in: “Sal only serving as a gay prop this season is problematic.” And it was, though not for any kind of politically correct reasons—how eye-rollingly boring would that critique be—but because it makes for crappy drama. Sal’s tragic situation and Carla’s steely silence during the Birmingham news report was a clumsy plot gimmick. It felt as though the writers were grabbing hold of us by the shirt collars and screaming, “CAN’T YOU SEE? THESE PEOPLE ARE OPPRESSED?!” Well, perhaps we needed reminding. But in this instance, the writers of Mad Men sacrificed their usual elegant nuance for some ham-fisted ’social message.’ Fortunately, though some elegance was found in other places—like Disneyland! Yay.

§ The Russians! They can be so problematic. Like shoebanger Nikita Kruschev, who threw a tantrum when he was barred from visiting Disneyland. This snub, according to capitalist stalwart Conrad Hilton, is what cinched our victory in the Cold War.

During a diplomatically fraught visit to the states in 1957, Kruschev announced that he wanted to spend some time in Anaheim’s Magic Kingdom. Neither the LAPD nor the suits at Disney, they said, could guarantee Kruschev’s safety. So during a dinner hosted by MGM (with Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe cavorting around with some Russians from the politburo), General Secretary Kruschev was informed that the trip would have to be canceled. Kruschev, who had already taken a fair amount of razzing about from studio heads and senators, was upset by the denial and left Los Angeles the next day.

It’s unsurprising that Connie would regard with such pleasure seeing the desires of a wily dictator snuffed out by a cartoon mouse. Conrad Hilton and Walt Disney shared similar views about their role in American culture: while the rest of the country rumbled with social turmoil, both men believed that their particular blend of folksiness and modern efficiency could secure social harmony. They both built their empires on the notion that respect for traditional values could establish (or reestablish) order among a diverse and unruly public. Conrad’s vision for moon hotels, as expressed to Don, echoes Disney’s homespun vision of Tomorrowland: the terrifying solitude of space made orderly, sanitized and comfortable, with a bible in every bureau.

§ Let’s slip out of the climate-controlled moon room into the sultry and prickly arena of gay sex. Specifically, let’s look at the super homo-erotic imagery of the 1963 Lucky Strike Print campaign. Recognize the imagery?

The ‘It’s Toasted’ slogan, from Season 1, seems to be a 1954 print campaign (Also? Kind of girly!). Starting in 1961, the thrust of the Lucky Strike advertisements were more along the lines of “SMOKING, IT’S WHAT MANLY MEN DO.”

Hunters, farmers, fishermen,and men of worthy of a hard-won stubble dominated the images — with the requisite thousand-yard stare.

§ Speaking of staring into oblivion, though the (newly) coral-colored walls of the Draper home barricade the family from outside events, still the rushing tide of history does find a way to seep in. Burning monks, election results and political addresses intrude from the radio, TV—and via the tortured do-gooder conscience of Don’s newest school-teacher fling (that was unnecessarily catty, I’m just envious. Of a fictional character. Christ).

§ As Carla solemnly helped Betty prepare dinner, a funeral service streamed on the radio. Four little girls had been killed in a firebombing of a black church, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a gathering place for civil rights activists in Alabama. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy three days later.

The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland from the low road of man’s inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilt blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future.

This is the speech that Teacher Lady told Don she would read to her second graders and the same speech that caused Betty to question the fast-paced civil rights movement to Carla. (But do you see what I’m saying about overstating the drama? Wouldn’t it have been richer to just let the eulogy play rather than walloping the viewer with it?)

The reverend of the church, who was giving a sermon as the bomb ripped through the building on a Sunday afternoon, told a local newspaper that it sounded as though “the whole world was shaking.”

Doesn’t it feel that way now, though? Like it’s all crumbling? Perhaps that’s why the overt use of white callousness and human dread as narrative felt excessive, ill-handled, suspect.

For more Footnotes of Mad Men, Natasha Vargas-Cooper is always on duty here.

Originally posted by Natasha Vargas-Cooper from The Awl, on October 14, 2009 9:01 AM

Art Smith's fried chicken. [Photograph: Erin Zimmer]

Fried Chicken Recipes

Art Smith's recipe »
The Lee Brothers' recipe »
Paula Deen's recipe »
Edna Lewis' recipe »

Chefs are paying more attention to fried chicken—the seasonings, 36-hour brines, air-drying techniques, and fancy bread crumbs. There really doesn't seem to be a downside of a fried chicken boom. But at the end of the day, is it really any better than Popeyes?

We asked a few Southern food gurus for their secrets to classic fried chicken.

"Salt. And using grapeseed or canola oil." —Art Smith, chef of Table Fifty-Two in Chicago and Art and Soul in Washington D.C.

"Hot sauce. Egg. Frying it up in peanut oil. It's more money but worth it." —Jamie Deen, son of Paula Deen

"Time and temperature." —Ted Lee, co-author of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook and the new The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern

"Buttermilk brine. It tenderizes and seasons the chicken through and through so that the flavor is not just in the crust and the chicken is moist and juicy! And, you have to shake the chicken in a brown paper bag of seasoned flour, just like my grandmother did. That's where the love and tradition comes in." —Elizabeth Karmel, executive chef of Hill Country

Related

The Great New York Fancy-Pants Fried Chicken Roundup
Cold Fried Chicken Better Than Hot? [Talk]
Eat for Eight Bucks: Japanese Fried Chicken

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 14, 2009 9:00 AM

Garrison Keillor:

The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on October 14, 2009 8:48 AM

TapLynx is a framework for building media-based iPhone apps without needing to do any programming.

It’s a tool for developers, though — you still use Xcode to build the app. You configure it via a property list file, add artwork and feeds, build it, upload it. (You build a fully-native Cocoa app: it’s not like compiled Flash or something like that.)

Though programming isn’t required, you still can do some programming: a tab can have a custom view controller. An example case: you’re building an app for a sports team. TapLynx provides the news display, photo galleries, and audio and video. But you want a tab that shows scores and stats — that’s the tab that you write. But since TapLynx provides the other features, you can save time, make more money, and concentrate more on the part that makes your app special.

Some technical details

TapLynx is a static library. It’s a whole app in a static library. Since the views are things like UITableViews and UIWebViews, there’s no need for xib files. (I’m not anti-xib, by the way. But when a view is just a table — and it needs to be configured in code — a xib doesn’t make sense.)

The SDK provides a sample skeleton app that links to the library. The skeleton app has no code other than its main method.

The features, colors, feeds, and so on are all configured in a single property list file. Artwork is added to the Xcode project just as you would with any other project. There’s no black magic going on, in other words.

It’s 1.0

The future of TapLynx will be driven by the needs of developers. We can’t know in advance everything you’ll want and need, but we’ve had some experience building iPhone apps and we know what the basics are.

For instance, I’m sure you’ll need more programming hooks, ways to customize and add features via your own code. But I don’t know in advance what those will be. (The custom tab was obvious: the next step isn’t obvious.)

So we’ve set up a Google Group for TapLynx as a place for feedback. I’d love to hear what would help you make apps faster, make your clients happy, and make you money.

It’s also for web developers

We’ve seen people build apps who aren’t Cocoa developers — or who hardly ever even use a Mac, let alone Xcode.

We quite definitely had website agencies and web developers in mind. For example: when specifying a color, you just use the hex value, as in #48EF93. We were thinking of you. :)

My favorite feature: over-the-air updates

When we were working with All Things Digital on their app, they wanted to have the same kind of immediate control over the app as they have over their website.

Well, in the world of iPhone development, we all know there’s no such thing as immediate. (At this writing, I’ve had a crashing bug fix — a two-line change — for NetNewsWire for iPhone in review for 10 days now.)

We came up with this: the config file that you edit to create the app can also be hosted on the web. The app will read that config file periodically (a period you can configure). Whenever there’s a new config file, it will re-configure itself.

This way you can add and remove feeds, change look and feel, etc. You might add a tab for a special event (Olympics, election, winter weather, whatever) and take it down later. Or add a photo gallery.

It even downloads the necessary artwork.

So you don’t have to do an App Store update and hope it gets up in time for the special event.

(It can’t download code, though, since that’s against the developer agreement with Apple. New code requires a new build and uploading to the App Store.)

A sort of homecoming

You probably don’t know this, but my experience before NetNewsWire was six years at UserLand Software where I worked on tools for developers and web publishers. I was there during very exciting days, during the early days of weblogs, during the development of RSS, XML-RPC, and OPML. I’ve been working with this same technology ever since.

But I forgot, until recently, how much I love doing developer tools. They’re fun to make — yes, totally — but even more fun is working with the folks who use them. It’s been coming back to me, and it’s like coming back to a great place I thought I’d never see again. (And some of the same people are there!)

Twitter

Yes, you can follow TapLynx on Twitter.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from inessential.com, on October 14, 2009 8:43 AM

The 2009 Artistic Gymnastics World Championships are taking place right now in London, England (until October 18th). London's O2 arena is housing a total of 437 gymnasts from 72 delegations competing for medals in ten events, plus the men's and women's individual all-around medals. The championships at the O2 Arena are seen as a preview of 2012, when London will host the Olympic games, and the O2 will house both basketball and gymnastic events. Collected here are some photographs of training and qualifying rounds from this year, the 41st World Championships. (36 photos total)

A gymnast practices on the rings during a training session before the Artistic Gymnastic World Championships at the O2 Arena in London October 10, 2009. (REUTERS/ Eddie Keogh)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on October 14, 2009 8:36 AM

The New York Times blog The Moment quotes me as saying , “I can die now. Madonna just sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.” Which frankly I don’t think I said and even if I did there wasn’t even a reporter from the Times at the event. And if I did say it I certainly would have said Madonna SANG ‘Happy Birthday’ to me since that’s correct English. If people believe the quotes they read about this they’ll think I’m some shallow low-level star-fucking faggot who doesn’t speak proper English. In reality I’m a medium-level shallow star-fucking faggot who speaks wonderful English. Thank God that’s cleared up! via www.papermag.com Get it right.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 14, 2009 8:36 AM

Yankees Defy Their Advancing Age - Bats Blog - NYTimes.com

My latest for the NYTimes.com.

Originally posted by Sean Forman from Baseball-Reference Blog, on October 14, 2009 8:17 AM

You know how famous people complain about being misquoted or things being taken out of context and how lame and self-absorbed it sounds? Well I’m here to tell you to cut the famous some slack!!! Being a minor local celebrity means that I sometimes get my attention-hungry mug in the papers and as a ‘fashion expert’ am regularly quoted on all sorts of headline-grabbing topics like the hot tubs in Britney Spears' Malibu beach house. Well by coincidentally having my birthday celebrated at a party for Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz attended by the Queen of Pop Madonna, I’ve now had a teensy weensy taste of the fun of misquoting. New York Magazine sent a very cute young gay who not only DIDN’T sleep with me but wrote that “I introduced myself to one of her friends’ friends.” "Her" being Madonna. What does that even mean? I told him that I introduced myself to Madonna telling her we had a cute jet-set Irish gallerist friend in common. Mr. Mickey goes right to the source people! The New York Times blog The Moment quotes me as saying , “I can die now. Madonna just sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.” Which frankly I don’t think I said and even if I did there wasn’t even a reporter from the Times at the event. And if I did say it I certainly would have said Madonna SANG ‘Happy Birthday’ to me since that’s correct English. If people believe the quotes they read about this they’ll think I’m some shallow low-level star-fucking faggot who doesn’t speak proper English. In reality I’m a medium-level shallow star-fucking faggot who speaks wonderful English. Thank God that’s cleared up!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on October 14, 2009 8:05 AM

NewsGator Technical Blog: “I've only been a programmer on Windows machines, almost exclusively in VB.NET. I was able to jump on a Mac and create an application in less than an hour.”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ranchero.com, on October 14, 2009 7:46 AM

So Britain’s NME reports that Kanye West is going to an ashram in Pondicherry (such a pretty name for a city, and one that would also make a nice title for a slack dancehall tune) for a month of meditative recuperation after his embarrassing outburst at last month’s MTV Video Awards. (Did you happen to hear about that?) This could be very good.

Besides the fact that Kanye probably could use some mellowing-out time, trips to India have yielded great music in the past. The Beatles, after all, came home from their 1968 hippie-trail Hindu pilgrimage with the songs that made up The White Album. (Note: contact Jay-Z and Danger Mouse for possible posse cut). Here’s hoping Kanye finds some inner peace. But then please let him get bored and disillusioned with his maharishi. (Maybe the guy could hit on Amber Rose?) So he writes a bunch of stuff as inspired as “Sexy Sadie” or “Blackbird” or or “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” or “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (Note: contact RZA and Dhani Harrison for a possible posse cut.)

Originally posted by Dave Bry from The Awl, on October 14, 2009 7:40 AM

I am, for the first time that I can REMEMBER, not wearing ANYTHING that I made today. For reals, and srsly. I am not sure how this happened, but I blame this skirt above. I was so excited to see a knit skirt with POCKETS that I hit "Buy" before I realized that, since I only make dresses and skirts, BUYING a skirt would mean that I would be venturing out of the house in clothing made entirely by OTHER PEOPLE.

Which I did today, and yet the sky didn't fall.

Although the skirt is really comfortable (and remember, I sit on a giant exercise ball instead of a chair, so my skirts must allow for at least some movement) the pockets are a bit shallow for my taste. And of course, it's a KNIT skirt, so if you put lumpy things in them they aren't swallowed in folds and folds of fabric, so lumpy things stay lumpy. (I transferred my pedometer and phone to the pockets of my cardigan.)

I do think it's slightly boring, as clothes go. It could be because I'm wearing (with the black skirt) a dark gray t-shirt, heather gray cardigan (with pockets!), knee-high socks with an abstract black-and-gray argyle pattern, and black penny loafers. This is my own fault; I could have worn a bright yellow cardigan and pink t-shirt, with yellow-and-pink socks (this is not a thought experiment; I have such items in my closet). The nice thing is that I am wearing a very pretty gray pearl-and-chain necklace that my mother gave me years ago and that I hardly ever wear (because when you're leaving the house in stripes/camo/huge florals/very bright geometric patterns jewelry seems a little beside the point).

This particular combo is making me feel strangely grown-up; Hanna Andersson clothes are very nice but they are definitely Mom Clothes. The next stop on this train is, of course, Eileen Fisher. (I actually like Eileen Fisher, and as soon as my hair stops futzing around and goes completely gray like I want it to I will probably save up my pennies -- Eileen Fisher is expensive! -- and start wearing more Eileen Fisher.)

Weirdly, though, even though I'm wearing all gray and black, I feel tremendously conspicuous. If you're wearing a bright-orange dress printed with anvils (just as a thought experiment; I don't actually have a bright-orange dress printed with anvils ... yet) you obviously don't give a damn about what people think about your clothes, so any judgments roll right off you. If you're wearing a tasteful black skirt, gray cashmere cardigan, and pearls, well ... see what I mean? There will be twenty other women on the street wearing the same thing today, and I am definitely NOT in the top ten percent of women who can do this look right. It seems odd to feel more conspicuous in a tasteful knit skirt than in orange-and-anvils, but obviously orange-and-anvils is my comfort zone, and that's all there is to it.

To sum up: it's a nice skirt. I like it. Next time I'll wear it with bright colors. Also, I need an orange dress printed with anvils.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on October 14, 2009 7:40 AM

This super long comment about what daily harassment is like for many women should freak some men out. Especially those who are fathers of daughters. This kind of treatment is basically what has kept me up most nights since my daughter was born. No one should have to endure this kind of thing.

Originally posted by mathowie from A Whole Lotta Nothing, on October 14, 2009 7:30 AM

New reports show the late Michael Jackson's latest single, "This Is It," was reportedly written and crafted over 20 years ago by co-writer Paul Anka.

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on October 14, 2009 7:30 AM

TapLynx is a framework for writing content-based iPhone apps — without doing any programming.

The idea is simple: you configure it, give it some feeds and artwork, build it, and upload your app to the App Store. You end up with an app like the ones we built for Variety or All Things Digital — but with your design and your content.

Your app can have news (text of whatever kind), photo galleries, audio, and video. It has some sharing features built-in (Twitter, in-app email) with more to come in the future.

It’s still a native Cocoa app: in fact, you use Xcode, even though you don’t have to write a single line of code.

But you can write some code if you want: you can write custom view controllers to add features that aren’t part of TapLynx.

For developers, the value is straightforward: if you have a client offering money for an app like this, you get a quick start. Either TapLynx does all you want to, or it’s close and you can add the features you still need. The idea is to save you time so you can make more money.

You can, of course, follow TapLynx on Twitter. Click here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ranchero.com, on October 14, 2009 7:19 AM

'self contained module' by frederic gaunet

french architect frederic gaunet created 'self contained module'  for organisation
men@work.  made from three metric tonnes of sheet iron measuring 12,20 x 2,44 m
the living space project is competing for the observeur du design 2010 prize this october
at the cité des sciences in paris.

working with shipping containers already used for transporting equipment and merchandise,
he conducted research, taking into consideration  functionality, aesthetics and eco
awareness for his proposal.


the module also has an immediate application as a reception facility for international
partners and clients of men@work in central africa. studies are also being  undertaken
for a hotel version, since the ISO 668 rating of the containers means they can be shipped
to any part of the world.



particular attention has gone into making the module independent energy-wise.
solar panels supply enough electricity for daily use (low energy lighting by LEDs) and even
for handling waste water.

natural and local materials, recycled and/or recyclable are used for heat- and sound-proofing
(Isocel® cellulose-base insulation for walls and roof) and for the interior and exterior
fit-out of the module (composite textiles, woven fibres...).




day/night spaces, circulation and technical installations are laid out around a central block
that encloses the wet room, with knock-down/fold-away kitchen and desk. similarly, metal
seating can be detached from support rails for use outside the module, where - flipped over
they become comfortable deck chairs.

'everything can be reassembled to make real villas, and all combinations are possible to
suit users'.  - frédéric gaunet

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on October 14, 2009 7:12 AM

"madurai meenakshi temple"

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Pixdaus: Popular Today Pics, on October 14, 2009 5:18 AM

This drawing "The Fall of Omega Burger" is of a closed burger place I walk by each day. It is drawn from memory.

Originally posted by Colin Matthes from Just Seeds: Blog, on October 14, 2009 5:00 AM

via ffffound.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 14, 2009 4:34 AM

I favorited a YouTube video: http://twitter.com/jsmooth995 An actual *mini doctrine* this time, just a hello to all my new viewers and subscribers. Music provided by Sabzi from the Blue Scholars.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from anildash's YouTube Activity, on October 14, 2009 3:59 AM

, originally uploaded by moleitau.

Thanks to Justin McGuirk for the invitation to http://www.iconeye.com/iconminds/.

Below, my (very) raw unedited, incomplete notes from the morning session on ‘Ornament’ – Charles Jencks was most enjoyable, must admit I tuned out as the morning went on…:

icon minds event

the return of ornament: intro by Justin McGuirk

100 yrs since ‘ornament and crime’ aldolf loos- amazing that that is still so potent. digital tech in architecture schools is driving this – in icon office they joke about ‘return of victoriana’ – but then it was incredibly theorised where as no it is not…

charles jencks
farshi mousavi (check) foriegn office architects
marjan colleti, bartlett school of architecture

Charles Jencks
———————-
(shows front page of the FT, picture of hank paulson)
book ’sense of order’
3 depths of ornament
‘all arts aspire to the condition of music’
rhythms that control and affect / effect us without us having to know to much about them
from simple to complex / abstract to meaningful
distinction between decoration and ornament
in the last ten year, ornament has been ornament as eye candy
paulson’s frown is a piece of decoration rather than ornament
i’m defining decoration as something you wear as a sign as a way to communicate in code to a group.
‘the blush on the face of a virgin in every novel is completely conventional’
(now frowns on the faces of capitalists is ‘the blush of the virgin’)
shows koolhaas morphing into zidane
(angry passionate reluctant – architect and designer’s ‘blush of the virgin’)
morphing is… one of the strongest influences on ornament today… morphing is somehow ‘musical’ – from Koolhaas to crescendo… of Zidane..
the construction / structural elements, repeated in a kind of ’symphonic’ way in each fact of the OMA’s seattle library… organisational diagram informs the ornament – intersection, interlocking, ornamental use of colour for ciruclation to take you through a grey abstract concrete space… ornament is being used to underscore organisation
shows prada building in tokyo (?) herzog de merreon
rem: “dubai is vernacular zaha” – everyone is doing the same tricks with form – in adevrtising and magazines and academia… cliched images, rather than reality
venturi’s ‘dumb box’ / ‘decorated shed’ – done by FOA in spain… hexagonal tiles… that wobble nicely – ‘i call it the hexiwobble’
eberswalde library by H&dM – ornament not guaranteed to last 8-10 years by concrete manufrs
‘age of mechanical reproduction’ -photograph, but double – the facade is mechinaical reproduction
birds next stadium by h&dm – getting closer to mimicking nature
FOA work – pleats and plates of folded.
the 19th criticised construction – they said ‘don;t construct you ornament, instead decorate your construction’ – then poiret (?) teacher of corb said don’t do that… decoration always hides fault, and so the truth.
argument: philospophical/’moral’ – don’t think it is moral… we all ornament, we all decorate
transformational ornament is the 3rd degree
my own work based on fractals (cosmic garden in N. England?)
ornament should tell a story, should be narrative
shouldn’t stop at the level of semantics
the two great theories underlying nature:
plato – behind nature the underlying forms are regular solids (modernism) unbroken plato -> classical -> cezanne -> corbusier
based on the metaphysics of getting to the underlying forms of nature, the organisation of matter – self organisating relationships between them
1977: benoit mandelbrot: the fractal geometry of nature
things are more or less platonic when viewed from our scale, but in reality – mostly crinkly, self-similar, scale-free, always changing.
a symphonic scaling, between scales… recent work of FOA
gaudi – still the master of doing this… mediating between scale with ornament and structure.
the 4th degree of ornament is where there is an overall story that is seen in every element that the architect/designer/client has worked out whih gives it greater resonance.

Farshid Moussavi / FOA

book: ‘the function of ornament’

how do we define and construct ornament today?

it is part of how they ‘perform’ (structurally, environmentally) – they have a function
architecture has a very outmoded and narrow concept of function
sensorially roles should be part of function
opposition of function to ornament is representative of our dualist thinking between matter and mind
natural / symbolic
structural / symbols
louis sullivan was the last architect of ornament before modernism?
‘form follows function’ dictum reduced function to utility
related forms to culutre – often added inbetween structure and function – not considered together
but now they are – and start transforming each other
it’s no longer possible to isolate forces in the environment: cultural, societal, structural
cities are spaces where multiplicity rules, novelity emerges
materials are now joined by what she calls ’supermaterials’ – economics, virology, systems, information
cinema
spinoza: affect / affectation

(I have to admit I tuned out at this point…)

Originally posted by moleitau from Magical Nihilism, on October 14, 2009 3:46 AM

An interesting theory has been revealed which may point to the reasons so much is going wrong with the Large Hadron Collider, and it revolves around time travel.

The New York Times has unearthed an article by physicists Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya that pose a number of 'timeless' questions surrounding the LHC.

The essay is titled 'Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal' – although we would have called it 'Run for it Marty: Doc Brown was right' – and put forward the theory that bad luck will dog the launch of the LHC, with future influences stopping the Collider from doing its job.

Interestingly, these theories were announced before the calamitous string of incidents that have postponed the LHC from finding the hallowed Higgs boson particle.

Future shock

In the article it states: "Since LHC will produce particles of a mathematically new type of fundamental scalars, ie, the Higgs particles, there is potentially a chance to find unseen effects, such as on influence going from future to past, which we suggest in the present paper."

The pair then go on to explain the effects the LHC may have on the future by way of a card game.

Although this theory has been royally bashed in a number of science blogs, as the New York Times points out, the physicists believe it to be crazy too but: "While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

Heady stuff, and while it might be total nonsense and not explain the reasons behind the LHC being broken, it does sound as if the physicists may well have cracked the barmy plot of Lost. And that can only be a good thing.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Techradar - All the latest technology news, on October 14, 2009 2:37 AM

Ze Frank asked his followers on Twitter if they had "any recommendations for a great book?" and got flooded with replies. He compiled a list ("about a third of the titles that came back") and put it on his blog. They're not all great, of course, but it's an interesting list and says something about Ze's fans...

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 13, 2009 10:25 PM

Hey Gang!

We’re headed to New York City next week to make the rounds before and during the CMJ Music Marathon. If you’re itching for an evening of drinks, music and conversation, please join us at the Happy Ending Lounge on Tuesday, October 20th from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.. Topspinners Ian Rogers, James Lamberti, Adam Bates and Paul Heck will be your hosts for the evening, and expect some musical entertainment from Paul (he’s bringing a big bag of vinyl goodies to throw on the house turntables). Here are the details.

Happy Ending
302 Broome Street
New York, NY 10002
Please RSVP on Facebook

See you there!

Gary Brotman
Topspin

Originally posted by gary.brotman from Topspin Media, on October 13, 2009 9:10 PM

Ever wonder why it’s called Madison Square Garden—when it’s not near Madison Square? 

The current Garden, on 33rd Street, is the fourth incarnation of New York’s premier sports and entertainment arena.

The first, at right, opened in 1879. Occupying an old railroad depot at Madison Avenue and 26th Street, it became a successful, 10,000-seat venue that featured boxing, bike racing, and ice hockey.

A decade later it was torn down. Famed architect Stanford White designed the second MSG in 1890, below left. This beautiful, 8,000-seat Moorish structure sported cupolas, arches, and a 32-story tower that made it the second tallest building in the city. 

 Madison Square Garden II’s rooftop restaurant was a chic place for New York’s Gilded Age elite to socialize. It’s also where White was murdered in 1906.

He was shot point-blank by Harry Thaw, the jealousy-crazed husband of a teenage showgirl the 40-something White had been having an affair with.

By 1925, White’s building met the wrecking ball, and the third MSG was completed at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue. This arena was home to the Rangers, Knicks, and lots of boxing matches.

Outdated by the late sixties, it was replaced in 1968 by the fourth and current Garden, built on the hallowed grounds of the original Penn Station.

Originally posted by wildnewyork from Ephemeral New York, on October 13, 2009 9:01 PM

Oh, this is wonderful: some physicists have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider was broken intentionally by a subatomic particle sent back from the future. Or... something.

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 13, 2009 8:38 PM

Why did the Large Hadron Collider fail? To save us from a terrible fate. It's not a crackpot theory unless you consider the man who founded string theory to be a lightweight. Seriously, this is my favorite science story of all time.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rebecca's Pocket, on October 13, 2009 6:50 PM

Very proud today of my friend and personal web guru Micki, whose profile in O Magazine went live today. She’s been hard at work the last year launching Neighborgoods, a site that makes sharing your stuff with neighbors and friends easy. There’s a great story about how she did an end run about concerns about finding partners and investors to get her idea started:

“I remember thinking, ‘Instead of focusing on what I don’t have, I can focus on what I do have.’” Shortly after she returned home, one of her consulting clients decided to invest in NeighborGoods and gave her what she needed to get the project off the ground.

Check out the rest of Micki’s profile in the November issue: Women Entrepreneurs: O’s Women Rule! Conference Winners

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on October 13, 2009 4:59 PM

For me, one of the great pleasures of studying Japanese cuisine has been perfecting my Japanese-style knife skills, techniques that open a range of cooking possibilities -- and not just for pros. While expertly slicing fish for sashimi is a specialized ability that can take years to master, home cooks can greatly improve their knife skills by learning a just few simple cutting methods. In the video that follows, I join my coauthor Chef Tadashi Ono at Matsuri restaurant in New York to demonstrate a few of these techniques (please note the video starts in black for 5 seconds). If nothing else, hold a knife like Tadashi does, and you'll dramatically improve your slicing mojo.

I've also added a couple of bonus videos below, too, of cooks in Japan demonstrating breathtaking katsuramuki with a daikon, and breaking a fish. Man, do these guys have skills! I can only dream...

Originally posted by Harris Salat from The Japanese Food Report, on October 13, 2009 4:47 PM

As stated previously, I love this kind of thing:

If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness.

I got a 6/10, which is probably more than I deserved...the invention of "new" technologies is not multiple choice. I wouldn't have the faintest clue where to begin in actually making concrete or steel from scratch. (via ettagirl)

Tags: time travel

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 13, 2009 3:50 PM

via www.kiasoulcollective.com

Janelle Monae, who I adore and whose Metropolis: The Chase Suite was one of my favorite things last year, has a new song!

It's called "Come Alive (The War of the Roses)", it's awesome, and you can listen or download on Kia's "The Soul Collective" site.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on October 13, 2009 2:58 PM

The next couple of batches of uploads at my Dad's memorial site.

1971-72 and 1972-74.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on October 13, 2009 2:39 PM

I'm usually clueless about fashion posts, but this one is like listening to two Syrian cabbies in an argument: You know EXACTLY which words are the bad words.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on October 13, 2009 12:46 PM

via http://fr.reddit.com/r/pics/?count=25&after=t3_9rceh

Originally posted by arnet from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE, on October 13, 2009 12:34 PM

Like the rest of the world, we’re big Gary Vaynerchuk fans. So when Gary asked us if we wanted to team up with him to sell some books, we said HELL YEAH WE DO.

So here’s what Gary and I came up with:

• Buy a copy of Rework and Crush It! together and you’ll get access to a private 3-hour video Q&A session.
• Buy five copies of each and you’ll get access to the Q&A session + a free ticket to a day-long business seminar with Gary and me in Chicago (exact date/location TBD, but after Rework is launched March 9, 2010).

Get the details and check out promo at the Crush It! site. We hope you enjoy the books, and thanks for supporting both of us!

Originally posted by Jason F. from Signal vs. Noise, on October 13, 2009 12:28 PM

Charles Rosen Charles Rosen at home with his books, New York City, 2009; photograph by Dominique...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on October 13, 2009 12:12 PM

Yahoo's Open Hack Day NYC has come and gone. I'm happy to say it was one of the best "hack" conferences I've ever attended.

Originally posted by By Nick Thuesen from Open, on October 13, 2009 12:02 PM

Dr. Dre has described his time consuming method of crafting his music and suggested that his delays are sometimes due to a need for perfection.

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on October 13, 2009 12:00 PM

Bennett and I and Jesse Dorris are reading this Saturday afternoon at 4 at Cake Shop, as part of the Enclave reading series. The Enclave series is, contrary to its name, open to all comers and free so please come see us!  More details here.  Free!!  And we will not go on forever because we know how much you hate that!

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on October 13, 2009 11:56 AM

Although very little is known about Topps’ upcoming Chicle release, it has already fallen victim to negativity. I contacted acclaimed artist Brian Kong, who is one of the many artist who worked on Chicle and was able to get an exclusive look into some of the work he submitted to Topps.

These images are not final in any way but we’ve already seen a mock-up with the Dan Marino piece. While it’s certainly possible that Topps won’t use every one of these images, more than likely we’ll see the majority of them in Topps National Chicle when it is released later this year.

You can check out Brian’s awesome work in sports & comic art HERE.

Originally posted by Mario A. from Wax Heaven, on October 13, 2009 11:25 AM

The RNC's big relaunch of its website has not gone so well today. In the last hour or so, the site has been crashing periodically. The Obama campaign's former online guru, Joe Rospars, tells TPMDC: "You know your web program is in trouble when your site can't even handle the traffic bump from people making fun of your web program."

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on October 13, 2009 11:08 AM

nice use of crowdsourcing to improve the google earth experience: Google Building Maker

Originally posted by erik from eriksmartt.com/blog, on October 13, 2009 10:56 AM

After doing the script, working with the actors, and supervise the set design, Wes Anderson directed Fantastic Mr. Fox over email. He also didn't want to use many contemporary stop-motion animation techniques. Both of these decisions ruffled some feathers.

"It's not the most pleasant thing to force somebody to do it the way they don't want to do it," Anderson said. "In Tristan's case, what I was telling him was, 'You can't use the techniques that you've learned to use. I'm going to make your life more difficult by demanding a certain approach.'

"The simple reality is," Anderson continued, "the movie would not be the way I wanted it if I just did it the way people were accustomed to doing it. I realized this is an opportunity to do something nobody's ever seen before. I want to see it. I don't want afterward to say, 'I could have gone further with this.'"

(via @WaitingCasually)

Tags: fantasticmrfox   movies   Wes Anderson

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 13, 2009 10:51 AM

Really funny: the Barely Digital team did a Chopped & Screwed-style remix of Miley Cyrus’ Twitter quitter video.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on October 13, 2009 9:28 AM

Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer, an in-depth look at Bukowski's relationship with personal computers, including his ode to the 16-bit Intel 8088 chip. I'm not kidding. (Via Timothy Buckwalter.)

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 13, 2009 9:06 AM

I would recommend NOT buying the Amazon Kindle version of this book. The footnotes are a huge part of what I wrote, and apparently, Kindle doesn't have the ability to run footnotes on the bottom of each page right now. You're much better off just buying a hard copy of the book. It won't read right on Kindle. Would have passed this along sooner but I just found out. via sportsguy.blogspot.com That's Bill Simmons. So, if the reading experience on the Kindle isn't good enough for Bill Simmons...

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 13, 2009 8:09 AM

It is a bit like the perfect self-contained hemispherical world of Truman Show, but in real life … and times four. Once constituting the largest gasworks in all of Europe, a series of stunning cylindrical brick structures from the 1800s have found an uncanny new use in modern times as a completely domed-interior town-within-a-city on a spectacular scale.

In their second life, these gasometer buildings have been converted into a giant community of shops, residences, hotels, entertainment, civic, public and garden spaces interconnected by a series of soaring skyways and uncanny underground passages.

Located in Vienna, Austria, these century-old buildings were abandoned shortly after construction as they were no longer needed to hold coal gas – leaving each of the four industrial structures with nearly 1,000,000  square feet of unused interior space under gigantic roof-spanning skylights above – but it would be nearly a hundred years until someone would think to turn them into a town.

Though used and abused over the years by subversive partiers and other illegal purposes, the buildings managed to avoid being torn down due to their impressive appearance, stunning scale and historical value.

The interiors vary from one 230-foot-tall  structure to the next, giving them each a distinctive appearance and functional personality.  With over 1500 residents and 70 shops, restaurants, bars and cafes, it is no wonder that urban designers and planners from around the world have studied the unique architectural and cultural phenomena and the virtual online community that has arisen out of this giant connected gasometer city.

Want More? Check Out This Great Related Design:

Religious Conversions: Old Train Cars Turned into Churches

Originally posted by d0rn0b from Dornob, on October 13, 2009 6:00 AM

The Architect's Journal has a nice article on a new book entitled Crap Cycle Lanes.

Description below:

Architects come up against short-sighted planning on a daily basis – not least when they get on their bikes

This charming book provides pictures of dozens of half-hearted, incompetent and dangerous cycle lanes. Crap Cycle Lanes is available from the Eye Books website, Amazon or any good bookshop. The book was inspired by the Warrington Cycle Campaign and all royalties go to the Cyclists Defence Fund.

Looks pretty good. Anyone got similar stories or pictures? Post them in the comments!

Originally posted by Prolly from Prolly Is Not Probably, on October 13, 2009 5:59 AM

Every seven years, Stefan Sagmeister closes his design studio for a year of focused R&D.

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.

Tags: design   stefansagmeister   video   working

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 13, 2009 5:50 AM

“Hengest” being an Old English word meaning “Apache’s mod_rewrite”.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on October 13, 2009 5:39 AM

The next Momofuku Milk Bar flavors, launching this Wednesday after 4: caramel apple, fruit cobbler, stuffing (that's right, Stuffing), and the standby cereal milk. [EaterWire]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater NY, on October 13, 2009 4:50 AM

Originally posted by A.V. Phibes from OMGKitty!!!!, on October 13, 2009 4:23 AM

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa / Plack-0.9000 - search.cpan.org

Some yak have been shaved and the last minute bikeshed of renaming things in Plack::Builder was done, and now Plack and PSGI are uploaded to CPAN!

Some server backends like AnyEvent, FCGI::EV, Coro, Danga::Socket, ReverseHTTP and ServerSimple are removed from the core distribution and uploaded to CPAN separately. Actually there's no reason those implementations need to be named Plack::Server::* anymore since it doesn't inherit anything. I have more to write about naming your stuff on CPAN, hopefully soon to be posted here.

I also uploaded Catalyst::Engine::PSGI but i keep other framework adapters like Maypole, Mason, Mojo, CGI::Application and Squatting in my github repos for now, since some of the implementations are pretty hacky, and I'm not confident nor comfortable maintaining those adapters when bugs are found etc. Anyone from the dev team of these frameworks want to take care of actually releasing this to CPAN or porting to the core? :)

Anyway, this is a big milestone. Thanks everybody for helping me this past month and let's celebrate the initial release, but let's continue hacking!

Originally posted by miyagawa from bulknews.typepad.com, on October 13, 2009 1:45 AM

Time Magazine did a round-up of how Nobel winners have spent their prize money and I was happy to notice two of them put their winnings towards advancing women in science. Neuroscientist Paul Greengard created the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize with his $400,000 share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Named after his mother, the prize is awarded every year to a female biomedical researcher. It is presented by a woman who has distinguished herself in law, politics, the arts or the sciences. 2008 winners Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine this year along with Jack W. Szostak. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, winner in the same Nobel category in 1995, established a foundation that provides female scientists in Germany with funds for childcare and other practical household needs.

Originally posted by noreply@blogger.com (Lilly) from GirlHacker's Random Log, on October 12, 2009 10:58 PM

Did I ever tell you when I was a kid I'd make pinball machines out of plywood, rubber bands, and nails? I did. They were awful.

Here's some photos of Chris restoring a real one: part one and part two.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on October 12, 2009 10:36 PM

Steve Jobs is having an impact on Disney's retail overhaul. From the NY Times:

Mr. Jobs provided access to proprietary information about the development and operation of Apple’s highly successful stores, and Disney executives visited Apple’s research operation in Cupertino, Calif. Mr. Jobs, who declined to comment, also insisted that Disney build a prototype store to work out kinks, a costly endeavor that most retailers skip.

The company followed his advice, working for the last year on a full-scale, fully stocked store inside an unmarked warehouse in Glendale, Calif. The prototype was crucial to shaping an overall philosophy, Mr. Fielding said, noting that he discovered the shops needed more “Pixar-esque winks and nods.” To that end, one sales area is now labeled “WWTD: What Would Tinker Bell Do?”

Just so happens that we read a version of Peter Pan before bedtime in our house tonight, and I had forgotten what an odd character Tinker Bell is. Wikipedia...

Though sometimes ill-tempered and vindictive (getting the Lost Boys to shoot arrows at Wendy), at other times she is helpful and kind to Peter. The extremes in her personality are explained in-story by the fact that a fairy's size prevents her from holding more than one feeling at a time, so when she is angry she has no counterbalancing compassion.

So really. What would Tinker Bell do in a retail environment?

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on October 12, 2009 9:57 PM

...people to do odd things. Above, just a fraction of the tourists I saw attempting the clichéd, ahem, classic hold up that Leaning Tower photo in Pisa. (I opted for a more subtle version, tho this one amuses me more.) These also reminded me of this post of tourists in Italy.

Elsewhere: Iconic Photos via Noah Kalina, this and this from bartpogoda's Wielka Warszawska set, City Museum via Danapalooza, and a photo on DailySnap that lead me to this: Are Photoblogs Dead?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from rion.nu, on October 12, 2009 3:38 PM

If you are suffering from Sunday malaise or something like it, let me recommend browsing through the archives of Improv Everywhere. Best known for staging mass depantsings on the NY subway, and originally given to staging events that were small in scale and a bit mean, they have over the last eight years inclined more and more towards the exuberantly bizarre and happy making. The Welcome Back stunt is a nice example, I think. I like to watch the video of the recipients being extremely puzzled but, it seems, genuinely enjoying the strangeness. It's cheering.

This small guinea pig story is also cheering.

The achy neck, scritchy throat, and strangely pressurized skull currently afflicting me are surely mere side effects of the flu shot I received on Saturday, not a sign that it came Too Late. Right? Right.

I think I had better have some tea.

While I do, let me tell you a story, or rather two proto-stories, about how my dad was very good at responding to the whims of a small child. Both took place in the car, as he was driving me from school or nursery school, probably to come hang out at his office.

He was, as I've mentioned, a secretary. Specifically, he worked in the music department of a university with quite a good music program. His office and the area just outside, which had a lovely enormous wood table to lounge on, were pleasantly full of students who found me a novelty. Taped to the door was a mystifying cartoon about something called an SAT. There were chairs with wheels on and a typewriter on which I was allowed produce pages of gibberish to my heart's content, while my father met with people and filled out forms on another typewriter, and arranged things on the phone. It was a nice place to visit.

Anyway, in the car. I was four or five. One day I announced that I would like to live in a mobile home. I had got some ideas from watching Sesame Street. It would be so much more fun, I said, to go to school in our house. 

"Oh but," said my dad, "look at that sign. It says that only vehicles of a certain weight can drive on this road. A mobile home weighs more than that. We couldn't drive you to school at all if we had one of those."

"Oh! Never mind then," said little me.

Another day I suggested that we should get a llama. (There was a bit on Sesame Street about a girl who took her pet llama to the llama dentist, apparently in a basement office somewhere in Manhattan.)

"You don't want a llama," he said. "They spit."

"Ooh, you're right, I don't! Never mind," said me.

What good parenting. No wonder I came out so well.

It was so long ago that he died. He never knew me as an adult or even as a full-fledged adolescent, and that of course goes both ways. I only ever knew him from a child's point of view. So generally, as I go through various grown-up rites of passage, I don't exactly wish he could have been there to see them, because it's so distant.

Of course I think about what it would have been like to know him that way, growing up, and how I would have liked that. It's just not "I wish he were here for this." But thinking about what life will be like with a baby in it is different. After all, I was a baby, and a little girl. I remember the latter, if not the former, and suddenly he's not distant at all.

I'm terrified of what it would be like if Steve died as young as he did. Please don't do that, Steve.

Dammit! This was not where I intended to wind up when I started writing. What was in that tea? I'd better go find a subway to take my trousers off in.

Originally posted by redfox from Adventures in the Pointless Forest, on October 12, 2009 2:21 PM

Eric Kleefeld reviews the second issue of the already legendary Michele Bachmann comic. But he finds that Issue 2 does not live up to the promise of Issue 1, mainly because the authors rely largely on paraphrases of Bachmann's wingloonian rants rather than the direct quotes which made up most of the copy in Issue 1.

Still good art, though. As you can see. And a must-buy for Bachmann completists.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 12, 2009 2:09 PM

As a lifelong fan of Michael Jackson’s music, the day he stopped breathing and passed on will go down in my history as one of the strangest, most surreal moments of my life. Yes, he looked sick for years and six months prior to his death at 50, I did a quick story about him being near death.

Part of me believed it but another part of me believed that someone like the King of Pop would never die or age, at least not gracefully. Since his death three months ago, many old fans and new ones have come back to MJ’s side. Even card companies have jumped in as both Razor and Upper Deck have produced Michael Jackson cards.

I spoke with Topps officials this morning hoping to find out if they had any plans for trading cards of M.J in 2010 products, after all, they produced an entire Michael Jackson trading card set in the 80’s so anything is possible. I was told that at this time they had nothing planned.

After doing a little research, I discovered that Michael Jackson was featured in a Topps trading card back in 2007. Unfortunately, it was from a brand titled ‘Hollywood Zombies’ and is about as disturbing to a fan as a card could possible be.

I could not find much information about Hollywood Zombies, as all evidence has been purged from Topps’ official site but I did find out that these sets were only sold at select comic book shops and video stores. There was even supposed to be a comic book released by IDW Publishing.

For whatever reason, the comic was never released and Hollywood Zombies did not return in 2008. Looking at some samples on the Internet and through eBay, it’s a shame these cards did not catch on and they could have been as popular as Garbage Pail Kids were in the 80’s.

You can find an unopened box on eBay for around $20 dollars.

Originally posted by Mario A. from Wax Heaven, on October 12, 2009 2:08 PM

We thought we'd let you know that our largest developer conference will be returning to Moscone Center, San Francisco on May 19-20, 2010. Find out more details on the Google Code Blog!

Posted by Joyce Sohn, Google Developer Team

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 12, 2009 1:50 PM

Susan Hamaker, a JFR reader who writes the Shrinecastle blog, graciously contributed this fabulous account of eating a Japanese baseball stadiums. Hot dogs and pretzels? Oh, so much more! Read Susan's terrific story below. Thanks so much for sharing it with us, Susan!

Every trip I take to Japan is a culinary experience, and my most recent one was no exception. From curry rice in Tokyo to takoyaki and okonomiyaki in Hiroshima, each city offered its own style and flavor. Oh, did I mention that I found these dishes at Japanese baseball stadiums?

I spent the first week of September with a group of twenty-five American baseball fans as part of a tour run by JapanBall. Each year the Seattle area-based JapanBall creators, Bob Bavasi and Mayumi Smith, guide an assemblage of folks from all walks of life through Japan to experience the Japanese version of our American pastime. As a result, tour members receive a healthy dose of Japanese culture, especially Japanese food culture. We saw five baseball games in four different cities: Tokyo, Kobe, Hiroshima, and Tokorozawa. As we crisscrossed the nation jumping from bullet train to hotel to baseball stadium, eating at the ballparks became a necessity. That was fine with me because I love all kinds of Japanese food, whether it comes from an upscale restaurant's finest entrees or a yatai serving ramen noodles on a busy city street.

The first stop on our tour was Tokyo Dome to see the Yomiuri Giants host the Yakult Swallows. A beer garden and restaurants serving fare ranging from burgers to ramen to Italian cuisine surround the dome. I prefer grabbing my food inside the stadium rather than in a bordering restaurant, so that evening I enjoyed edamame and yakitori while I observed other fans eating steaming bowls of udon at their seats. We also saw a game at the other baseball stadium in Tokyo, Meiji Jingu Stadium. Built in 1926, Meiji Jingu Stadium is located on the grounds of a revered Shinto shrine and is Tokyo's oldest professional ballpark still in use. You're allowed to bring your own food and drinks into the stadium - unprecedented in any country - but why would you want to do that? I loved the food there despite reading online declarations that Jingu Stadium has the worst variety. I devoured both curry rice and an omu-rice bento - all in the name of research, of course - while other fans chowed down on gyoza and yakisoba.

The carnival atmosphere surrounding the outer grounds of the Seibu Dome in Tokorazawa, Saitama, brought to mind funnel cakes and corn on a stick. Instead I saw a mural advertising KFC and a truck serving native Okinawan dishes. Seibu Dome is home of the Seibu Lions, a powerhouse team from the 1980s and '90s and, most recently, the 2008 Japan Series champions. The Lions improved concession stands and installed picnic tables behind first and third base after receiving a windfall of money - $51.1 million - when the Boston Red Sox purchased the rights to Seibu's star pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka, in 2007.

My favorite stadium in Japan is without a doubt Mazda Zoom Zoom Stadium, the brand new home of the Hiroshima Toyo Carp. For variety in food and friendliness in atmosphere, this place can't be topped. Perhaps I fell for the new ballpark flair, but the food sealed the deal. A popular item on the menu was the local specialty in Hiroshima, okonomiyaki. I also indulged in takoyaki, one of my favorite Japanese snacks.

My most disappointing experience was at Skymark Stadium in Kobe, the part-time home of the Orix Buffaloes. The stadium itself was fine, and it offered a large selection of food choices. But I couldn't find my food choice: Kobe beef. Ah, yes, that succulent, black Tajima-ushi meat from the Wagyu breed of cattle that once cultivated rice is now allegedly pampered with beer and massages to produce the world's finest - and priciest - meat. From the moment I discovered the tour would take in a game in Kobe, I craved the tender, fatty, marbled goodness that is Kobe beef, and I made it my mission to satisfy this craving. After passing tables set up with popcorn and shrimp-flavored chips, rack after rack of bento boxes, and, strangely enough, a crepe stand, I finally found a counter advertising Kobe beef croquettes. Jackpot! Alas, the heavenly meat fried in whatever croquettes are fried in was sold out. I could have looked for the Italian stand to purchase the Japanese interpretation of pizza or Panini, or I could have humored myself with a curious, foot-long chicken stick. I could've eaten a regular dog, a curry dog, and a cheese dog, but my when-in-Rome policy of eating only local foods wouldn't let me. Crestfallen over the sold-out status of my Kobe beef, I bought the first thing I saw when I walked away from the Kobe beef croquette counter: I settled for karaage (delicious) and French fried potatoes (not so much, and definitely not local).

Good food needs to be washed down with good beverages, and there's plenty of that in Japanese ballparks. Beer girls with kegs strapped to their backs roam the stands, and vendors mix liquor drinks such as shochu right at fans' seats. Watching the process is almost as much fun as drinking the beer.

In my second year on this baseball tour, I have seen 11 of the 13 stadiums in Japan and eaten almost everything they have to offer. Despite the sadness of not fulfilling my quest for Kobe beef, I thoroughly enjoyed eating my way through these ballparks. Although new MLB parks such as Yankee Stadium and Citi Field in New York lean toward high-end, gourmet offerings from celebrity chefs, I'll take the concessions in Japan any day. Such basic staples as bento boxes and yakitori are fixtures at all parks, yet each park celebrates the specialty of its region. It may seem exotic to the average American baseball fan, but this food is delicious, down-and-dirty Japanese junk food. It may not be as sophisticated as Harris's nabe pots and soy sauce-marinated tuna, but these ballpark treats will provide enough sustenance to get anyone through a dizzying week of travel and baseball.

Originally posted by Harris Salat from The Japanese Food Report, on October 12, 2009 1:11 PM

Starting October 13 at Noon EST, Neil Gaiman (known as @Neilhimself) will launch a special round-robin interactive storytelling experience. He'll tweet the first line of the story and then the rest is up to you! Just login to your Twitter account (registration is free) to continue the story. 

via www.bbcaudiobooksamerica.com

Nice idea, but the man has over 1,000,000 followers. Are they really only going to take the first 1,000 responses?

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on October 12, 2009 12:51 PM

I'm not a real "fast food" guy. I don't really love burgers, and I don't really love super fried or greasy things, and I realize that by making both of these statements it's very possible that the Department of Bro-land Security will revoke my man-certificate.

That said, I've always admired Burgerville, Oregon (and Southern Washington's) home-grown fast food chain.

Burgerville goes out of their way to feature seasonal , local ingredients in monthly menu items. When a cyclist was denied drive-through service and caused a Twitter PR ruckus, they re-trained staff, put up "bicycle in lane" signs, and offered free milkshakes to cyclists. When they opened a box of Gardenburgers and "became concerned about the look and texture of the product" (!), this caused Kelloggs to shut down Gardenburger production for six months, and they switched to a locally-made product.

So, I was happy to see that Burgerville is now testing the coolest receipt ever. (Pictured at left.)

They're from company called Nutricate (tip: if you have to put a pronunciation guide next to your name, you need a new name). And, as you can see, they provide highly accurate nutritional info for your meal.

I mean, it's not surprising that tartar sauce is high on calories. But it was slightly surprising that Sweet Potato Fries were so much "worse" than regular fries.

Sure, there is some irony that you get this receipt after you've paid for your meal. But I say any nutritional education is better than none at all!

(Oh, and confidential to Burgerville: the only thing left to do? It's time to fix your interior design and remodel your stores. The sock-hoppy, jukeboxy theme of your restaurants is total disconnect from your modern, local, fresh message. You designed a great interior with Noodlin' (R.I.P.) — get those guys fixing Burgerville!)

Next Time: The Disneyland Scammer

Originally posted by Cabel from cabel.name, on October 12, 2009 12:33 PM

One thing I love is when someone’s able to step back from the trees and see the forest. Few do that better than Jesse James Garrett. At our recent UXWeek event Jesse took appraisal of the State of User Experience, giving new perspective on what the intent and practice of user experience is all about, and what new challenges await us.

It’s important to take the time to watch this presentation because of the new footholds Jesse creates for UX. First and foremost, he takes on “mediumism” or the tendency for design to have to be about a medium rather than the medium-independent design of experiences. Then, he offers a practical definition of experience design that shows the strengths and missing of today’s UX practice in a new light:

“experience design: the design of anything, independent of medium or across media, with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal.”

Watch the video, and Jesse will lay out the means by which we can tackle the challenge of human engagement head on. But be warned, “the user experience mindset is an acquired condition for which there is no cure.”

Jesse James Garrett | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Originally posted by Brandon Schauer from Adaptive Path, on October 12, 2009 12:19 PM

Today, we are happy to launch one of the most requested Google Docs features — the ability to share folders. Shared folders make it easy for a team of people to collaborate on projects that require multiple documents, spreadsheets or presentations. If you have a group of items you want to share, all that you have to do is put them into one folder and share it.


Once you've shared a folder, all of the items in the folder will be accessible to the group. You can also add someone to an existing shared folder to give them access to all of the folder's content. Likewise, each item you add to the folder will be automatically shared. Just like with sharing documents, you can specify edit and view-only access for a folder.

In addition to sharing folders, you can now upload multiple files to Google Docs at the same time, simplifying the process of transferring documents from your desktop to the cloud. Once your documents are in the cloud, you can access them from any device connected to the Internet or share them with people you choose.

These features are currently rolling out and will be available to everyone by the end of the day. If you're interested in learning more, check out our post on the Google Docs blog.

Posted by Vijay Bangaru, Product Manager, Google Docs

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on October 12, 2009 12:13 PM

Jon Heyman of CNNSI.com says that the Brewers will attempt to sign first baseman Prince Fielder to a long term contract this winter, and would only trade him if those talks go sour.

…he is the prototypical first baseman that the Mets should be interested in, but Fielder will command a kings ransom in any potential deal, and i worry that the Mets don’t have the type of players that the Brewers would be interested in to get a deal together…

Fielder finished the season hitting .299 with 46 home runs and 141 RBI, and played in all 162 games.

Meanwhile, according to Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe, Brewers GM Doug Melvin has already met with former Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson about filling their pitching coach vacancy.

Originally posted by Michael Baron from MetsBlog.com, on October 12, 2009 11:53 AM

You know we've been following the bizarre, sad and sometimes hilarious story of Hardin, MT and its crumbling deal with American Police Force to run its unused jail and it seems also become the town's police force. But just how did tiny Hardin get saddled with this prisonerless prison and so desperate to pay for it that they were prey for a con-man like Michael Hilton and his potemkin private security firm?

That's the story TPMMuckraker's Justin Elliott looks at today.

It's a town and prison version of the subprime mortgage collapse. And it's not just Hardin, Montana. A consortium of private companies around the country has been searching the country for impoverished and desperate small towns and who set up complex economic development authorities to build prisons few of which will ever bring in the funds and jobs the prison building song-n-dance men promised.

Here's our report.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 12, 2009 11:51 AM

We are preparing for our next taste test installment: frozen apple pie. Though we're fans of grandma's labor-intensive kind, we're curious if a great frozen one exists. Do you have a favorite brand?

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 12, 2009 11:45 AM

Story links: NASA probe slams into the moon, LCROSS: IMPACT, Blasted into space from a giant air gun, Internet Eyes: Video Surveillance as Video Game, 10 Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009: X2 Coaxial Rotor Helicopter, 10 Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009: I-TEC’s Flying Dune Buggy, 10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009: Techcrunch Crunchpad Tablet, The Sharp, NASA gave me blue balls, NASA moon bombing dud…, LCROSS impact video disappoints…, Copywriting, NEO_AMiGA, NASA moon shot disappoints public with fuzzy white flash, How did NASA manage to make a moon bombing boring, Surveillance Cameras, Surveillance Cameras II, UK spy cameras, Surveillance cameras becoming more common study, Surveillance Cameras III, Surveillance Cameras IV, Surveillance Cameras V, Instant Crime Stopper, Kevin Computer, Game show winners, Computer Hacker, Angry boy on computer, CCTV Footage Robbery, CCTV footage of a robbery in action, Surveillance footage of an armed bank robbery , Breakthrough Awards 2009, Kamen Dean, Homeless, Cablecar, SF Travel Financial District…, SF Painted Ladies, Fruit Loops, Cap ‘n Crunch, Crunch Berries, NASA moon bombing lame…, 10 Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009: Bacteria-Powered Battery

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on October 12, 2009 10:58 AM

Not that we’re keeping score, but punimoe had the honour of uploading our 4 billionth photo on Saturday.

Sadly, while 1,000,000,000 is no more, you can still see what 2,000,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 looked like.

For what it’s worth, it’s really difficult writing about all these billions without having a small Dr. Evil moment. That is all.

Photo from punimoe.

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on October 12, 2009 10:41 AM

From Recipes

Squash spaetzle squiggles. [Photographs: Erin Zimmer]

I had no idea how easy it was to make spaetzle. It sounds like something a hunched-over grandma would slave over all day. Plus, anything in the pasta or dumpling family can seem intimidating—all that rolling and shaping, especially when somebody else is probably making a perfectly fine version for pretty cheap. But at the New York Culinary Experience recently, chef Bill Telepan proved that spaetzle is a cinch.

And for an extra autumnal kick, it's even better topped with a maple glaze and bacon-squash-apple mixture. You don't need special equipment—just a colander and a giant pot. The bigger the colander's holes, the bigger the spaetzle squiggles will be. Another perk after making this, you get to say: "I just made spaetzle from scratch, no big deal."

Bill Telepan and a very big colander.

Squash Spaetzle

- serves 4 -

Ingredients

For the squash spaetzle:
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1/3 cup milk
2/3 cup roasted butternut squash bottoms
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt

For the maple glaze:

2 ounces white wine vinegar
2 ounces white wine
2 ounces maple syrup

For bacon-squash-apple mixture:
4 ounces small diced bacon
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup diced squash
1 tart apple, peeled and diced small

Procedure

1. Mix together the eggs, yolk, and milk. Add the squash and blend together with a hand blender or in a blender until smooth. Whisk in flour and salt and let rest a few minutes.

2. Set up an ice water bath. Place a colander over a pot of lightly salted boiling water. Scoop in half of the mix and press through the holes into the water using a rubber spatula until all the mix is in. Remove colander and when the water returns to a boil, cook the spaetzle for one minute.

3. Remove spaetzle from the water into the ice bath and chill for a few minutes. Repeat with remaining batter. When fully chilled (5 to 7 minutes in the water) drain and drizzle with a little vegetable oil to hold.

4. Mix all the ingredients in a saucepan and reduce over medium heat until it's the consistency of maple syrup.

5. Place the bacon and oil in a large saute pan and on medium heat, cook until crisp.

6. Add the butter and when bubbly, add the squash and cook to a golden brown, approximately five minutes.

7. Add the spaetzle and brown, toss in apples, and cook an additional minute.

8. Serve as a side and drizzle with glaze.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 12, 2009 10:15 AM

The endorsement of independent gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett by New Jersey's largest newspaper, the Star-Ledger, has already had one major consequence: The Ledger has pulled out of Friday's upcoming debate, or else violate state law.

The debate is still on through its other partners, including the northern Jersey Record and the Herald News, as well as Fox News. But the Ledger will not be sending their reporter to take part in the panel.

The state election commission's regulations require that officially registered debate sponsors not endorse a candidate, at least until after the debate. "We came to the conclusion that it was probably the best for everyone involved if a replacement were found for us," managing editor Kevin Whitmer told TPM, "that there was something in place that if we endorsed before the debate, that would be in violation."

This regulation apparently took the paper by surprise, with Whitmer saying it was never discussed in any of the events leading up to endorsement: "I personally - I can't speak for the whole paper -- but I was personally surprised to hear of it over the weekend."

If the Ledger had known about this rule in advance, would they have waited to endorse Daggett? "Impossible to speculate on that decision," Whitmer replied.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on October 12, 2009 9:46 AM

(via aquarium drunkard)

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on October 12, 2009 9:16 AM

By mapping, among other variables, how many people click on a link, and how long they linger there, Google assigns it a value, known as PageRank, after Larry Page.

That's from Ken Auletta's article about Google in the New Yorker last week. Didn't know that PageRank was named after Larry Page. (via @dens)

Tags: Google   PageRank

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 12, 2009 8:46 AM

I want to flag your attention to something. There's a percolating story down in Texas about Gov. Perry (R) and the possible execution of an innocent man. There appears to be real question whether Cameron Todd Willingham was wrongly executed for an alleged murder by arson in 1991. Perry had no direct connection to the case. But he did sign the death warrant in 2004. And now he seems to be trying to scuttle an investigation that might have shown he'd signed off on the execution of an innocent man. Here's our report on the latest developments.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on October 12, 2009 8:09 AM

Unsubstantiated! However, one Twitterer recently twote that she "Just found out cops in Williamsburg call hipsters marshmallows because we are white and soft." Whether or not this is true, we would like to recommend that everyone use "marshmallow" going forward — it is much less amorphous than the H word.

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist, on October 12, 2009 7:28 AM

Bruce Springsteen did the last gigs ever at the Meadowlands this weekend. The Boss wrote a tribute to the stadium. Here is a snippet.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on October 12, 2009 6:17 AM

How about a giant shoe costume to get your Halloween plans kick started? evil_plan_z made this great costume out of poster board and felt. Laces and a Nike tag add to the effect. Hey, if the shoe fits…

PREVIOUS POSTS
Muppet Costume, October 1
Ball o’Yarn Costume, October 2
Gnome riding a Snail Costume, October 3
Grumpy Care Bear Costume, October 4
Ghoul Scout Costume, October 5
Baby Elvis Costume, October 6
Pinata Costume, October 7
Tomas Costume, October 8
Peacock Costume, October 9
Oogie Boogie Costume, October 10
Autumn Princess Costume, October 11

Originally posted by rackycoo from Craftster.org Blog, on October 12, 2009 4:00 AM

Using Michael Vick as a pivot, Malcolm Gladwell compares professional football with dogfighting and asks if the former is just as morally unacceptable as the latter. This is former NFL offensive lineman Kyle Turley:

I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I'd hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn't come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don't remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you'd get into a collision where everything goes off. You're dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field-fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you're seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions-boom, boom, boom-lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.

Perhaps this is what Gladwell will be talking about at the upcoming New Yorker Festival?

Tags: dogfighting   football   Malcolm Gladwell   NFL   sports

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 12, 2009 3:26 AM

via www.futureofthebook.org We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas -- whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself. Excellent. I love the Kindle, but I can't spend fifteen minutes on it before I have a new idea to improve it (this ends up distracting me from reading). I'm glad Bob Stein and the folks at if:book are thinking deeply about how books should work.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 11, 2009 8:20 PM

A quick but big-time thanks to Ainsley Drew for helping me out here for the past couple of weeks. Again, you can find Ainsley at Jerk Ethic personally and Ministry of Imagery professionally.

Me? I'm still operating at half speed due to the new little one. But hopefully things won't be too sporadic around here for too much longer.

Tags: Ainsley Drew   kottke.org

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on October 11, 2009 7:40 PM

...in the game at least. His timing in the post-game celebrations/interviews, not so much.


Oh, oh God.

(Image courtesy of Twitter user TheRealFurballz)

Originally posted by J from 3:10 to Joba, on October 11, 2009 7:40 PM

Where the Wild Things Are bento #2!, originally uploaded by kickintheheadcomic.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 11, 2009 7:08 PM

Ben Fry has made a wonderful visualization showing how Darwin changed the text of Origin of the Species over the course of six editions. It's more of a conceptual art piece at this point but an exciting indicator of the powerful tools to come. Here's Ben Fry's own description:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas -- whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.
The second edition, for instance, adds a notable "by the Creator" to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase "survival of the fittest" -- usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin -- instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn't appear until the fifth edition of the text. Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin's ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.
This project is made possible by the hard work of Dr. John van Wyhe, et al. who run The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online. The text for each edition was sourced from their careful transcription of Darwin's books, and Dr. van Wyhe generously granted permission to use the text. This piece is a simpler version of a larger effort that looks at the changes between editions, and is intended as the first in a series looking at how the book evolved over time. Built with Processing.

Originally posted by bob stein from if:book, on October 11, 2009 7:05 PM

Wall-E Bento!, originally uploaded by kickintheheadcomic.I came upon this browsing random posts on kottke.org. See more Bento boxes.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 11, 2009 7:05 PM

Helsinki metropolitan area cinemas throughout the ages, originally uploaded by hugovk."There have been around 166 cinemas in the Helsinki area over the years, some 18 remain."

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on October 11, 2009 7:03 PM

soupsoup:

ninety9:

Foster manages to get through an entire post about young writers [sic] in New York without mentioning how many days it’s been since he’s had time off.

If these girls want to be writers so bad why don’t they, oh I don’t know, try and write something. At no point in the article did I find any mention of them attempting to demonstrate any ability to do the jobs their looking to fill. Since the only thing they’ve demonstrated is the ability to attend classes and memorize things.

They mention thinking of starting a blog as an afterthought, which they should have been doing years ago if their profession of choice was journalism. The fact that they don’t already have some online portfolio of writing samples is a testament to why they’re jobless. They have no concept of what it would take for them to get the few jobs that are available in this ultra-thin market.

How about networking? I saw no mention of them going to any events where they would encounter people who work at companies that would potentially hire people. It’s not difficult to find these on Meetup.com, for example. It’s far more likely they would make an impression face to face rather than another unremarkable resume among a heaving pile of unremarkable resumes.

I have little sympathy for these girls because they don’t seem to be making a serious effort to show they’re qualified or have an understanding for what makes someone looking for jobs like these marketable. They seem to think the world owes them something.

There’s also this part of the article:

They had had a meeting with Deadspin, a sports blog, but no real jobs there, just the suggestion to join an Australian football team and write about it.

If those two had any brains at all, they’d write a post or two for Deadspin for free about anything. If they want to be sportswriters, that’s the best possible exposure they could get to people who work in the industry and might be in a position to hire them.  None of the Gawker jobs are ideal on a permanent basis, but they’re basically free marketing for the next gig (provided you’re not a terrible writer) because every editor in town reads them. If you can get real estate on any one of them, it’s more effective than any amount of cold resume dropping or applying for jobs through media websites. Especially if you’re young and don’t have any real clips or experience.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on October 11, 2009 6:11 PM

From left: Art Smith, Chris Lilly, Ted Lee. [Photograph: Erin Zimmer]

As the New York City Wine & Food Festival's "Down South Up North" dinner wrapped up last night, three of the featured hosts circled up to tweet about the Southern food-filled evening. It all started when Ted Lee (@TheLeeBros) snapped a Twitpic of his chili crab on the menu. (His brother Matt, the other half of the Lee Bros. duo, was somewhere nearby feasting on the crustacean.) Chef Art Smith (@chefartsmith) jumped in to type: "The Chefs and Twitter!!xooxArt." And barbecue pitmaster Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Alabama just played along. He doesn't actually have a Twitter account.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on October 11, 2009 2:00 PM

Adam Greenfield: "... the responsibility to think holistically about the urban milieu is generally located within architecture, never least by architects themselves ... the field is in genuine risk of missing the picture entirely ... the more advanced practices of the current architectural generation seemingly remain smitten by scale-free, procedural strategies for the generation of form. Their exercises are often lovely, occasionally awe-inspiring, but they seem to issue from some mathic universe governed by the teraflop exertions of a deep ruleset that excludes the possibility either of human agency or of the frailty which inevitably attends it."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on October 11, 2009 11:58 AM

Matt Needle - MyModMet

Originally posted by (author unknown) from this isn't happiness., on October 11, 2009 9:06 AM

via http://tatihc.tumblr.com/

Originally posted by jampa from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE, on October 11, 2009 6:55 AM