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October 24, 2009
wooooooooo ...
As you know, I'm a big fan of the Kindle, despite being frequently disappointed by Amazon's Orwellian practices. But it's probably more accurate to say I've become a big fan of the e-book, something I never would have thought I'd say. And it just happens that the Kindle is the one I got.
Like me, you may have heard over the last few days that Barnes & Noble is introducing their own Gizmo called Nook. And taking my first look at the tech specs and comparison with Kindle, it looks pretty cool.
Frankly, when I first heard about this, it didn't make much sense to me. I just didn't think B&N still had the heft as a company to really make a serious play in this space, especially with Apple and Microsoft rumored to be coming in soon and Sony already there. I think of their stores closing these days (or local one closed about a year ago, leaving a massive lot of empty retail space where there used to be a great bookstore). But at least on execution, it looks pretty nice. And B&N does have the relationship with the sellers.
Just on a very casual glance some features that make Nook sound much better than Kindle are 1) color, speaks for itself, 2) touch screen, curious to see how it's executed but that could make it a million times nicer than Kindle, 3) the ability to share or lend books to other people with a Nook or other mobile device. Lots of other stuff. But those jumped out at me. And B&N claims to be entering the market with more titles available than Kindle, as well as a lot more free titles. For you tech nerds out there, Nook is Android-based.
Presumably where we're going, eventually, is that you'll have a handful of different readers -- competing on ranges of cost and feature sets -- and at least relatively open standards in terms of book format. So you don't have your whole digital book collection hostage to one company -- as some of us now do, very unhappily, with Amazon.
Very eager to get a look at this thing.
(ed.note: In case you're wondering whether this post is part of our weekend discussion about TPM on different mobile devices ... no, totally unrelated. Just happened to notice this and wrote it up as part of my Kindle obsession.)
Late Update: It seems I was at least partly bamboozled by Nook's spec sheet. The color, as far as I can tell, is only the book cover section down at the bottom. Basically where you thumb through your library. The reading section seems to be pure grayscale, just like the Kindle. For reading that's fine, probably preferable. Where it's fallen short for me on the Kindle is that even black and white photos or illustrations are essential unviewable.
The more I think and learn about the curious pricing of the 27” iMac, the more bizarre and...
The more I think and learn about the curious pricing of the 27” iMac, the more bizarre and incredible it seems.
It has a resolution of 2560x1440, which no other monitor in the industry seems to have (that I can find). 30” LCDs are the same width but 1600 tall. Shrinking 2560-wide into a screen that’s 3” smaller diagonally yields an impressive pixel density, especially given the panel’s still-immense size.
It has an IPS panel. IPS is the best and most expensive LCD type, giving the best viewing angle and the least color- and brightness-shifting as the angle increases in any direction. Nearly every panel on the market, including every laptop panel, is the cheap TN type. (TN panels wash out as soon as you move your head slightly, especially vertically, which is why it’s so hard to find a good viewing angle for your laptop lid while watching a dark movie.) Other 27” TN panels exist (only at the lower 1920x1080 resolution), but I can’t find any other 27” IPS panels.
It’s also LED-backlit.
So it’s a very high-specced, brand new panel that’s apparently not being mass-produced yet (since no other monitors for sale are using it). That must be expensive. How much of the base 27” iMac’s $1700 retail cost does this represent?
The closest existing panel for comparison, spec-wise, is the 30” IPS panel that Apple uses in their Cinema Display. It has the ultra-high resolution and size, but doesn’t compete with the 27” iMac’s panel for brightness, contrast, power efficiency, or color range. It’s overpriced by today’s standards at $1800, but not by much — Dell’s original 30” monitor with the same panel is $1200, and a newer version with better specs (although still not as good as the new iMac’s) is $1700.
A standalone monitor with the new iMac’s panel would be perfectly reasonably priced at about $1500. From Dell. Apple’s only charging $200 more than that for theirs, and there’s an entire high-end computer stuck to the back of it.
When they mentioned on last week’s quarterly earnings call that they expected lower profit margins for a new product, I don’t think anyone expected a change of this magnitude. How are they making anything — or even not losing money — with the base-model 27” iMac?
My guess: a massively successful negotiation with the panel’s manufacturer (most likely LG) to get not only an incredible price on these panels, but also apparent exclusivity for a while. It’s a hell of an accomplishment, and presumably a hell of an effort, for a computer that isn’t even Apple’s most-selling model (or even product line). That raises a more interesting question: Why?
Until we know why the panel is so cheap, I bet we’re going to see a lot of Mac Pro owners buying 27” monitors for $1700 and trying to figure out what to do with the free computer stuck to the back. For new-computer shopping, a lot of people are going to abandon whichever laptop or Mac Pro they were considering and get this instead.
That helps answer the “why” question: Maybe Apple wants to push more buyers away from today’s default system-type choice — laptops — and show them why they should consider getting a fast, spacious desktop instead. And, for the time being, it’s a desktop with absolutely no equivalent in the PC world.
Head, Heart by Lydia Davis
Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.Also from last week's New Yorker, in the book reviews.
Minimal Black and White
See more in the Minimal Black&White group
Photos by maxhomand, Pic@, Arkadius Zagrabski, josh leahy & TWRebelxt
Ghost Busters Multitrack
I favorited a YouTube video: Matt Mulholland performing the Ghost Busters theme in 14 part harmony. Booyah Check out the fantastic video effects and magic!
Raindrop, this mornings coffee shop conversation with my imaginary friend
Shared by sippey
Been away from the chattering for a couple days and this post on Raindrop is a gentle way to ease back in. Also, the Dave Winer line is perfect.I’m not really qualified to write or say anything about Raindrop, Aaron pointed it out to me yesterday, and I immediately got bogged in the marketing speak on the page. Still, I was sitting at El Beit this morning thinking that if El Beit was Ritual I could have struck up a conversation with person sitting next to me, and we could have had a conversation about our mutual inability to get past the marketing speak, and besides this whole “qualified” filter is a tension largely created by the professional blogging class, who are frankly boring as a sin, every last one of them.
So, once I got done talking (very very quietly) about how Raindrop sounds awesome, but also kind Chandler-ishly vague, I saw this Twitter from Sonny, “Raindrop is the innovative idea that Google Wave was hoping to be.”
Which got me all kinds of excited again. And also musing on the failures of Wave. Really hoping that Raindrop can be useful to me, whether or not you’re also using it, Google is qualified to build boil the sea solutions, but they lack elegances.
Just the name Raindrop sort of sounds to me like something that could build slowly to a crescendo, a “delicious play”: a tool useful long before its adoption curve cross the plane where its latent social dimension is revealed. (my imaginary friend is old school, he pointed out that IM tools successfully required people to opt-in to build value and they’ve done fairly well, to which I can only say times were simpler when ICQ was launched and we were all more desperate for better tools, and AOL already had a meaningful desktop internet install base they could upgrade largely in place)
And then Raindrop has all this buzz about personal/people centricity, but I’m worried not to see much acknowledgement on the failure of RSS readers. Its easy to get confused by the real time web buzz and think people actually want real time, comprehensive information. Fuck that. I want a tool that delivers meaningful, timely information, everything else is just anxiety producing.
Blaine has done a lot of good thinking, and talking, and not nearly enough good writing on the game changing, sea change that is the switch from pull-to-push, that perhaps the white-list vs black-list is the most important kladistic trait, and I’m wondering if papering over those divides in a single client misses the point. (Blaine useful refers to this as, “the total fucking brokenness which is email” or words to that effect) It’s something I’ve been meditating on a late into the night recently having just opened a new push communication channel on Flickr.
“Raindrop uses a mini web server” is also old school. Wow. There was a really wild and wooly bunch of apps being evolved at the end of the 20th century that largely died out, interesting to see that design idea still kicking out interesting creatures. (this is what Aaron calls the I-hate-to-admit-it-but-Dave-Winer-was-right principle)
And while I love to see Flickr get love, “flickr arrives, your messaging client should be able to show the video or photos near or as part of the message”, it really raises the question in a system of social object sharing, what is the object? Just the photo? Something else? (and smacks a bit of the one-system-to-rule them all, which is cool, but again, see Chandler, and Dreaming in Code)
What can I say, that’s the sort of thing my imaginary friend and I talk about. Now I guess I should go finish reading those docs.
Sex, lies, & type
The Week in Type
Welcome to a slightly later than usual week in type. Lots happening in the world of web fonts — links to the best content below. There’s also free stuff, so don’t click away.
I’m thrilled by the launch of a new type foundry, Mota Italic. Congratulations to Rob and Co.
As others have noted, the shopping cart is particularly novel and intuitive. Be sure to check out Vesper, their present flagship typeface; it’s bursting with lots of OpenType features, including numerous smart contextual alternates.
This article’s header is set in Vesper Pro Italic & Heavy Italic.
Inspiration
This wonderful invitation for Ale Paul’s TDC talk on November 3:
Nancy Harris Rouemy from the NYT Sunday Magazine designed it with ten (yes ten!) of Ale’s fonts. I wonder who can name them all.
Love this series of photos from Lajos Major:
A web site from Ascender Corp., dedicated to the Frederic & Bertha Goudy:
New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective is a wonderful piece on the H&FJ blog. I’ve always loved their specimens (both on- and off-line). A must-must read:
It’s no secret that Trajan is the movie typeface. If you don’t believe me, then take a look at this Flickr pool:
Some fine alternatives to Trajan over at FontShop. — via @zeldman
Which leads nicely on to this great piece over at the FontFeed, about the making of the Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles:
I’m sure you all know Nicholas-Felton. Now he has most of his portfolio on Cargo. Nice:
I think I’m going to be buying a copy of alphabeasties and other Amazing Types (I’m sure I’ll have children one day — when they come genetically engineered not to cause trouble and puke over one’s clothes):
You can read more about it at the brilliant Grain Edit. — via Christian Schwartz.
iA (Information Architects, Inc.) has posted a great piece about their pitch for the redesign of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They’ve even posted the entire proposal online — a 95MB PDF:
I like their choice of Frutiger Next Frutiger Serif (Meridien), and the idea of highlighting key words in blue. Be sure to follow iA on twitter.
Video
http://www.odedezer.com/typembrya.html
Typembrya by Oded Ezer from www.odedezer.com on Vimeo.
LAIKA, the dynamic typeface:
And a little more info about the project at Laika.ch.
I like this video promotion for Neuforma:
We’ve had Helvetica the documentary; now:
No comment. And, if that’s not enough Comic Sans for one day, here’s an entire book set in Comic Sans. Someone had to do it.
Be sure to check out Jos Buivenga’s Wild Type Gear:
New faces
At last, sans-serif companion to Mrs Eaves. Meet Mr Eaves Sans:
And if that’s not enough, there’s Mr Eaves Modern. Thank you Zuzana Licko.
A redesign and update of Linotype Really. Meet Really No. 2:
This is fun. A slabby Western by the name of Cowboyslang, from Hype for Type:
Featured face
First up is the lovely Starling from Font Bureau:
An interesting back story to this typeface. You can read more about it over at FontShop (scroll almost to the bottom of the page).
The wonderful Aunt Mildred:
Specimen from FontShop’s Flickr stream.
Web fonts news
Lots to report. In addition to growing support for the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) specification, there’s this wonderfully exciting taste of what the future holds, and how browsers will one day begin to take full advantage of OpenType features: read After Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers and be sure to watch the video.
WOFF sample page — you will need the latest development version of FireFox to actually see the fonts at work (or wait until FF 3.6). Let’s hope the other browser vendors get behind it, and start implementing support for WOFF.
Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font IgnoranceBetter Postscript CFF font rendering with DirectWrite.
Typotheque has now released its Web fonts. Comes with a 30-day free evaluation, so why not give it a go:
I used it while they were testing the service, and It’s pretty easy to set up.
If you’re wondering how it all works, then watch the video:
They also have a comprehensive FAQ.
From Typotheque to Typekit — nice use of David Březina’s Skolar. Site designed by Jason Santa Maria for Liz Danzico:
Type links
An interview with Rob Leuschke
Ellen Lupton on 90s typography
Web typography techniques
Designing a font to preserve a vanishing language:
League of Type voting
The awful new Hilton logo
Covering the Good Books
Matthew Carter and Hamilton Wayzgoose
I have seen the shadow of the moon
Serene Infoboards
The Art Institute of Chicago — Pentagram
NBC Sued in Font-Related Flare-Up — viaNeed a new wallet? Look no further than:
via @danoliver
Events
Type as Object — Oct 20 through Nov 20:
Typo Zürich
Typographic Exploration in Hangul
Adopt a BodoniOn a lighter note
Think you can tell Helvetica & Arial apart? If you read my Helvetica versus Arial from the archives, you’ll be well-prepared for the Ironic Sans’ Arial-Helvetica quiz:
via @typophile
And the winners are…
Congratulations to Dan Reynolds for winning gold in the Designpreis Deutschland for Malabar (his third award for this typeface):
And another three cheers for David Březina for winning first place at the Gransham International Type Design Competition for Skolar Pro (Cyrillic):
Available for purchase later this year from Type Together.
Free stuff
Seb Lester has kindly agreed to give away one of his wonderful prints. The winner gets to choose from Tits Arse or Hellfire.
To be in with a chance to win one of these great prints, simply be following @seblester and me, and tweet about this post. Be sure to add the hashtag #ilovetypography, then I can find you and enter you into the draw. I will announce the winner early next week.
And finally
If you haven’t already RSS-subscribed, then you can do so with a mere click of your mouse. Would be nice to see ILT squeeze past the 50,000 mark. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this week’s the week in type. Have a productive and happy week.
Collectors Still Love George Bush
Well, at least his rare 1990 Topps card anyway …
In case you weren’t reading Wax Heaven in 2008, the most rare 1990 Topps card recently hit eBay and sold for an astounding $9,000 dollars.
Don’t go digging up your junk wax, odds are you don’t have this card and have never even seen it in person. It’s a special issue produced exclusively for the man responsible for “Jeb”.
It has long been rumored that about 50-100 of these cards were printed and perhaps a few made their way into packs of 1990 Topps. Unfortunately, neither rumor has been confirmed by Topps.
You can check out the auction HERE.
If you need a little more rare 1990 Topps, check out the birth of Refractor technology on baseball cards, which was tested by Topps in their 1990 traded sets.
Who knew there was so much treasure in Junk Wax?
October 23, 2009
N.F.L. Data Reinforces Dementia Links
A flawed union analysis unwittingly corroborates the theory that aging pro football players have cognitive problems at higher rates than the general population.
Kindle? iPhone? Need Your Input
We're getting more and more readers asking us when or if we're going to offering TPM on Kindle or creating a TPM iPhone app or rolling out other versions of the site on similar 'mobile' platforms. The short answer is: Yes, we've had these plans on the drawing board for some time. And we're working on implementing them. But I wanted to start a conversation with you to get a better sense of which mobile devices you're using, how you'd like to be kept up to date on our latest and best stories and more.
Join me after the jump.
We're going to be doing a reader survey to get some more statistical data -- how many TPM Readers own which gizmos. But for now I'd like to hear from you more directly. Would you read more TPM through the day if we had a high-end iPhone app that packaged together our articles and posts in a way that was customized to be easy to read on an iPhone? Would you subscribe to TPM on your Kindle?
If the answer to either of those questions is yes, how do you use these gizmos? Are you to the point where you'd actually prefer to read your TPM on one of these mobile devices? Or would it just be the way you'd keep up when you were on the go or didn't have a computer handy?
Apple and Amazon's feelings notwithstanding, there are other mobile devices besides the Kindle and iPhone. What other devices should we be thinking of. Lots and lots of our readers have Blackberries, of course. But the application market isn't very developed with Blackberry and they lack the same kind of visual interface. But maybe that doesn't matter to you. You just want to be able to read your TPM more easily on your Blackberry. If the answer is yes, let me know.
These are pretty basic questions. But I'm really interested in your reactions, insights and preferences. People talk a lot about the way our reporting leverages how close we are in contact with our readers. But when we're starting new projects, coming up with new ways to allow you read and use the site, it's really new no less helpful. It's really, really important that I get your feedback.
So, want to have TPM on Kindle, iPhone, your blackberry? Yes? How we should we do it? What should we avoid. Let me know what your thinking and thanks in advance.
my new cheap sunglasses
my new cheap sunglasses, originally uploaded by lia.Classic photo.
This is Phil Collins’ daughter. She’s in some dumb...
This is Phil Collins’ daughter. She’s in some dumb movie called The Blind Side.
This was your service journalism post for the day.
Possibly The Saddest Thing Ever: Rat Stuck In Sidewalk
Reader Wayne sent us this photograph and explains, "I was walking along and texting. Not really paying that much attention. Then something caught my eye. I thought I was about to step in dog shit, but quickly realized it was a rat stuck in the sidewalk. A big rat. It had tried to squeeze through a crack in the sidewalk and failed."
Update: Another reader created the second photograph in the gallery, adding, "hopefully this makes it a little better!"
We are still awaiting a reply from Wayne to ask if he tried to help the little guy (or gal) out, where it was located and whether we needed to send out a rescue squad. And if you want to pass the time with some Photoshopped sad rat images... well, you can send them to tips@gothamist.com and we'll compile them into a gallery later.
Update 7:50 p.m.: We've added some of the rat-in-sidewalk Photoshops—if you're not doing anything this Friday night, send 'em our way!
What Is J Street?
There's been a roiling controversy of late about the upcoming J Street conference. We've written a bit about it. But in what I guess is a paradox, in part because of my own strong feelings on the subject, I haven't written much about it myself. In any case, I just read this interview The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg did with J Street's Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami.
"The Downward Spiral: Live at Webster Hall" fan-produced DVD
During the 2008 Lights In The Sky tour we began an open camera policy for stills and video during all NIN shows, inviting fans to capture the events with anything from a cell phone to a hi-def video camera. The results have been overwhelming, filling our own galleries with thousands of images and videos from every show, and inspiring a number of ambitious fansourced video projects within the NIN community. Some of those projects are starting to surface now, and we couldn't be happier with the way the fans have organized themselves and created some truly impressive work.
On the recent Wave Goodbye tour, we were unable to professionally film the band's performance of The Downward Spiral at Webster Hall, due to exorbitant fees requested by the LiveNation venue. Our open camera policy, however, remained in tact, and as soon as the show ended fans took matters into their own hands, organizing online to track down everyone who had filmed HD footage of the show. Now, only two months later, the group has released a polished, edited, downloadable DVD of the full Downward Spiral performance from Webster Hall. The entire thing has been recorded, edited, and distributed entirely by fans, and it's the latest example of the amazing things fans will do when their creativity isn't limited by outdated, misguided restrictions.
You can watch "The Downward Spiral: Live" in HD on this YouTube playlist. You can download it via torrent as a burnable DVD or an iPod/iPhone-friendly video from this page (click the question mark link on that page if you're new to downloading with torrents).
We filmed all of the other final Wave Goodbye shows professionally, and you can expect to see that footage surface in some form or another in the future. In the meantime, we appreciate the efforts of The NIN Hotline, This One Is On Us, and everyone else who helped to immortalize the Webster Hall performance.
Hacked Off
Today was the day I read two things about the Saw movies.
javascript-tools.tmbundle
This Javascript Tools bundle for Textmate totally saved my sanity while debugging a recent javascript bug. Best feature: it can run a selected section of Javascript code in Textmate's webkit-based Preview window.
Remember when?
Remember when blogs were more casual and conversational? Before a post’s purpose was to grab search engine clicks or to promise “99 Answers to Your Problem That We’re Telling You You’re Having”. Yeah. I’d like to get back to that here. -- Dan CederholmYeah... *sigh* me too.
Diwali 2009
October 17th marked the celebration of Diwali among Hindus and other groups around the world. Diwali is also known as the "Festival of Lights" (the name translates as "row of lamps" in Sanskrit). The festival marks the homecoming of Hindu God Rama to Ayodhya after a 14-year exile in the forest following his victory over Ravana, and signifies the victory of good over evil, of light over darkness. Celebrants observe Diwali with fireworks, colorful lanterns, lamps, garlands, sweet treats and worship. Collected here are a handful of photographs of Diwali this year. (33 photos total)Schoolgirl Bhargavi, 7, arranges garlands made from marigold flowers at a roadside stall on the eve of the Hindu festival of Diwali in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad October 16, 2009. Flowers are offered to Hindu gods and goddesses on the occasion of Diwali, the annual festival of lights that was celebrated across the country on Saturday, October 17th. (REUTERS/Krishnendu Halder)
Start your own FabLab: $1,499
At TED2006, Neil Gershenfeld gave a fun and fast-paced introduction to the FabLab -- a miniature fabrication plant for making pretty much anything. Gershenfeld's pioneering FabLab at MIT cost a cool million bucks, thankyouverymuch. He's been spreading the idea of smaller FabLabs around the world -- from urban Boston to the Takoradi Technical Institute in southwestern Ghana.
But since this talk was given in 2006, it's also become more affordable to start a mini FabLab at home or school -- like the starter kit described in this blog post:
This Christmas season,you could buy a loved one an HDTV, a low-end MacBook, or a suite of tools that enable them to create anything they can imagine.
There's a 3D printer, a 2D plotter and a 3D mill (the Unimat 6-in-1 tool system). As blogger Joseph Flaherty says: "The educational applications of these tools are very exciting, and can help bridge the gap between Lego Mindstorms and having to wait for machine shops to provide parts for you." Check out the blog for more details: "For the price of a TV you can start a FabLab" >>
Hello Monkinetic.com
Some of you may have noticed links around here starting to point to a new domain: www.monkinetic.com. Well, today I finally pushed the Big Red Button that directs all traffic from redmonk.net over to monkinetic.com. In some ways this is a bittersweet moment for me - I still feel a close personal connection to the redmonk moniker (though this site fell from first place in the google war long ago). I first started using 'monkinetic' as the blog title back when I was trying to make redmonk.net into a business site (ca. 2003 I think) and the name stuck. I've grown to love it, and I'm glad to finally be giving it it's own domain!
Along with the domain move, I'm changing platforms. A bit over a year or so ago, I moved this blog from WordPress (self-hosted on Dreamhost) to Movable Type (also self-hosted). I really like Movable Type (I should, I make a living building awesome stuff with it!) but I've grown weary of managing the hosting. So I've moved the site to TypePad, and today I flipped the switch to direct all traffic from redmonk.net to monkinetic.com.
There are still some style fixes that need to be applied - I ported the looks and feel from MT to TypePad's advanced templates (I haven't lost my need for control completely) and there are loose ends scattered about. But now that this is "Home", I hope to finish the spit and polish soon.
The move to TP also means that commenters can signup/login with their TypePad, OpenID, Facebook, or Twitter accounts, which is a nice touch.
Thanks for reading!
October 22, 2009
The rise and fall and rise of the Roman Empire
David Galbraith graphs the population of Rome from 300 BC to the present.
The population [of Rome] during the Renaissance was miniscule (yet it was still a global center), when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel it was considerably smaller than a town like Palo Alto is today (60K); Rome at its nadir was about the size of Google (20K employees); the growth of Rome during the Industrial era is much greater than the rise of Ancient Rome.
David, you should check out The Inheritance of Rome; I'm about 100 pages in and pretty interesting so far. Also, it would be instructive to do the same graph but Rome's population as a percentage of world population.
Tags: cities David Galbraith population Rome
From Novice to Adept: Embrace the Copious Documentation
The second hack in the book Perl Hacks (no link; if you download it and send me $2 and Ovid $0.50 via PayPal or wherever, we get a lot more money than we would if you bought a printed copy from the publisher, grumble grumble) talks about perldoc for a good reason. If you don't take advantage of Perl 5's copious documentation, you'll struggle learning Perl 5, far more than necessary.
(The first hack in the book is to look up distributions and documentation on the CPAN. As mst says, CPAN is my language.) Note that well-behaved CPAN distributions also include copious documentation which integrates with
perldoc. I miss this in other languages.The examples here assume you use
perldocfrom the command line. If that's not the case -- if you have them installed on your system in HTML form or if you prefer to browse them on perldoc.perl.org, the suggestions will still work with modifications.Start by running
perldoc perltoc. You don't have to know or understand all of this, but it gives you an overview of all of the documentation included as part of a complete Perl 5 installation. If you've never read any of the documentation before -- if you're a novice to Perl 5 in general, perhaps -- thenperldoc perlintrois a quick survey of what you can do with Perl. It does presume some familiarity with programming, but if you're reading this I presume the same.Other documentation worth skimming includes
perldoc perlstyleandperldoc perlglossary. The former will help you as a neophyte understand what makes decent Perl and the latter explains several of the terms of art in the Perl community. You should also readperldoc perldoc, as it includes gems many Perl gurus don't know.Operator and Builtin Documentation
The most useful
perldocflag is-f. After eleven years with the language, syntax rarely fools me, but I still can't remember all of the return values ofcallerorlocaltimein the right order, and I can't always remember all of the arguments tospliceandsubstr.
perldoc -f namelooks throughperldoc perlfuncand displays the documentation of the builtin named name. I use this regularly:$ perldoc -f splice splice ARRAY,OFFSET,LENGTH,LIST splice ARRAY,OFFSET,LENGTH splice ARRAY,OFFSET splice ARRAY Removes the elements designated by OFFSET and LENGTH from an array, and replaces them with the elements of LIST, if any. In list context, returns the elements removed from the array. In scalar context, returns the last element removed, or "undef" if no elements are removed. The array grows or shrinks as necessary. If OFFSET is negative then it starts that far from the end of the array. If LENGTH is omitted, removes everything from OFFSET onward. If LENGTH is negative, removes the elements from OFFSET onward except for -LENGTH elements at the end of the array. If both OFFSET and LENGTH are omitted, removes everything. If OFFSET is past the end of the array, perl issues a warning, and splices at the end of the array.This is handy if you remember the name of the builtin, but not its exact syntax or semantics. When I can't remember what I want, I read a couple of pages into
perldoc perlfunc, which categorizes builtins by their uses.Occasionally the difference between a Perl 5 operator and builtin is significant, so you have to trawl through
perldoc perlopfor more details. That's rarely an issue for me, but that may be how I program. Be aware of the distinction and be willing to check the other document, if necessary.Perl FAQs
Perl 5 also includes a copious FAQ which contains a wealth of information for novices.
perldoc perlfaqis a great place to start, but when I need to look something up in the FAQ, I use the-qoption toperldoc:$ perldoc -q number Found in /usr/share/perl/5.10/pod/perlfaq4.pod Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)? Internally, your computer represents floating-point numbers in binary. Digital (as in powers of two) computers cannot store all numbers exactly. Some real numbers lose precision in the process. This is a problem with how computers store numbers and affects all computer languages, not just Perl. perlnumber shows the gory details of number representations and conversions. To limit the number of decimal places in your numbers, you can use the printf or sprintf function. See the "Floating Point Arithmetic" for more details. printf "%.2f", 10/3; my $number = sprintf "%.2f", 10/3;This relies on a keyword search, so you have to get a keyword in the title of a question right, but if you browse the titles of the FAQ, you'll get some idea of the questions in the FAQ and the answers you can expect.
I tend to use the
-fand-qswitches when I know I need something in the Perl 5 documentation but I can't remember its details.
Photo of the Day: Candy Corn Traffic Cones
Wouldn't the world be better if all traffic cones just looked like candy corn? These were spotted in Washington D.C. by Flickr user diabetik. As a candy corn hater, I vote for more of these, less of the nasty Halloween triangles. [via DCist]
Related
Video: How Candy Corn is Made
Cakespy: Homemade Candy Corn
Candy Corn Knit Cap
Natalia Poses for Herself
Dear Fashionista,
So here I was just wandering through Soho doing my thing when I happened upon Natalia at the corner of Prince and Greene, snapping shots of herself with a digital camera.
Though I suppose that's just an average Thursday afternoon in this neighborhood. If it's not a fashion shoot, it's Gossip Girl, right?
Anyway I thought you guys would enjoy them! Also, how amazing are those shoes????
xoxo,
A Supermodel-Spotting Reader
Sponsored Topics: Gossip Girl - Digital camera - Fashion - Photography - Shopping
Hulu to charge for content; cubicle dwellers everywhere cringe
Hey you. Yeah, you - guy wasting company time by watching last week's episode of Heroes on Hulu. Enjoying it? Well, get ready to cough up some cash to find out what happens next.
In a move that we've all long feared was probably inevitable anyway, Chase Carey, deputy chairman of News Corp. (one of Hulu's co-owners) annouced that Hulu would begin charging users. According to Broadcasting & Cable, Hulu's fees could start as early as 2010.
You may commence booing now.
Continue reading Hulu to charge for content; cubicle dwellers everywhere cringe
Filed under: Industry, Video, Web, Reality-Free, Webisodes
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SEC Launches Investor.gov on WordPress.com VIP
The SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) announced the launch today of Investor.gov – a site focused on helping and educating investors:
Investor.gov is hosted in the WordPress.com VIP program, and uses a custom theme based on the GPL licensed Vibrant CMS theme.
Be sure to check out the video welcome message from Chairman Mary Schapiro for more details.
[ Visit Investor.gov ]
Good Enough to be in NYT Bay Area Blog?
Shared by Eve
YES! Good one, Brittney.The New York Times' Bay Area Blogs is seeking submissions for their blogroll--a list of sites selected by the author of author(s) to be included as outgoing suggestions to readers--but you are going to not curse, keep your space up-to-date and be a good writer, I learned at SFist:
Keep it relatively clean. We do not view links as an endorsement — caveat browser — but our readers come in a wide range of ages and sensibilities. We do not want to direct them without warning toward profanity-laden screeds.
I'm down with blogrolls, but if you're gonna do old school, do old school.
It used to be gauche to ask to be on someone's blogroll. Soliciting people to submit to *maybe* be listed if they live up to some arbitrary standard not only tacky, it goes against the whole spirit of blogrolls. They are lists picked by the author, to reflect what that author is reading or inspired by or what have you. This "maybe we'll link to you if are good enough"? It stinks of pretention, and isn't exactly the best way to warm yourself to the existing online community, since there are bound to be some rejections that result in hurt feelings.
More at SFist.
Antisocial bookmarking
Every time I want to save or share a link these days, I run headlong into a wall of frustration. There are so many options but none of them are right; they're barely even close. I haven't built bookmarking into giraffe yet, so I'm stuck between these options:
"Readability" is Readability, but every other link there is for saving bookmarks. If I want to save a plain web bookmark, I have a few options. If I click "delicious":
The important things to note here are (a) it completely ignored the text I'd selected to quote, (b) half the window is crap I don't use (like Send, or the visible tag list), (c) it's 2009 but these tags are space delimited, and (d) this is the service I have to use if I want anyone to see links I save.
I still have a soft spot for Gnolia, but when I click its link (I use the mini-marker):
This is a much more compact view, which is nice. After getting used to Gnolia providing star ratings, I added ratings to Delicious and got really used to them. Since I first saw them on Gnolia, I'm not sure why the mini-marker doesn't have ratings. On the other hand, Gnolia uses a four-star rating system, and though I tried a couple times I can't adjust mentally from the Netflix five-star system—so maybe it doesn't matter that they're there anyway.
Also no one will see anything I post to Gnolia.
Here's Pinboard:
Not pleasing aesthetically, but that doesn't really matter. It doesn't have ratings, though. I hadn't noticed the nice touch that it preselects the tags field. The "tldr" link is also Pinboard, since it has the unread list feature, which I totally use. That link doesn't even prompt, it just pops up, saves the link, and closes itself. Handy.
But no one will see anything I post to Pinboard. (Handily that doesn't matter for tldr links.)
You might notice it's not in my link bar, but I had tried briefly to switch to a TypePad linkblog using the great new bookmarklet:
This is a pretty nice bookmarklet, but for the purpose of bookmarking it's not only missing ratings but tags, altogether. However, it's the one option that realizes the quote I wanted to quote is a quote, instead of leaving it in the description field for me to quote myself. Also this makes blog posts instead of bookmarks—not even link assets in my TypePad library—so it's ultimately not that useful for this, I think.
I would find it funny that none of these services are quite correct, but since I only remember that when trying to share a bookmark, it's really a moment of burning frustration that immediately collapses into a disappointed malaise. I guess I might just have to do it myself.
The ideal startup career path
The startup world is extremely small. If you’re smart, work really hard, and act with integrity, people will notice. Contrary to popular wisdom, you will actually have more job stability than working at a big company. via www.cdixon.org I'm officially on the Chris Dixon bandwagon. Good blogger!
Proposed new Mets uniform
Found this design for a new Mets jersey over at MetsBlog. I like it. Created by Matthew Weiler, it's clean and simple with a nod to the glory years of the 80s. Hopefully, the front office is listening.
Serious Beer: Brown Ales from England and Beyond
[Photographs: Maggie Hoffman]
Brown ale was once the beer of the British masses. In the late 1700s, fancier folks began to favor the newfangled pale ales. (Pale malt was more expensive to process than wood-fired darker malt, making pale ale a bit of a luxury drink.) But low-alcohol brown ales were perfect for fueling long days of hard work and long evenings in the pub. A good brown ale is gentle, smooth, and wonderfully drinkable—pint after pint.
Despite their low alcohol, these are flavorful beers. They tend towards maltiness, reminding some of our tasters of bagels and malted milkshakes, which is not really a bad thing. English-style brown ales aren't heavily hopped, but they manage to avoid being sweet or heavy.
They're perfect for fall, with a whisper of chocolate and walnut. Our favorite brown ales would be delicious with roast pork tenderloin or chops. It's worth considering serving brown ale at your Thanksgiving dinner: the toffee flavors in the beer would pair well with a crisp-skinned turkey and any caramelized bits of mushroom in the stuffing.
Serious Beer Ratings
***** Our new favorite
**** Awesome, worth remembering
*** We'd consider buying this again
** There are probably better options
* No, thanks, I'll have water.
Ratings are subject to personal taste.A Top Notch Pint
Wychwood Hobgoblin Dark English Ale Oxfordshire, England 5.2% ABV
This flavorful, drinkable beer is almost red in color. Rich malt and caramel flavors are prevalent, though a touch of bitterness keeps things balanced. A hint of chamomile seemed to mingle with the yeasty, bready notes. This mellow and smooth ale was our favorite among this bunch.
***1/2Newcastle Brown Ale Dunston, England 4.7% ABV
Fresh, smooth, and well balanced—we could drink this rosy brown beer all day. Malt and toffee flavors blend pleasantly with a light bitterness. Some tasters noticed a hint of orange-peel flavor. This is not a super complex brew, but it's perfect for fall: It's crisp, warm, and refreshing. This could be a good entry-level beer for folks who like their beers mild and fruity.
***1/2We Wouldn't Refuse Another Round
Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale Tadcaster, England 5% ABV
At first sip, we tasted toasted malt and a hint of juicy pear. Bracing bitterness followed and cleaned the palate. The finish is a minerally and dry—supposedly a result of limestone sediment in the brewery's water.
***Coopers Brewery Dark Ale Regency Park, South Australia 4.5% ABV
No, it's not from England. But this brown ale is worth mentioning. It's substantial and a little nutty, with just enough bitterness to balance the warm coffee flavor. Some tasted a hint of licorice, and the malty notes reminded one of our tasters of an old-fashioned chocolate phosphate.
***Not Quite What We're Looking For
Moorhouse's Black Cat Lancashire, England 3.4% ABV
Black Cat, indeed—this beer is seriously dark in color, though it's surprisingly light-bodied. The roasted malt in this beer crosses the line over to smokiness; this is almost like a Rauchbier. "It's like they waved bacon over the barrel," remarked one taster. Peaty flavors mingle with dry chocolate—this could be a good beer to drink with meat you've charred on the grill.
**Don't worry, American brown ales are on tap next week.
About the author: Maggie Hoffman is always looking for her new favorite beer. She also writes about cooking in a teeny New York kitchen for Pithy and Cleaver.
Windows 7 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard at no additional cost
Filed under: Hardware, Software, Open Source
Anil Dash has described how to run Windows 7 on a Mac running OS 10.6 -- as a virtual machine -- for free (after you buy Windows 7, of course). It's not very tricky and, according to Anil, works well. Start by installing Windows 7 in Boot Camp and wait while it grabs the necessary drivers (the duration of this process will vary).
Next, eject the Boot Camp disk and enter a few simple Terminal commands. You'll also need VirtualBox, which is free and open source virtualization software. Once you're done in Terminal, launch VirtualBox and browse to the file you made with Terminal. Read Anil's article for the details.
As today is Windows 7 launch day, we're interested in hearing from anyone who has installed it on their Mac, either via Boot Camp or virtualization.
For more, read Christina's post on installing Windows 7 on a Mac (at Download Squad), or Steve's take here. You can get your absolute fill of Win7 coverage all day today at DLS.TUAWWindows 7 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard at no additional cost originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The ideal startup career path
For most people I know who join or start companies, the primary goal is not to get rich – it is to work on something they love, with people they respect, and to not be beholden to the vagaries of the market- in other words, to be independent. The reality is being independent often means having made money and/or being able to raise money from others.
A while back, I posted about how I recommend thinking about non-founder option grants. In the comments, Aaron Cohen made the point that given today’s “good” exit sizes and standard equity grants, most non-founders will not gain independence even in the (non-extreme) good cases:
Most startup employees need to realize they are on a journey and that in addition to making a few hundred thousand dollars on a good outcome they are learning how to become more senior at the next company. Real wealth creation will take founding, seniority, or staggeringly large exits.
As Aaron said, you shouldn’t think of joining a startup as just joining a company. You should think of it as joining the startup career path. This career path could mean starting a company as your first job. It could also mean working at a few startups and then starting a company. (In my view, if your goal is to start a company, it is mostly a waste of time to work anywhere but a startup – with the possible exception of a short stint in venture capital).
Maybe you will make some money working at a startup, but more importantly you will hopefully work for founders and managers who are smart and willing to mentor you and eventually fund or help you fund your startup.
The startup world is extremely small. If you’re smart, work really hard, and act with integrity, people will notice. Contrary to popular wisdom, you will actually have more job stability than working at a big company. And hopefully you’ll go on to start your own company, gain independence, and then help others do the same.
David Hockney's iPhone Passion
By Lawrence Weschler
After two decades of regularly finding himself caught up in all sorts of seemingly extraneous side-passions (photocollages, operatic stage design, fax extravaganzas, homemade photocopier print runs, a controversial revisionist art-historical investigation, and a watercolor idyll), David Hockney, now age seventy-two, has finally taken to painting once again, doing so, over the past three or four years, with a vividness and a sheer productivity perhaps never before seen in his career. This recent body of work consists almost entirely of seasonal landscapes of the rolling hills, hedgerows, tree stands, valley wolds, and farm fields surrounding the somewhat déclassé onetime summer seaside resort of Bridlington, England, on the North Sea coast, where he now lives. Some are intimately scaled but many are among the largest, most ambitious canvases of his entire career.
New Uniform Idea: The Weiler Design, by Matthew Weiler
In a similar theme, Matthew Weiler sent in the following design for a new Mets home jersey, using the 1986 racing stripes on egg-shell, with no black drop-shadow, no pinstripes, and no names on the back.
I like it, Matthew. I like it a lot.
I know there are traditionalists who believe every design should include the original, thin-blue pinstripes, from 1962. I am not against the pinstripes… it’s just, I like the clean look of the uniform without them.
Also, as a child of the 80s, I love the thick blue and orange racing stripe along the side of the shirt and pants, without any shadow or black in the design.
I feel like the Weiler Design is a nice hybrid of traditional and modern… also, it’s clean, simple, classic and new.
Nice work, Matthew.
So, this got me thinking…
If you have a design, do a mock up in Photoshop, and e-mail it to me. I will post the best ones during the off season, after which in spring we can have a site-wide vote to determine the best new look.
Off-Peak Discounts for NYC Transit: An Intriguing Idea
Discounting off-peak transit service could be a boon to New York City's transportation and quality of life, so long as revenues can be found to make up for the likely farebox shortfall.Photo: cunningsue/Flickr
MTA chief Jay Walder floated the idea of off-peak discounts in an interview in today's New York Times. While Walder didn't offer quantification, the Balanced Transportation Analyzer software model I've developed with Ted Kheel can estimate the effects of time-varied subway fares -- not just how ridership might shift from peak to off-peak periods, but indirect impacts such as the shift of auto trips to transit and the resulting changes to car travel speeds.
The results look promising for this prototype fare structure that I tested with the BTA:
- 1/3-off subway fare from 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m.
- 1/6-off subway fare from 5:00 to 7:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.
- 15 percent higher subway fare from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. (Although Walder referred only to off-peak discounts, the model suggests that forestalling an increase in ridership during the two peak hours, when the system is strained beyond capacity, could require raising fares at those times.)
- No fare change during the "shoulder" hours of 7:00 to 8:00 a.m., 9:00 to 10:00 a.m., 4:00 to 5:00 p.m., and 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
- 1/4-off subway fare at all hours on weekends and holidays.
- 1/4-off bus fare at all times (not mentioned by Walder but assumed here to preserve overall fare parity).
Here are the results:
- The average price of a subway ride drops by 23 percent, equivalent to a $210 annual savings for a typical straphanger who takes 12 trains a week.
- Notwithstanding the overall discount, however, peak-hour subway users who could not change their commute times would pay $100 a year more in fares.
- Annual savings of $230 for bus riders, due to the assumed 25 percent drop in bus fares.
- Subway usage increases 3 percent, even as morning and evening peak hour ridership drops by 1 percent and 3 percent, respectively, slightly easing crowding during those critical times.
- Bus usage increases 5 percent.
- 15,000 fewer cars enter the Manhattan CBD on weekdays, raising average speeds there by 2 percent.
- Car and truck drivers save six million hours of travel time worth an estimated $230 million that they now lose to gridlock each year -- with a majority of the savings occurring outside the CBD.
- A rise in cycle and pedestrian commuting due to lower traffic, with the resulting increase in physical activity translating into health and longevity benefits worth an additional $116 million a year.
- Fewer crashes and less pollution, with health and related benefits close to $100 million a year.
The downside of this program is an estimated $300 million drop in farebox revenues: $134 million on the subways, $162 million on buses.
The logical place to make up the shortfall, congestion pricing, is a subject Walder will obviously want to avoid until he is on even firmer political footing. The synergies are strong from a technical standpoint, since differential subway pricing would help the subways absorb car drivers whom a cordon toll would induce to switch to transit. The political synergies could be strong as well if differential fares help expand the constituency for congestion pricing.
Does anyone like 3-D?
Simply put, has anyone ever attended a 2-D movie and thought, ‘If only it were in 3-D’? I doubt it, because 2-D creates a perfectly effective illusion of depth and dimension. When I see Lawrence growing from a dot far across the desert sands, it never occurs to me that I’m watching a 2-D image. When I watch 3-D, however, I’m constantly reminded that it’s in 3-D. Objects approach and recede alarmingly, drawing you out of the actual film. via www.spectator.co.uk Jason Kottke led me to this.
MS does on-demand software printing at retail
Microsoft is really making a serious push into retail, as evidenced by what I've seen today at the opening of their first retail store. One of the biggest issues with software sales at retail is the real estate that it takes up on the sales floor. You can't possibly have every product available for the consumer to buy. Or can you?
At Microsoft Stores, customers will be able to purchase anything in the Microsoft catalog of PC software, even if the retail box is not carried in the store. Using a kiosk with a touchscreen display that resembles a stripped down, user-friendly version of the Microsoft online store, customers will be able to add products to a cart. Once finished, you save your cart with a name and approach any of the store's representatives with a handheld computer.
After paying with cash or credit card, the disc, cover and manual are printed in the back of the store. The entire process takes about four minutes and the final result looks just as good as if you'd purchased the retail box.
This is the kind of thing I've been waiting to see for years (in fact, about five years ago, I proposed a similar solution to the executives at a major retailer I worked for to better manage CD and DVD sales). Having a one-stop shop for everything Microsoft has to offer without having to worry about shipping times from an online store or praying that the big box retailer down the street will have what you want in stock is a huge advantage for the new chain. Well done, Microsoft.
First video from a plane, 1909
This short film was made in 1909 and depicts Wilbur Wright flying one of his airplanes around an open field. At 1:38, they attach the camera to the plane and shot what is thought to be the first video footage shot from a powered flying machine.
Then the plane started up again, followed a launching pad and took off: the camera was fixed for the first time on the ground that gave way...and the emotion was there, so great you could almost touch it! The image was as unstable as the cabin of the plane flying at low altitude, flying over the countryside and gradually approaching a town.
(via @ebertchicago)
Tags: flying video Wright brothers
Don’t knock the blockbusters
Promoting Pirates of the Caribbean in Japan (By tralala.online)
Kristin here:
When was the last time you heard someone complaining about the high cost of the latest Toyota prototype? Probably not recently, since car manufacturers don’t tend to boast about how much it costs them to design a new model. In fact, I couldn’t find any information on how much the development of automobile prototypes costs. Some new models catch on, some don’t. Presumably some don’t make a profit for their makers. The same tends to be true for other big-ticket items.
In a way, a film’s negative is like a prototype. It costs a lot for a mainstream commercial film to be made, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in many cases, before the first distribution print is struck and the first ticket sold. Yet once that prototype exists, any number of distribution prints can be struck, and a film may make back many times its negative cost.
For some reason, the cost of making that negative is often public knowledge. To some extent, at least, since we all know that the budget as acknowledged by a studio may be considerably less than the actual costs. The notion that a movie set its company back by $200 million is to some extent a selling point. I’m sure that back in 1922 Universal wasn’t happy that Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives ended up costing more than a million dollars. Still, they turned it to their advantage by advertising it as the first million-dollar movie, and studios have been using the same tactic ever since.
The producers and makers of other kinds of artworks don’t tend to make such information public. How much does it cost to put on a symphonic concert or publish a book? We may hear about big advances paid to an author, but that’s basically a lump-sum against future royalties, and the author doesn’t get any more until–if ever–the advance is paid off. But how much do editorial supervision, printing, and binding set a publisher back? What kind of money goes into the creation of a large stone sculpture?
Journalists looking for a hook for an article about movies find a sturdy one in the idea that today’s film budgets are bloated. They point to classic movies of decades past that cost only a few million to make and then compare these to the loud, overblown summer tentpoles of today, with their multi-hundred-million-dollar costs. Of course this overlooks the inflation of the dollar over the years. In the 1950s the average family income was about $5000 and an average house cost under $20,000. A penny bought a gumball and could be used in parking meters. Just about everything costs a lot more now.
To be sure, other factors have raised the budgets of films well beyond what they would be through inflation alone. The key factors have been star salaries and computer-generated special effects. The latter can account for half the cost of an effects-heavy film. Beyond the negative cost, typical budgets for prints and advertising have skyrocketed.
Some people seem to see an innate immorality in today’s biggest budgets, as well as an almost inevitable lack of quality in the films that result. Here’s one of the first results of a search on “big budget movies,” from Dmitry Sheynin on suite101.com. He even makes the car comparison:
The film industry has had a good summer this year – action sequences were bigger than ever, and expensive displays of pyrotechnics and CGI showcased new and exciting ways to destroy cinematic credibility.
With the economic crisis forcing many companies to scale down or even discontinue some of their more opulent product lines (think GM), it’s comforting to know Hollywood studios are still spending inordinate sums of money producing bad movies.
I think that’s fairly typical of the grousing you find on the internet and in print. No doubt Hollywood produces many bad movies. But actually, it is comforting to know that Hollywood is still spending great sums of money, ordinate or in-, if you think of the welfare of the country as a whole.
Every now and then I’ve pondered the possibility that American movies must be one of the products, if not the product, that has the most favorable balance of trade. While the US doesn’t have quite the stranglehold on world film markets that it used to, most significant Hollywood films get exported to numerous countries. Conversely, very few films from abroad are imported, and those that come in, especially the foreign-language ones, play in far fewer theaters and sell far fewer tickets than do domestic films. In 2006, according to US census figures, foreign films took in $216 million in the U.S., while domestic films sold $7.1 billion worth of tickets. So that’s 3% of the U.S. market for imported films, which is the figure I’ve heard pretty consistently for decades.
(In passing, I note from the same report that theaters made 66% of their income on tickets, meaning that we moviegoers spend about a third of our cash on all that stuff in the lobby.)
Turns out my ponderings have been correct. On the Motion Picture Association of America’s “Research & Statistics” page, there appears the claim, “We are the only American industry to run a positive balance of trade in every country in which we do business.” (”The industry” includes both film and television.) In April the MPAA put out its latest annual report, “The Economic Impact of the Motion Picture & Television Industry on the United States.” The combined trade surplus in the moving-picture industry for 2007 was $13.6 billion, or 10% of the US trade surplus in private sector services. According to the report, “The motion picture and television surplus was larger than the combined surplus of the telecommunications, management and consulting, legal, and medical services sectors, and larger than sectors like computer and information services and insurance services.”
Lest anyone think these figures are mere industry propaganda, the MPAA’s information, though made public, is gathered for the benefit of the film studios, which collectively own the association. Screen Digest, a highly respected trade publication, summarized some of the report’s material in its September issue (”Film and TV Are Key to US Economy,” p. 265).
For better or worse, most films that are really successful abroad are big-budget items, with lots of expensive special effects and (usually) top stars. Back in 1997 people were aghast at the first $200 million movie, Titanic—until it brought in nearly $2 billion around the world. Here, in unadjusted dollars, are the top foreign earners for the past nine years (not including domestic box-office):
2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull $469,534,914
2007 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End $651,576,067
2006 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest $642,863,913
2005 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire $605,908,000
2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban $546,093,000
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King $742,083,616
2002 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $616,655,000
2001 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone $657,158,000
2000 Mission: Impossible II $330,978,216
Add in the DVDs and ancillary products, and the balance of trade gets even more favorable.
Yes, it may sound absurd that it requires $200 million to make a movie, especially one that gets mediocre reviews from critics and fans. Still, from a business point of view, it makes sense and it’s good for the country. It’s especially important in a period of financial crisis, when the movie industry’s income seems considerably less affected than many others. Our overall trade deficit is falling, since Americans are saving more and buying less from abroad. This year the film and television industry’s share of the surplus will presumably grow.
Apart from the balance of trade, according to the MPAA report, in 2007 the moving-image industry also employed 2.5 million people, paid $41.1 billion in wages, spent $38.2 billion at vendors and suppliers, and handed over $13 billion in federal and local taxes.
If you think the trade deficit doesn’t affect you, think again the next time you travel abroad and curse the exchange rate with the euro or the yen.
No doubt there’s a great deal of waste and slippery dealing involved in those huge budgets, but there are definite advantages that don’t get considered often enough.
I do see a lot of foreign cars on the roads.
How to Make Trouble and Influence People
Iain McIntyre and Breakdown Press have joined forces to release a book length collection of the greatest hits of Iain's long running zine How to Make Trouble and Influence People. It's fully rewritten, reedited, full of new material, and beautifully designed by Tom Civil (I've had a sneak peak, it looks awesome!). I'm hoping to get some of these babies over here for people in N. America to check out, but in the meantime, have look at the new Trouble website HERE, and Breakdown Press HERE.“These tales and images also serve to remind us that political activity need not be a predictable and grim slog. As well-resourced as our opponents may be, they are vulnerable to the use of creativity, solidarity, and humour. Indeed, these are often the only tools we have.”
1960 Topps Frank Torre
I am lazy.I have here a perfectly good 1960 Topps Frank Torre.
And I don't feel like writing anything about it.
The Most Important Drink of Your Day: GQ.com
GQ Magazine listed their favorite coffee companies in America, complete with a slideshow. It’s nice to see so many friends acknowledged at once, and to such a large audience. Congrats to you all! Chris, this isn’t the first time your arm has been published. Bonus points to you if you can remember the first.
Posted in cafes, coffee, people Tagged: brewing, coffee, espresso, green coffee, roasters
New York Times Cuts Its Way To Huge Earnings Surprise, Revenue In Line
The New York Times (NYT) blew away earnings expectations in the third quarter, thanks to aggressive cost cutting.
EPS of $0.16 per share beat consensus of a loss of $0.01 per share. Revenue was basically in line: $571 million versus estimates of $562 million.
See Also:
- NYT's Bill Keller: We Will Not Fire Journalists Based On Pageviews (NYT)
- New York Times Staff "Stunned" By Newsroom Cuts (NYT)
- New York Times Says It Will Not Sell The Boston Globe (MEMO) (NYT)
Dirty Little Secret of Success
A longing for love and approval. That’s the dirty little secret of success.
Yes, you must make something people want. Of course, you must improve and extend it. Certainly, you must give 110% where customer satisfaction is concerned. Definitely, you must convert your customers to evangelists. All of that is true, always has been and will be.
BUT.
But you won’t be able to do those things, not really, not all the way, not as they must be done, unless there is a brokenness in you that continually craves attention and affection you somehow missed out on.
You have to have been abandoned, betrayed, ridiculed, unsupported at some point when you needed it most.
This sounds terrible and it is. But it’s the facts.
A contented person with a whole heart, who has never doubted for a moment that she is loved by God and the universe, should not bother trying to succeed as a creative entrepreneur. She should get a job working for someone else, turn it off at 6:00 PM, and come home to the people who love her.
Only a restless, broken heart can drive you to do what is necessary.
And that’s how to succeed in business without really crying.
When failed genius is rewarded
The reaction to the news that John Meriwether is setting up a third hedge fund has been entirely predictable, especially when Sam Jones's story deadpans that “the fund is expected use the same strategy as both LTCM and JWM to make money”. (Meriwether's first two funds, of course, were spectacular failures.)
But really this isn't a third hedge fund at all, it's just a reincarnation of the second one, minus the high-water mark. Kid Dynamite explains:
JWM Partners closed last year after losing 44% amidst the market turmoil of 2008. Hedge funds typically have “high water marks” which means that investors don't pay performance fees to the fund manager in subsequent years unless the fund surpasses its highest point. Thus, the solution for fund managers whenever they have a bad year is to liquidate, wait a bit, and form a new fund?!?! Anyone who was invested in the old fund and the new fund thus pays fees twice: you paid when JWM Partners reached its high water mark, and now you'll pay again if/when Meriweather Cubed (not the real name) manages to make money - the same money JWM Partners effectively lost after reaching its high water mark.
This is great for John Meriwether, of course. And perhaps, in an attempt to goose his AUM, he might even give investors in JWM a break on his fees. Mostly, however, it's just an indication of the same delusion that we're seeing in the leveraged-loan market: the idea that the status quo ante was “normal”, and that now we've rebounded back to something very similar. After all, if the financial crisis was a once-in-a-century event, we won't see another for 99 years, right?
You've got to give this to Meriwether, though: the guy's clearly a spectacularly good salesman. That's a key attribute of hedge fund managers which they tend not to talk about: after all, they love to give the impression that people are giving them billions of dollars just because of their unsurpassed investment prowess. The truth is clearly very different.
October 21, 2009
Finally: Tetris Dress!
Well, it's been a long time coming, but I have FINALLY finished my Tetris dress, and here it is.
Here's the back (with iPhoto enhancement -- the colors aren't really that bright):
Here's the bodice, so you can see the contrast facing (these colors are truer, too):
It's just in time, too, as I'm talking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today (about Wordnik, naturally!), and I hate giving a talk without a new dress. There's something about sewing that makes it easier to think out talks ... by the way, the talk will be STREAMED LIVE (ulp) at 3 pm PDT, so if you want to hear me talk, tune in! (Warning: I am shorter in real life than I am on the blog.)
If you like this dress, would you do me a favor and tweet/Facebook/delicious the link around? I'm having a personal-best contest to see if this one shows up in more places than the Darth Vader dress!
Flickr is made of people
You can tag people directly in Flickr photos now.
Tags: Flickr photography
How to run Windows 7 under Mac OS X 10.6 for free
Pardon the uncharacteristically nerdy post, but I thought I'd write up a handy way I'd found to run Windows 7 in a seamlessly-integrated virtual machine under Mac OS X 10.6. I started with these basic components:
- A MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6.1 (Snow Leopard)
- A license for a full install of Windows 7 Ultimate
- VirtualBox 3.08 for Mac OS X
If you're like a lot of geeks that I know, you have a Mac as your main machine, but often need to drop into Windows to check things like browser compatibility or to use some particular Windows applications. I happen to just really like Windows 7 (it's on par with Mac OS overall for me, with some parts being better, such as the Windows Taskbar being much better than the Mac's Dock, and of course some parts being worse.) Some of these instructions may be obvious, but I hadn't seen a writeup anywhere, so here goes.
Here's what you'll need to do:
- Install Windows 7 under Boot Camp, following the normal instructions. All of the Vista drivers for Boot Camp worked fine for me, and the install was actually pretty quick.
- Download and install VirtualBox. This is an open source virtualization system that runs on Mac OS, a lot like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, but available for free.
- The tricky part: You'll need to do a little bit of geeky stuff. First, eject the Windows boot camp disk in Finder. (It's usually called "Untitled".) Then, launch Terminal so you can enter two commands.
sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0 -filename win7raw.vmdk -partitions 3- Start up VirtualBox, make a new Windows 7 machine, and browse to
win7raw.vmdkin your home directory to choose the virtual hard drive for the machine. Your Windows install should boot up. It'll fuss for a little while as it installs new drivers.- Once that's done, you can optionally install the VirtualBox Guest Additions software to let your Windows install completely integrate with your Mac OS X environment.
While it's not quite as seamless as some of the paid alternatives out there, I've found it was very easy to do (under an hour total, and only 15 minutes or so if you already have Windows installed), works very well, and is speedy enough to use regularly.
As always, your mileage may vary, and comments or corrections or feedback are welcome. I was too lazy to do screenshots of the whole process, but if you want to turn this into a complete gadget blog-worthy writeup, I'll be happy to link to it. If you really liked this how-to, you can buy WIndows 7 from Amazon and I'll make a few bucks.
The Assumption
TPM's Eric Kleefeld ascends directly to heaven after landing this interview with Congressman and professional quote machine Alan Grayson.
Beneath the pyrotechnics there's the actually very real and serious issue of people who suffer needlessly and even lose their lives because they lack health insurance.
New IRC channel for PSGI and Plack
We've been using #http-engine IRC channel for the convenience but we agree that PSGI/Plack talk invades the whole channel and is confusing to newcomers: so we made a new IRC channel dedicated for PSGI and plack talk (yes, another channel!)
David documents the moment
David documents the moment, originally uploaded by msippey.Hadn't seen this.
The glittery Big Bang
You say to me "light photos" and I say "zzzzz", but Alan Jaras' light patterns captured on film are probably what the universe looked like at an early age.
(via justin blanton)
Tags: Alan Jaras photography
Flickr! It’s made of people!
We’ve launched People in Photos, a new feature that will help put a face to the Flickrverse and enable you to highlight members that you’ve photographed in a whole new way. People in Photos lets you add a member to a photo, find photos of people you know, and manage which photos you’re in. Huzzah!
To add someone to a photo, you can either type in the member’s name, much like you’d add a tag, or you can draw a face boundary on the photo, as with a note. People in Photos has been wired into your your Recent Activity, so you’ll always be up to date with who’s added you to a photo or added other members to your photos.
But maybe you’re thinking, “Eep — me in a photo?” Don’t fret. We’ve spent a lot of time weaving together a variety of preferences that will ensure you’re only featured on Flickr in a way that you’re comfortable with.
You can set your preferences for who can add you to photos and who can add people to photos you’ve shared. You can even determine on a photo-by-photo basis if you’d like to be featured — after all, everyone has a bad hair day now and then. If you do remove yourself from a photo, only you will be able to add yourself back in. If you decide that People in Photos isn’t your thing, you can remove yourself entirely.
We also extend that same level of personal control to people who aren’t on Flickr. If you wish to add someone to a photo who’s not yet a member, that person needs to give their approval to be added.
Profile updates
Finally, you’ll see that your member profile is sporting a swanky new look. In addition to featuring a few of your recent favourites, if you’ve been featured via People in Photos, you’ll see thumbnails of those pictures too.
These FAQs will get you started — What is People in Photos?, How do I add a person to a photo?, Who can add me to a photo?, How can I remove myself from a photo? and, How will I know when I’m added to a photo? The complete People in Photos FAQs are available here.
If you’ve feedback about People in Photos, or encounter bugs, please head over to our Help Forum.
RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
At Google, our goal is to create the most comprehensive, relevant and fast search in the world. In the past few years, an entirely new type of data has emerged — real-time updates like those on Twitter have appeared not only as a way for people to communicate their thoughts and feelings, but also as an interesting source of data about what is happening right now in regard to a particular topic.
Given this new type of information and its value to search, we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience
VC funding for 20x200
Shared by Jake Dobkin
congratulating people on taking VC funding is like congratulating people for getting a credit card with a really high interest rate. save the congratulations until you see what happens in the end- and count no man happy until he's dead.Congrats to Jen Bekman on getting funding for 20x2001.
"I love the idea of taking the friction out of the art world," said Mr. Conrad. "A lot of people want to buy nice things, but don't know how. Jen has built a business from that, which is growing very nicely and has a lot of repeat customers."
[1] In light of the new FTC guidelines for disclosure by bloggers2, a few somewhat relevent statements. 1. 20x200 has in the past paid $1200 to sponsor the kottke.org RSS feed. 2. I have linked to 20x200 and Jen Bekman's gallery several times on kottke.org, for which Jen Bekman has thanked me, which is a good feeling, to be thanked, and perhaps that subconsciously predisposes me towards future linking because who doesn't like to be thanked? 3. Jen Bekman is a friend. 4. I also know Caterina Fake, Zach Klein, and Scott Heiferman socially; they are a few of 20x200's angel investors. 5. I am a resident of New York City, in which 20x200 is headquartered. 6. I have purchased art from 20x200 in the past. 7. I may have received a 20x200 print from Jen Bekman herself, either as a straight-up gift or as a promotional item. Honestly, I can't remember if she gave me anything, what it was, or the circumstances of the giving. 8. I have received 20x200 prints as gifts from others. They are thanked. 9. I know my wife and my wife knows Jen Bekman. 10. I may have unwittingly posed for photos next to 20x200 artwork hanging in my residence or in the residences of others, giving the impression that I am endorsing said artwork. Apologies. 11. I have agreed to, at some point in the future, curating a selection of artworks for 20x200 and then chatting casually with Jen Bekman about my choices, an edited transcript of which will appear on the 20x200 web site. As far as I know, no payment for this service is forthcoming and if it was, I would refuse it politely. 12. Jen Bekman's dog's name is Ollie. So is my son's. ↩
[2] Why just for bloggers? Do New York Times book, music, and movie reviewers disclose that they received review copies for free? ↩
Tags: 20x200 art Jen Bekman legal
PAPER TV: The Postelles Go Acoustic
Daniel Balk and David Dargahi of The Postelles perform an acoustic version of their single "123 Stop" for PAPERMAG! The Postelles play a CMJ showcase tonight at the Bowery Ballroom alongside Fanfarlo, Tiger City, Findlay Brown, Freelance Whales and the Midnight Juggernauts.
Google Chrome Power User’s Guide
Mentioned earlier this week that I’ve been rediscovering Google Chrome (mostly due to Wave), so this morning over at Lifehacker I rounded up some of its latest and greatest features in my Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome, 2009 edition.
The Burnout Antidote: A Creative Sabbatical
In an early episode of the excellent TV series Mad Men, agency partner Roger Sterling walks into creative director Don Draper’s office to find Don gazing off into space.
“I’ll never get used to the fact that most of the time it looks like you’re doing nothing,” Sterling quips.
Sterling should take comfort in the fact that our best creative work is done in times of reflection and idleness. Studies have shown that the wandering mind is more likely to have a “Eureka!” moment of clarity and creativity. Taking breaks and zoning out from everyday tasks gives our brains time to do a kind of long-term, big-picture thinking that immediate engagement with bosses and clients and email and meetings does not.
Designer Stefan Sagmeister takes these findings seriously. He works time off into his schedule in a way that will make you green with envy. Every seven years, Sagmeister closes his New York City–based design studio for an entire year of creative rejuvenation. During his sabbatical, Sagmeister “works,” but not for clients. (He’s serious about that, too. Last year, he turned down an opportunity to design a poster for the Obama campaign while he was on sabbatical.)
Read the rest at HarvardBusiness.org »
Oysterfest at 508!
There is little better in this life than a handful of oysters, some delicious horseradish-based sauces in which to dip them and a nice cold beer. That is why we raced to 508 Restaurant & Bar, a cute little bistro located right around the corner from Ear Inn in the far West Village to try their Oysterfest Oktoberfest special. For $15, oyster fans get six oysters (from which there are seven varieties to choose) and a pint of beer (they offer six German and Belgian brews). We tried a whole slew of oysters, and enjoyed the Hama Hamas, which were creamy, delicate and went down real easy. October is nearly over, as is this yummy deal, so if you find yourself in that neck of the woods, go on and snag some 'sters.
The Higgs boson and the Enchantment Under the Sea dance
Are the problems that have plagued the Large Hadron Collider and previous high-energy efforts (SSC, I'm looking at you here) a result of the Higgs boson travelling back from the future to meddle in its own discovery? A pair of scientists think it's a possibility.
"It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."
That's heavy, Doc.
Tags: Higgs boson lhc physics science time travel
Our Legendary Fake History
Are you following this Errol Morris investigation into the photography of Walker Evans and pals? A new installment, part 3 of 7, went up last night and it is BONKERS. Basically it is about alterations—suspected or proven or even wildly obvious, in retrospect—in 1930s documentary work of the FSA photographers (Evans, Dorothea Lange, et al). Essentially, much of what we view now as documentary—and what we see in our minds as the visuals of recent American history—was actually pretty close to propaganda.
This is James Curtis, the author of Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: F.S.A. Photography Reconsidered, in conversation with Morris.
John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” comes out in 1939. And Russell Lee comes up with an idea. He says to Stryker [the head of the F.S.A.], “Why don’t we try to create a series of photographs that could illustrate ‘Grapes of Wrath’?” And so, he goes to eastern Oklahoma — rather than to Steinbeck’s locations in western Oklahoma. And he finds a family and literally walks them through the early stages of the flight to California, including buying a loaf of bread from the storekeeper. And they felt that they were going to be able to sell these photographs to the publisher for an illustrated version of “Grapes of Wrath.” Unfortunately, Thomas Hart Benton, the artist, beat them to it. It’s his illustrations that are brought out in a new edition of “Grapes of Wrath.” It was propaganda.
Why Wall Street Reform is Stuck in Reverse
At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said.
Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.
Today, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.
What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for ten months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now.
Second, the banks keep paying off Congress. The big guns on Wall Street increased their political donations last month after increasing their lobbying muscle. Morgan Stanley's Political Action Committee donated $110,000 in September, for example, of which Democrats got $43,000.
Official Wall Street PAC donations are piddling compared to the tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street executives dole out to candidates on their own (or with a gentle nudge from their firms). Remember -- the Street is where the money is. Executives and traders on the Street have become the single biggest sources of money for Democrats as well as Republicans. And with mid-term elections looming next year, you can bet every member of Congress has a glint in his or her eye directed at the Street.
That's why the President went to Wall Street to raise money Tuesday night, gleaning about $2 million for the effort. He politely asked the crowd to cooperate with reform -- “If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms" -- but those were hardly fighting words. It's hard to fight people you're trying to squeeze money out of.
Which is the essential problem.
Ken Feinberg, the President's "pay czar" came down hard on executive pay yesterday, for those banks still collecting money under TARP, as well he should. But Feinberg isn't trying to pass new financial reform legislation, and TARP no longer covers several of the biggest banks with the highest pay and bonuses -- although they're still getting subsidized by the government with low-interest loans.
Wall Street and the Treasury wants us to believe that the TARP money will be repaid to taxpayers, but Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general keeping watch over TARP, said yesterday that just 17 percent of the TARP money has been repaid, and “[i]t’s extremely unlikely that taxpayers will see a full return on their investment." Later he told a reporter that it's unlikely "we'll get a lot of our money back at all."
Brian Griffiths, the Goldman international adviser obviously knows what he's talking about, at least in terms of widening inequality. America is lurching toward inequality once again, led by the financial industry. The Street is back to where it was in 2007, but most of the rest of us are poorer than we were then -- largely due to the meltdown that occurred because Wall Street overreached. The oddity is that we bailed out the Street, including Griffiths and his colleagues, but apparently won't even be repaid.
Perl 5.11.1
Milo had been caught red-handed in the act of plundering his countrymen, and, as a result, his stock had never been higher. He proved good as his word when a rawboned major from Minnesota curled his lip in rebellious disavowal and demanded his share of the syndicate Milo kept saying everybody owned. Milo met the challenge by writing the words "A Share" on the nearest scrap of paper and handing it away with a virtuous disdain that won the envy and admiration of almost everyone who knew him. His glory was at a peak, and Colonel Cathcart, who knew and admired his war record, was astonished by the deferential humility with which Milo presented himself at Group Headquarters and made his fantastic appeal for more hazardous assignment. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 It gives me great pleasure to announce the release of Perl 5.11.1. This is the second DEVELOPMENT release in the 5.11.x series leading to a stable release of Perl 5.12.0. You can find a list of high-profile changes in this release in the file "perl5111delta.pod" inside the distribution. You can (or will shortly be able to) download the 5.11.1 release from: http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.11.1/Read more of this story at use Perl.
Heather Graham and the Public Option FTW
The Democrats haven’t been doing the best job of actually explaining why the public option is awesome as of late. Luckily there are smart and simple ads like the one below featuring Heather Graham from MoveOn.org. In the video it becomes clear that the reason the public option is good is that it will force the greedy and lazy insurance companies to shape up and be more efficient at their jobs.
Which is clearly what we need. Give a watch and go to the act section of this post to learn what you can do to get the public option back in the race.
Sherman Alexie Won’t Sell Out His Basketball Game
“’My concern was that they would never have been able to find an Indian kid who could act well enough and who was a good enough basketball player to play me,’ Mr. Alexie said in a recent interview, adding that basketball was even more important to him than ‘the Indianness of me.’ As it did during his own youth, salvation for his misfit protagonist, Junior, comes when he quits the reservation and excels on an all-white high school team. ‘I’d rather see myself played by a Puerto Rican or an Italian with a tan than have them ruin the basketballness of me.’”
—Sherman Alexie, in today’s Times, on why he turned down deals to make a movie of his award-winning young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (Alexie’s Indianness, to clarify where it’s probably not necessary, is the American kind, Spokane/Coeur d’Alene, of Washington State. His basketballness is that of an offensive minded guard who can’t guard anyone.)
Authentic Soba
I've only recently discovered Soba Koh, a tiny spot in New York's East Village where you can watch Chef Hiromitsu Takahashi roll and cut soba by hand as you walk into the place. I don't know what took me so long. Chef Takahashi's soba is the real-deal -- fresh, dense, toothsome and delicious. If you're curious about soba, you have to check this place out.
I had heard the chef's teacher was in town from Japan and "guest rolling" soba, so I visited the restaurant again, where this time, Master Chef Akila Inouye, who runs the Tsukiji Soba Academy in Tokyo, was working a sheet of soba dough. Check out the pictures below of the master at work. During a break in the action, Chef Inouye told me that he teaches intensive soba-making classes for professional chefs as well as classes in English (idea for my next Tokyo trip!). I got to try Chef Inouye's handmade soba served in a hot broth with tempura shrimp, a classic dish. The soba was amazing, perfect. The broth was fantastic, too, so intensely savory and flavorful. As I was enjoying my meal, Chef Takahashi stopped by my table and explained that the broth was made from kombu, katsuobushi (dried, shaved bonito) and sabazushi -- dried, shaved mackerel -- in the traditional, potent Tokyo style. Perfect for a blustery autumn day in New York.
October 20, 2009
How the Kindle got its name
I can’t have a conversation about the Kindle without someone asking, “What the hell does ‘kindle’ mean?” Well, here you go.
[Jeff Bezos] wanted to talk about the future of reading, but in a small, not braggadocio way. We didn’t want it to be ‘techie’ or trite, and we wanted it to be memorable, and meaningful in many ways of expression, from “I love curling up with my Kindle to read a new book” to “When I’m stuck in the airport or on line, I can Kindle my newspaper, favorite blogs or half a dozen books I’m reading.”
Frosty the Spro Man
Winter came to Ithaca just in time for Take Your Snowman to Work Day.The guys on shift at State St Gimme! put Frosty right to work."Anyone order a (cold &) wet cappuccino?"
Delicious! Sorry you didn't make it until spring Frosty!
Chad Ochocinco Experience
Check out this application:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=327288264&mt=8
FIFA Earth: Visualizing more than 2 Million Daily Soccer Video Games
Fifa Earth [easports.com] visualizes data from about 2 million FIFA 10 EA Sports football / soccer games played each day. The online "data visualizer" consists of 3 distinct live and interactive elements. "Fifa Buzz" shows recent Twitter messages that contain key words or hash-tags such as 'Goals', 'Fussbal', or 'Soccer', or any other number of searches such as players 'Rooney', 'Benzema', or 'Xavi' that relate to FIFA or football. These tweets are geo-located and time-coded and placed in real-time on a 3D football-shaped globe. "Live Competition" lists the total number of games played around the world (38 million and rising), number of goals, wins, losses, and draws, while it can also display the complete match history of every game played to date. Clicking through the "History" link of each team conveys a bar graph of past performance data. In "The World Plays", countries are ranked accordingly to the play data.The potential size of the visualized dataset is immense. With over 2 billion (!) video game matches played last year, resulting in about 40 millions goals scored, it brings the competitiveness of players together.
Those great (staged?) Great Depression photos
In his newest multipart essay for the NY Times, Errol Morris examines evidence of photo manipulations by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, including Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange. Were they dispassionate observers of American life in the 1930s or employees after a certain type of story?
Tags: Errol Morris greatdepression photographyIf one can imagine the political animosity that would have been generated if, as part of the current stimulus package, President Obama introduced a national documentary photography program, then it is possible to understand the opposition that the F.S.A. faced. Fiscal conservatives did not want to see their hard-earned tax dollars spent on relief, let alone a government photography program, of all things.
Marching Ants With Core Animation
Cocoa Is My Girlfriend: “If you’ve ever used any drawing program you realize that when a rectangular area of the image is in a seleted mode, a dashed pattern stroke outlines that area and the pattern will move like marching ants. To achieve this effect manually actually takes quite a bit of effort, but is quite trivial when done with Core Animation.”
Try::Tiny
Try::Tiny rocks.
Every perl programmer should start using it. Especially if you're a CPAN module author and wants to eval { } inside your module (often to check if the user of your module has some optional module in which case you optimize stuff for it etc.), you're strongly suggested to use this module instead of your own eval { } stuff.
Why? If you do eval { } in your module that clobbers the global $@, and to avoid that you need to local $@, and then if you want to die (rethrow) from local $@ then the exception gets cleared etc... Try::Tiny solves this endless yak shaving and there're no dependencies at all and works with perl back to 5.005x.
Anyway, i started using Try::Tiny (when nothingmuch himself added this :)) in Plack and Tatsumaki with so much fun, but last night I experienced one minor pitfall of this module that I might want to share with you.
I had this code:
sub write {
my $self = shift;
my $writer = $self->writer || $self->init_writer;
$writer->write(@_);
}I wanted to catch Broken pipe exception from ->write, so I changed to do this:
sub write {
my $self = shift;
my $writer = $self->writer || $self->init_writer;
try {
$writer->write(@_);
} catch {
/Broken pipe/ and $$self->{client_disconnected} = 1;
};
}It might be obvious to you but it didn't work as I expected, and I wasted about 15 minutes to figure out what's wrong with that code.
Yeah, the use of @_ in the try { } clause. it's internally implemented as try sub { ... } so the content of @_ is changed when it's executed.
Lots of clever modules on CPAN that exports DSL sugars (including my own Web::Scraper) shares the same problem. At least you have to be careful not to use @_ in the block, by assigning the @_ content into some lexical variables before you construct the block,
(Well maybe Try::Tiny can add a workaround to save the @_ in the caller stack but i'm not sure if it's a doable without magic and whether it's right thing to do anyway)
Anyways, Try::Tiny is a great module if you care about this tiny thing. Enjoy.
the hook:seat ratio!
the hook:seat ratio!:add it to the list!
Joe Switches to Ecco Caffe
In perhaps the biggest news to hit NYC coffee since Ninth St switched to Intelly, Eater has reported that Joe the Art of Coffee will switch to exclusive use of Ecco Caffe starting tomorrow. Sprudge had the scoop about a month ago, but the time has come to finally make the switch.
As purveyors of some of the best beans in the world, Andrew Barnett’s Ecco Caffe partnering with 5 high volume locations throughout Manhattan could have significant impact on the state of NYC coffee.
Posted in cafes, coffee Tagged: coffee, Ecco Caffe, espresso, NYC, roastersAndrew Barnett, via Liz Clayton
Mark Pilgrim on his publisher's reaction to the resale of his GNU-licensed book
funny, the copyright notice from the print version is completely contradictory [via]
MacBook Pro sees a price drop
Filed under: Macbook Pro
The Macbook Pro, a formidably-powerful laptop, is a bit pricey for most consumers. Today saw a price drop for a top-of-the-line configuration, which makes the price almost $1000US cheaper. That's a pretty hefty savings, although $3600US is still a hefty sum for the average user. A few months back, I dropped a larger amount on a slightly less-powerful version ... I have no regrets, but who couldn't use an extra grand right now?
The specs I'm referring to are:
- 17-inch
- 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
- 500GB Serial ATA drive @7200 rpm (add another US to sub a 256GB solid-state)
- Antiglare display
Adapters and peripherals don't appear to have changed price much, and you'll still need to buy an Apple Remote (there's a new one!) separately (if you need one). Still, for a portable graphics/video-editing machine and all-around powerhouse, that's a great machine, at a new, significantly lower buy-in level.
TUAWMacBook Pro sees a price drop originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Should We Repeal “No Homo”?
Negating the negatory: “If the point of ‘no homo’ is truly, as Weiner argues, to slowly make hip-hop less heteronormative, censoring ‘no homo’ can only speed up the term’s intended progress. Why not encourage rappers to express alternate interpretations of masculinity without an easily deconstructed verbal safety net?”
Rakim On His Dr. Dre-Produced Records, "I Think A Lot Of It Is Just Gonna Stay Buried"
Rakim recently addressed his past run on Dr. Dre's Aftermath Records and said that fans should not expect to hear any of their unreleased tracks.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
RZA On Raekwon, Method Man & Ghostface LP, "I'm There For Them"
Wu-Tang Clan leader RZA has shared his reaction to Raekwon, Method Man and Ghostface Killah possible joint album and said he fully supports the movement.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
MomoWire: Dave Chang's VIP Wall and His Troubles With Chez Pim
[Photo via OAD]After seeing a tweet by well known food blogger and author Pim Techamuanvivit, aka Chez Pim, about the whole Dave Chang v. San Francisco fracas, Steve Plotnicki gets on his blog to report on a purported back story between the chef and the blogger. Apparently Chang's rubbed Pim the wrong way for quite awhile, and Plotnicki explains why; the whole thing is a bit involved and completely gossipy, but it's worth a read for those who enjoy this sort of thing as much as we do. The biggest takeaway, however, is that Chang has a VIP wall in the basement of Ssam Bar (and probably the other Momos) with pictures of out-of-town chefs that are in the area, important NYC chefs, critics, and the like. A recent picture of the wall is above; see how many you recognize.
As for Dave Chang and San Francisco, Bourdain is in the comments on Eater National offering his thoughts.
· What Does Pim Have Against David Chang? [OAD]
A Visit to Castle Rock
Nothing beats asking what you’re supposed to be scouting for, and being told: “Castles.”
If you’ve ever driven along Route 9D in Garrison, New York, you may have seen it from the road: a fairy tale-like castle poking out from the trees at the top of a mountain:
Built in 1881, Castle Rock was the estate of Illinois Central Railroad president William Osborn, who also owned hundreds of acres of land surrounding property. Since Osborn’s death in 1894, Castle Rock has passed down through numerous Osborn generations and is still privately owned by the family. Rumors abound that the castle was writer Frank Baum’s inspiration for the castle in the Wizard of Oz (Castle OSborn?).
Castle Rock was deemed a National Landmark in 1977. Most of the surrounding woodland was donated to the State Parks Council and is now open to the public. Several films and TV shows have been shot at Castle Rock, and the owners are very film friendly. I was graciously granted permission to post these pictures to help spread the word, and if you’re seriously interested, email me your production interest, and I’ll pass along the contact info.
The drive up to the property is a long, windy dirt road that snakes up the mountain, a perfect approach to such a unique place. Note the numerous KEEP OUT signs! This is still private property, and a caretaker living on the premises has had to call the police countless times. Most productions park their trucks at the nearby library and use stakebeds to portage up equipment:
When you finally get to the top of the hill, you pass under this beautiful stone arch:
Continue around a bend, and you find a stone gate:
Pass through and you’ve reached Castle Rock!
The front of the castle:
A tower:
A different view from the lower level:
One of many porches:
The famous spire:
A basement-level passage:
This addition was to be a recreation room. Sadly, it was never finished:
Castle Rock is currently in the midst of some serious interior renovation work. The original door has been temporarily removed for construction. Anyone know what those hooks to the right are (perhaps for tying up horses)?
This is the front hall, and you can see the extent of renovation work. This is all to be redone within the next year or two, but a clever production company with a budget could easily cover up the work (or even help finish it):
(pan: click for full size!)A second room with wood-paneling:
The living room features a wrap-around porch…
Head out on the porch and you are treated to one of many gorgeous views of the Hudson…
The full view of the Hudson from Castle Rock:
(pan: click for full size!)If you look north up the Hudson, you can see West Point. From this vantage point, it becomes quite obvious why the original garrison was built on this strategic crook in the river:
Other Castle Rock porches and balconies, all with equally stunning views:
A lower-level porch:
No visit to Castle Rock is complete without a trip to the famous spire. I headed up the creaky spiral staircase…
…up into the spire…
…which features a full panorama of windows.
Here is the view from the spire:
(pan: click for full size!)Another picture:
A rare view of the Castle Rock roof:
Outside, the Castle Rock grounds are tree-lined, shady and peaceful. This road leads over the stone arch I passed under when I first came up the mountain:
Looking away from the house, the road leads to a quiet spot surrounded by trees…
At the far end is a fountain that I imagine hasn’t been used in quite a while:
The fountain up-close:
Finally, I love the break in this little stone wall, leading off into the surrounding wilderness.
There’s a lot more to Castle Rock that I didn’t have a chance to shoot, including the Osborn’s original spring-fed wooden water tank. You can’t find a more unique property than Castle Rock, and the fact that it is located just over an hour from New York City is unbelievable. A special thanks again to Castle Rock for letting me post these pictures, and again, if you’re interested, send me an email and I’ll relay the contact info.
-SCOUT
CoffeeWire: For the coffee nerds out there,...
For the coffee nerds out there, Joe the Art of Coffee is switching roasters for the first time in six years. Starting tomorrow, they will be the first shop on the East Coast to sell all their beans from Ecco, "considered to be one of the top boutique roasters in the country." [EaterWire]
Link: Mariano Rivera Spitball Video
The following video, on YouTube, claims to show Mariano Rivera spitting on the baseball, moments before pitching to the Angels yesterday.
For more on this “Internet Controversy of the Day,” check out Big League Stew, Deadspin, Halo’s Heaven, the Star-Tribune, and Fack Youk.
Update, 2:10 pm:
According to Joel Sherman of the New York Post, “The Commissioners Office reviewed available video and still photography from Rivera spitting toward a baseball in ALCS Game 3 and ‘found no evidence that Rivera spit on the ball.’”
The challenge of creating a new category
One of the hardest things to do as a startup is to create a new category. Bloggers and press have a natural tendency to “pigeonhole” – to group startups into cleanly delineated categories, and then do side-by-side comparisons, comment on the “horserace” between them, and so forth.
At my last startup, SiteAdvisor, we were at first consistently pigeonholed as an anti-phishing toolbar, even though what we did was help search engine users avoid spyware, spam, and scams, which (for various technical reasons) had almost no functional overlap with anti-phishing toolbars. My co-founder at Hunch, Caterina Fake, had a similar experience at Flickr. Early on, people compared Flickr to existing photo sharing websites – Shutterfly, Ofoto, SnapFish - and found Flickr lacking in features around buying prints, sending greeting cards, etc.
Pigeonholing is one reason startups should actually welcome direct competitors. It was only once a direct competitor to SiteAdvisor appeared that people started treating “web safety” as its own category (Walt Mossberg was the first one to legitimize the category with this article).
At my current startup, Hunch, being pigeonholed as a so-called Answers site is one of our main marketing challenges. Hunch is a user-generated website similar to Wikipedia except, instead of creating encyclopedia entries, contributors create decision trees that help other users make choices and decisions. For example, about 50 computer enthusiasts came together to create this decision tree about computer laptops that helps users with less expertise find the right laptop. Hunch gets smarter over time as more people contribute to it. So far, about 10,000 users have made 115,000 contributions to the site. Last month, our third month after launch, over 600,000 unique visitors used those contributions to make decisions.
Many of the initial reviews of Hunch accurately reflected that Hunch is trying to create a new category of website. Nevertheless, the tendency to pigeonhole Hunch as an Answers site remains. Answers sites allow users to ask a question and get back direct answers from other people. There are many Answer sites including Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, Vark, Answerbag, and ChaCha. These are all excellent and useful services – but have as much to do with Hunch as Ofoto had to do with Flickr.
There is no easy solution to avoid being pigeonholed. All you can do is consistently, straightforwardly describe what you do, and then keep beating that drum over and over until the message gets through.
Signs of old age
I flipped back to a page of my website from 2000 just now, and after a little struggling, I zoomed the text size.
Twice.
How To Read Andrew Ross Sorkin
From the inbox, regarding this excerpt from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail: “Substitute any utilitarian object name for “Lehman Brothers” (i.e. “my used pool filter pump”) in this article, and both the astonishing incompetence and absurdity of the compensation these men receive is made clear.” Ooh, try it! It really works!
Ion propulsion engine could take you to Mars and back in 39 days
Ready for some interplanetary exploration? We've had the force shields, currency, and refuel stations all sorted out for a while, and now here come the ion thrusters we've been missing to make manned trips to Mars really viable. Currently, a return journey to Mars can take up to two years, with crew members having to wait a full year for the planets to realign, but with ion propulsion -- which uses electricity to accelerate ions and produce small but longevous thrust -- ships can get there and back within a reasonably tight 39-day window. Ion propulsion rocket engines were first deployed successfully by NASA in the Deep Space 1 probe in 1998, and the latest iteration's successful Earth-bound testing has led to plans for a flight to the moon and use on the International Space Station as test scenarios for the technology. It's all still very much in the early stages, of course, but should all that testing, checking, and refinement bear fruit, we might finally have a whole new world to colonize and sell sneakers on.
[Thanks, Davis]Filed under: Transportation, Science
Ion propulsion engine could take you to Mars and back in 39 days originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google's page turners
This is page 471 of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code book (previously mentioned here).
Looks like the scanner caught one of Google's pink-fingered elves at work. A quick search reveals several other such errors.
Tags: books Google Google Books
Murph Vatiation from a Met Fan
Got this in the mail the other day, totally out of the blue from Stats on the Back. Maybe because I helped him with his Allen & Ginter project, maybe just for the halibut. Who knows? It was one 'variation' card, with a note:OH DEAR HEAVENLY JEEBUS WHAT DID THAT MET FAN DO TO DEFILE POOR MURPH???
I was almost afraid to look...Huh. Just a nice normal 1986 O-Pee-Chee Murphy card, totally undefiled. Not even mildly blasphemed. I really like the '86 Topps set and this is a nice card of the two time MVP who hit the crap out of the ball without taking anything stronger than an aspirin to enhance his performance. The O-Pee-Chee logo clipping his hat is odd though. So what's the variation? I flipped the card over:
GUM-USED RELIC CARD!
Brilliant! Anyone who has ever opened n old O-Pee-Chee pack knows what's going on here. Old gum. Permanently fused to the card. Never to be completely separated. Awesome. If I had the money to burn, I'd send this puppy to PSA to get slabbed.
1986 OPC Dale Murphy With Gum: PSA 10 1/2. Population: ONE.
Awwww yeah.
This Cat Looks Like This Other Cat
THIS CAT was trapped in an SUV and driven across town. (Cat survived.)
THIS CAT was dressed up like a literary character for the New Yorker’s “Critterati” photo contest, which is really a thing that is happening. (Cat may not survive.)
When Rap Really Died: What He Said
“If you try to locate the moment of a major paradigm shift, in the moment, perhaps by calling your album ‘Hip Hop Is Dead,’ as Nas did in 2006, you’re slipping into weatherman territory. Will it rain tomorrow? Will another great rap album pop up? The life spans of genres and art forms are best perceived from the distance of ten or twenty years, if not more. With that in mind, I still suspect that Nas—along with a thousand bloggers—was not fretting needlessly. If I had to pick a year for hip-hop’s demise, though, I would choose 2009, not 2006.” Everything I’ve written about rap this year? This is what I meant to say. And here’s a video of Freddie Gibbs, the Gary, Indiana rapper profiled in the last section of this excellent piece.
Coffee Chronicles: Vietnamese Coffee Converts The Purist
"If the iced version was blended and topped with whipped cream, it could knock a Frappuccino out of the park."
[Photographs: Allison Hemler]
The thought of putting an inch of half-and-half and three sugar packets into eight ounces of coffee is a terrible enough thought to turn me onto tea permanently. Or so I thought, until I had my first cup of Vietnamese ca phe sua nong, disturbingly strong black coffee with a layer of sweetened condensed milk.
This weekend, we visited The Viet Nam Restaurant in Spring Valley, New York—thirty minutes outside of New York City, and the only restaurant on Main Street which seemed to be full on a Saturday night. A drive through the "downtown"—if it can be called that, since nothing was open and every other store was for ren—will assure you it lacks any appealing food or coffee options other than IHOP or our hotel, which served Fairfield Inn's "Bold Beginnings" brew. Yuck.
Intending to find some alcoholic cure for suburban misery on the menu, I instead discovered the "Ca Phe" section, and ordered one cup hot (ca phe sua nong), one cup iced (ca phe sua den, each $3.50). The drinks came to the table in white porcelain cups topped with metal filters filled with boiling water. The grind inside appeared to be similar to an auto-drip and probably measured about 2-3 tablespoons for six ounces of water. The thin layer of sweetened condensed milk sat at the bottom of the porcelain cup, to be stirred before drinking.
My first sip followed dishes of goi cuon (spring rolls filled with shrimp), banh mi, com ga xao xa ot (lemongrass chicken and rice), and bun xao do chay (sauteed mixed vegetables with tofu on vermicelli noodles). Chili powder, fish sauce, and onions don't usually leave one wanting a cup of coffee, but for a first taste, one doesn't need a perfect pairing. It's not often a cup of brewed coffee can stand up to milk and sugar and still taste as strong as it was prepared, but this was something different.
According to various recipes across the web, it should be made with double the amount of coffee you're used to—and it was very clear that my version would've been nearly undrinkable without the milk. I didn't want to like its sweetness, but found it strangely addictive—dangerous, when you calculate the caffeine content.
Within a minute, my companion's iced coffee was gone, as the ice further dilutes the strength of the coffee. Our waitress said the coffee was her favorite drink to sit and linger with, both morning and evening. However, I saw it more as a dessert drink, especially if it was scalding hot. If the iced version was blended and topped with whipped cream, it could knock a Frappuccino out of the park.
Any Vietnamese restaurant will have the concoction, but the preparation may vary as much as a latte will at any cafe around New York. The drink can be made at home just as easily. The metal filter can be found easily in an Asian grocery store or a number of online outlets, but a similar strength can be accomplished with stovetop espresso. Friends tell me many Vietnamese restaurants in the United States use Cafe du Monde pre-ground coffee with chicory, but a good espresso blend or any beans that lack acidity should work. In my dreams we'd all make our own sweetened condensed milk, but restaurants that sell huge plates of food for $6 may not stray from the canned variety. And stay far, far away from the restaurants that pre-mix the coffee for you. Most of the fun comes from stirring the milk at the bottom, lifting your spoon, and letting the thick globs drip off.
Some NYC-area recommendations:
Nha Trang One, 87 Baxter Street (b/n Walker Street and White Street), Manhattan
Viet-Nam Banh Mi So 1, 369 Broome Street (b/n Elizabeth Street and Mott Street), Manhattan
Hanco's, 85 Bergen Street (b/n Hoyt Street and Smith Street), Brooklyn
Ba Xuyen, 4222 8th Avenue (at 43rd Street), Brooklyn
Nha Trang Place, 249 Newark Avenue (at Coles Street), Jersey City, NJAnd if you happen to be in Rockland County:
The Viet Nam, 304A North Main Street (at Eckerson Road), Spring Valley, NY
Call for Applications: NYFA Artists' Fellowships
Apply for the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowships program! Deadlines are around the corner, in early November:
Artists' Fellowships are $7,000 cash awards made to individual originating artists living and working in the state of New York for unrestricted use. Grants are awarded in 16 artistic disciplines, with applications accepted in eight categories each year. Since the awards began in 1985, NYFA has awarded over $22 million to over 3,688 artists. In 2009, NYFA awarded 131 Fellowships to 134 artists, with six of them working in a collaboration.
Categories include Music/Sound, Video, Photography, Architecture/Environmental Structures, Choreography and more. For the full lowdown, check the Artists Fellowship Applications Guidelines (pdf) or visit NYFA's fellowship page to apply.
Nightcap: Close Encounters
So last night, Versace and the Whitney threw a very fancy party. There was a dinner where people like Donatella (of course), Shakira, Gerard Butler, and other patrons of the arts got together upstairs at the museum.
There was also a downstairs party where they all made their way afterward. I got the chance to see the beginnings of this charity endeavor with Donatella back in July, and it was so nice to see the children's art displayed on actual handbags that will be sold to raise money for the Starlight Children's Foundation and the One Foundation.
Not for nothing, they created a graffiti wall where everyone could draw and have fun. So of course someone went for "balloon boy" and started sketching a CNN screen grab of America's latest reality travesty. Oy, America. But that's a discussion for another blog on another day...
And of course, the usual fashion crowd was out in full effect—Alexa, Leigh, Peter, Hana, Fabiola, Alexandra, Amanda—but there was really only one star in the room—Chuck Close.
Sponsored Topics: Gerard Butler - Starlight Children's Foundation - Shakira - Donatella Versace - Donatella
Buzz: Mets, Vladimir Guerrero and Omar Minaya
Following this season, Vladimir Guerrero will be a free agent for the first time since signing a five-year, $70 million deal in 2004.
According to Jeff Blair from the Globe and Mail, “Baseball people have felt for some time it’s a slam-dunk that Guerrero would end up with the Mets and GM Omar Minaya.”
However, Blair says, this is ‘no longer a certainty,’ due to Minaya’s lack of job security and concerns about the team’s finances.
Blair now believes Guerrero can only hope to be a team’s Plan B or Plan C, saying, “He’ll get a contract, but, in this cautious marketplace, it will likely be with a big-market team that can afford to cover any losses.”
The 33–year-old Guerrero hit .295 with a .334 OBP, 15 HR and 50 RBI in just 100 games for the Angels this season, missing time with a torn pectoral muscle, as well as a strained muscle behind his left knee.
He hit 27 home runs with more than 90 RBI in each of the previous two seasons, playing at least 143 games.
Janet Maslin and Malcolm Gladwell: Whose Side Are You On?
So in today’s Times Janet Maslin tears into Malcolm Gladwell’s new greatest hits book collection. It is brutal, because she is endlessly making fun of his sentences and his paragraphs: “He liked to begin by framing some kind of broad question. Then he liked to change subjects abruptly. Let’s suddenly talk about Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer.” Ha ha, that is funny. For some reason though, this makes me uncomfortable! And when I am uncomfortable with conflict, I ask myself: whose side am I on? After some internal investigation, I realized: I’m not on either of their sides! Why should I be? What horse do I have in that race? I look around, and I see no horse present. Also what would the horses be racing towards? For what? Also here is Malcolm Gladwell in a new interview: “Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school.” As they say in the opinion polls: STRONGLY AGREE.
Air!
Reggie Love, President Obama's personal aide, drives to the basket.
This and other scenes from the October at the White House in today's October at the White House Slideshow.
The Dil Pickle Club
Marc Moscato/Dean Rank The Dil Pickle Club $4 The Dil Pickle Club was an underground literary nightspot in Chicago from 1914-1933, home to hobohemians, Newberry librarians, derelicts, ozone orators, poets, painters, journalists, sex workers, Wobblies, professors, lawyers and doctors. The Club was in part founded by Ben Reitman, anarchist doctor and lover of Emma Goldman. 2 color offset printed poster 11"x17" unsigned/unlimited edition
Artistically Interpreting the "Mo Money Mo Problems" Music Video
"Mo Money Mo Problems" [nickhardeman.com] is a collection of images that are generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video with the same title, originating from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death.The software detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion happening from frame to frame. The output is rendered as a vector image, with curves representing the traced motion patterns. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, with their size determined by the distance from their previous location: the further away, the larger their size. The color of the points is determined by the color of that pixel in that frame. The bright colored track suits worn by Puff Daddy and Mase in the dark backgrounds make for good tracking and nice color combinations.
One can check out some more renderings in the Mo Money Mo Problems photoset on flickr, or watch the original music video. See also Tracking Michael Jackson's White Glove in 10,060 Video Frames.
World Of Goo Sale Offers Fascinating Results
As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that’s the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they’ve announced how many copies they’ve sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It’s an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn’t be underplayed.
(...)
Read the rest of World Of Goo Sale Offers Fascinating Results (965 words)
Posted by botherer. | 44 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: 2D-Boy, feature, pricing, World-of-Goo
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.
House in NYC Tonight
Type as Object Exhibition opening at the New York Type Directors Club.
House Exhibition & Pop-Up Shop
October 20th, 6-8pm
Type Directors Club
347 West 36 Street, Suite 603
New York, New York
Read This Book: Asian Dumplings
Okay, I'm going to out myself here -- I'm totally "gyoza otaku," or obsessed with Japanese-style fried dumplings. I'm not alone. In Japan, gyoza is the classic companion to ramen (with a frosty mug of beer finishing the picture), with bespoke versions the subject of magazine articles and television shows and endless debate online. There's even a Gyoza Stadium in Tokyo, a food theme park that brings together the giants of Japanese gyoza cooking. But for all my gyoza adoration, I have never tried to make them -- until I got a copy of Andrea Nguyen's amazing new book Asian Dumplings
. First, Andrea is a fantastic cook and writer and one super-cool human. Second, her new book rocks, covering dumplings from across Asia with terrific recipes, clear techniques and illustrations, and insights into pan-Asian food culture.
I quickly turned to Andrea's gyoza recipe on page 41 and gathered the ingredients. I cut corners a little bit by buying gyoza skins instead of making them from scratch (sorry, Andrea!). Also, my wife and I have a ton of shiso growing in our garden, so I chopped up some of that fabulous herb and threw it in, too. My wife also wanted more nira, or Chinese chives, so we doubled the amount Andrea calls for. (As always, think about how you want to prepare recipes). Now it was time to assemble the dumplings, by pleating together the edges. I never did this before, so my gyoza looked pretty pathetic. But luckily my honey's a trained sculptor with phenomenally nimble hands. She shoved me aside and quickly formed a bunch of lovely dumplings, even though it turned out I got the wrong shaped skins -- square instead of round (thanks, honey). We fried them up, chowed them down. Fantastic. And we made enough for another round tonight for dinner.
World Of Goo 'Pay What You Want' Experiment A 'Huge Success'
For the one-year anniversary of 2D Boy's World of Goo, the studio held a pricing experiment that had customers paying whatever price they wanted for the game -- and the results are revealing. In a blog post this week, 2D Boy's Ron Carmel said there was a definite discrepancy between what people thought the game was worth, and what they were willing to pay for it. "Few people chose their price based on the perceived ...
Video: André Soltner Makes an Omelet
André Soltner, former chef-owner of Lutèce and the dean of Classic Studies at The French Culinary Institute, helps you bone up on your omelet skills in this video from Time Out New York, after the jump. A trick new to me: using white pepper instead of black—to avoid the specks.
André Soltner Makes an Omelet
All or Nothing
Jimmy Rollins came to the plate last night as his team's last hope. The Phillies trailed by a run and were down to their last out. However, just three pitches later, it was the Dodgers who were done. Rollins and the Phillies has grabbed a win from the verge of defeat. In doing so Rollins became the fifth player in postseason history to come to the plate with the opportunity to lose the game for his team and instead provide them with a walk-off win. The others include some amazing post-season moments, including Cookie Lavagetto' s turning Bill Beven's no-hit bid into a loss, Kirk Gibson's one legged home run, the Braves remarkable comeback in the 1992 NLCS, the only such game in extra innings.
Car# G# Date Series G Batter Tm Opp Pitcher Score Result Inn RoB Out Cnt Pit RBI Play Desc. +-----+---+-------------+------+-+-----------------+---+----+-----------------+-----------+------+---+---+---+---+---+---+-------------------------+ 1 1 1947-10-03 WS 4 Cookie Lavagetto BRO NYY Bill Bevens down 1-2 2B b 9 12- 2 - 2 *ENDED GAME*:Double to RF; Gionfriddo Scores; Miksis Scores 2 1 1988-10-15 WS 1 Kirk Gibson LAD OAK Dennis Eckersley down 3-4 HR b 9 -2- 2 3-2 7 2 *ENDED GAME*:Home Run (Line Drive to Deep RF); Davis Scores 3 1 1992-10-14 NLCS 7 Francisco Cabrera ATL PIT Stan Belinda down 1-2 1B b 9 123 2 2-1 4 2 *ENDED GAME*:Single to LF (Line Drive to Short LF); Justice Scores/unER; Bream Scores/unER; Berryhill to 2B 4 1 2003-10-03 NLDS 3 Ivan Rodriguez FLA SFG Tim Worrell down 2-3 1B b11 123 2 1-2 5 2 *ENDED GAME*:Single to RF (Line Drive); Gonzalez Scores/unER; Pierre Scores/unER; Castillo to 2BRollins also became the 11th player overall and second this season to give his team the lead, despite coming to bat trailing with 2 out in the ninth (or later).
October 19, 2009
Dear Palm, it's just not working out.
Folks, I couldn't take it any more. Today I wiped my Palm Pre and bought an iPhone.
Believe it or not, this actually has nothing to do with my utterly nightmarish experience of trying to get my applications into Palm's app catalog, and everything to do with the fact that the phone is just a constant pain to use.
This should be obvious, because my complaint about Palm's developer relations is that they are setting up a closed ecosystem, and Apple is even worse than Palm in that regard. (And while Palm is also slow and unresponsive to respond to developers, Apple is even worse.)
So why would I get an iPhone? Because it's an appliance that just fucking works.
I have a list of 30-ish reports of more-or-less irritating bugs that I encountered during my first week of using the phone that I back-channeled into Palm via several of their developers, but most of those bugs were tolerable. The deal-breaker bugs are as follows:
- I still can't reliably sync my phone to my Mac.
Now, I have to say that since the last time I publically bitched about this, the developers of Missing Sync really stepped up: I've been exchanging emails with a couple of the Missing Sync developers for months now, doing tests and sending logs and trying out alpha versions, sometimes several times a week. So I really appreciate the effort they went to to try and diagnose the bugs that I was experiencing. But, the bottom line is, it still doesn't work. The only reliable way to sync the phone is to manually do "desktop overwrites device", which means I can't actually edit contacts or calendars on the phone, ever.
- Peformance is a joke.
Seriously, it's comically bad. The speed of this phone is truly pathological. It's horrible across the board, but some of the most egregious examples:
- If the Calendar app is not running, it takes 10-15 seconds to get from "I clicked on the Calendar icon" to "I can see today's events". And then, switching from the display of one day to the next takes 2+ seconds (and it doesn't buffer swipes, so you have to keep trying). It's embarassing when I'm talking to someone and they ask me about availability and I have to say, "I'll tell you in a little while, once my phone wakes up."
- If a call comes in, the phone starts ringing, and I can answer and talk to the caller, but most of the time it takes another 10 seconds before the Phone application's UI comes up! So if it's from the front door and I have to press a button to buzz someone in, I have to either hope the app starts responding before the caller hangs up; or I have to slide out the physical keypad and pray that it buffers the keystroke. Trying to answer the door feels like a game of whack-a-mole.
- If I want to take a photo (for example, of the license plate of a hit-and-run) getting from "I clicked on the Camera button" to "I have taken a photo" takes almost 20 seconds. If I want to get all the way to "I have reviewed the photo, and can tell that it came out ok", that takes more like 40 seconds.
It seems to me that the only way this phone is going to be usable is for it to get literally 10× faster across the board. There was a speed improvement of maybe 10% between WebOS 1.0 and 1.2.1, so I think it's safe to assume that they've already picked the low-hanging fruit. I don't expect the performance of this phone to be even remotely suitable for every day use for at least a year. I figure it's going to either take a substantial amount of work on the lower levels of the OS, or they're going to have to throw Moore's law and new hardware at it... and the recently-announced Pixi is clearly not the hardware that's going to be 10× faster.
So even though I hate Apple's developer-hostility, and even though I hate that now I'm giving money to AT&T, and even though AT&T's network is way less reliable in San Francisco than Sprint's, and even though I absolutely despise the iPhone's on-screen keyboard... at least now I have a phone whose software actually works.
I thought about trying out an Android phone, but the reality is that the most positive review I've ever heard about Android was damning with faint praise along the lines of, "it sure does show the potential to someday be an iPhone competitor." Also, you have to surrender all your data to the Hivemind to use one. At least an iPhone will actually sync with the computer on my desk.
Sorry, Palm. I tried to root for the underdog, I really did.
I’ve always been interested in the differences between...
I’ve always been interested in the differences between “most commented” and “most read” on various sites. I suspect that The Awl’s lists are more similar than any other site, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why that is.
The recipe (sorta) for the Shake Shack burger. (I don’t...
The recipe (sorta) for the Shake Shack burger.
(I don’t eat meat, so I don’t really care. But this is a subtle attempt to get someone to post a recipe for that amaza-ridonk mushroom burger they make.)
missed opportunity
One quick note on the DroidDoes campaign: the whole site is built in Flash, which makes it completely unreadable on the iPhone. This fact may be some cute inside baseball play on the "iDon't" theme, but as a marketing tactic it's absolutely boneheaded. Dear Verizon: your campaign is a meme. You want it to spread. To people with iPhones.
mod_reproxy for Apache and lighttpd
typester's mod_reproxy at master - GitHubKazuho made mod_reproxy for Apache2 and typester made one for lighttpd.
They add a support for X-Reproxy-URL header, which is used in perlbal often in combination with mogilefs, so your web app can internally redirect static files to other static web server after the authentication etc. is done. It's more flexible than X-Sendfile since the file doesn't really have to live on the frontend proxy, which is not often the case in the user uploaded content like photos or videos.
Good stuff.
News at Fox News?
Earlier this evening I watched a segment on the Newshour about the now-open feud between the Obama White House and Fox News. The segment ran a quote from a Fox News exec who took the White House to task for not distinguishing between Fox's talk shows -- which lean heavily right -- and its straight news which supposedly adheres to traditional standards of fairness, objectivity and editorial integrity. What surprised me is that the host and the guests seemed, at least implicitly, to grant this distinction.
At TPM we have all the cable channels running through the day in our news room. So I think we collectively can count ourselves as experts at cable news watching -- admittedly a rather dubious honor. And the whole point of Fox is that no distinction exists.
I'm sure there are legit, ethical journalists in the organization (in fact, I've known several of them. And God help them.) And there are standouts like Shep Smith who goes off the reservation with some regularity. But as a product the straight news is almost more the stuff of parody than the talk shows which are at least more or less straightforward about what they are.
As we know, MSNBC has now made a big push to refashion itself as a liberal or perhaps just non-hard-right-wing alternative to Fox. But the distinction between the two operations becomes clear whenever you watch 'news' on MSNBC as opposed to Maddow, Olbermann or Ed.
If you actually watch Fox News with any regularity it's hard to see any point to discussing the fact that the station operates more or less openly as a wing of the GOP. The more interesting question is whether and (I would say) how news organizations with strong editorial viewpoints can maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity, fairness and reportorial excellence. That's critical question for journalism today because in many ways that is the direction much if not all reportage is going. But it's a conversation Fox isn't even a part of except as the paradigmatic example of how it's not done.
As business, a thing of genius. As journalism, really?
Exporting "likes" data from Google Reader
There's no official API, but GReader's Atom feeds include the likes data.
Tags: googlereaderThis means that as a publisher you can extract this information and see which of your items Reader users find interesting.
Apple's Record Quarter Silences the Doubters (...Me)
I'd say the moral here is: Don't bet against a company whose products you own and love. via business.theatlantic.com Many millions of words will be spillt in the next week about Apple's rise and wondering about its eventual fall. The Atlantic gets right to the point!
"Sportswriters are funnier and looser on Twitter"
Shared by EveSportsJournalism.org
totally totally agree!
They seem to operate with more freedom and fun than they do on blogs, says Jason Fry. "Too many newspaper sports blogs still feel either like obligation or like an emptying of the notebook. [On Twitter], their personalities shine through better." || More sports links:
> Why do sports media get along with MLBTradeRumors?
> Glazer: Foxsports.com piece had my byline, but I didn't write it
Oakland Local
"Oakland Local is an independent, non-profit community news and information hub, connecting community and news. Our site combines original investigative and feature reporting with community news and information about Oakland non-profit organizations, community groups and engaged citizens. We are a voice of independent journalism and community service for a city where too many people go unheard, too many issues uncovered. We connect individuals and organizations around issues so change can take place."
"We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well."
“We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well.”
- Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka -one of my favorite essays of all time, which I hunted down today as part of some research. Bookmarked here for posterity.
Al Jazeera Blogs Go CC
Al Jazeera has just launched the latest of its online project called Al Jazeera Blogs.
The website features blog posts written by prominent journalists and correspondents from the global Al Jazeera television network. It also hosts several sub-blogs sections divided by geographical areas, such as the Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition, Al Jazeera has a blog focused on international business and the ongoing financial crisis.
The project also features interesting tech extras such as integration with OpenCalais’ semantic tagging system.
Credit once again goes to Al Jazeera English’s Head of Online, Mohamed Nanabhay. Mohamed also happens to be the author of the first commoner letter for this year’s annual campaign, and was one of the key players who made Al Jazeera’s amazing CC repository a reality.
The Shake Shack burger recipe
With a bit of research and social engineering, an enterprising burger enthusiast has figured out the recipe for the infamous Shake Shack burger.
Exclamation point interlude: !!!!!!!!!!!!!
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.
Totally doing this for dinner one of these nights. We'll probably cheat on the ground beef...we've got some Pat LaFrieda patties stockpiled in the freezer.
Tags: food hamburgers how to NYC restaurants Shake Shack
2010 vancouver olympics medals
last week the medals for the 2010 vancouver winter olympics were unveiled.
they feature artwork by corrine hunt and were designed by omer arbel.
the 2010 winter games medals will be produced by the royal canadian mint with metals supplied by canadian
mining and metals giant teck resources limited. they will be among the heaviest medals in olympic and
paralympic history, weighing between 500 grams and 576 g. their form was inspired by ocean waves,
drifting snow and the mountainous landscapes found in the games region and across canada.
the 2010 medals are based on two large master artworks of an orca whale (olympic) and raven (paralympic)
by corrine hunt, a canadian designer/artist of komoyue and tlingit heritage based in vancouver. each medal
has a unique, hand-cropped section of the art, making it a one-of-a-kind. a silk scarf printed with the master
artwork will be presented to each medallist along with their medal, enabling them to see how their medal
connects with those awarded to other athletes at the games to make the whole design.
more details here.
2010 vancouver olympic medal (back)
2010 vancouver olympic medals (front)
2010 vancouver olympic medals (back)
2010 vancouver paralympic medal (front)
2010 vancouver paralympic medal (back)
2010 vancouver paralympic medals (front)
2010 vancouver paralympic medals (back)
“There Appears To Be A Rabbi On The Court”
Make of this one what you will: “The New York Knicks beat Maccabi Tel Aviv 106-91 on Sunday in an exhibition game that featured a bizarre delay in the third quarter when Maccabi coach Pini Gershon refused to leave the floor after he was ejected. The game was halted for about eight minutes when Gershon continued to linger near Maccabi’s bench - a delay that included a rabbi trying to intervene by asking the NBA’s replacement referees calling the game to allow Gershon to stay.”
library joke
Some signage amusement from the Howe library in Hanover New Hampshire.
The Corrections
Interesting piece about a group of j-school students on a fact-checking mission: “Each morning, the students gather in a room to review the day’s news and identify stories that seem questionable. Then they go to work, hitting the phones and other sources to pull suspicious stories apart and see if they hold up to scrutiny. As of today, roughly 80 percent of the stories checked have contained some form of factual mistake, according to instructor and Dutch journalist Theo Dersjant.”
Sportswriters: Who Needs Them?
Can a web-crawling algorithm generate a readable sports story? Yes, more or less.
More wins than your team
If you like baseball cards, I recommend checking out a blog called Cardboard Junkie. Recently, the author posted this 1983 Topps Gaylord Perry card as part of his analysis of that particular set:
He also noted that Gaylord Perry had more career wins than the entire Mariners franchise when he joined the team. I mean--Perry had more wins than the Mariners in their entire history up until that point. A quick check confirms that before the 1982 season, Perry had 297 career wins while the Mariners had (1977-1981) just 290.
This got me to thinking about how often this happens, namely that a pitcher joins a team and has more career wins than his new franchise in its history. Of course it must happen pretty often. Virtually every pitcher with major league experience has more wins than an expansion team. Look for example at the 1993 Florida Marlins. They had zero franchise wins when the season started, but obviously most of the pitchers (such as Charlie Hough, Jack Armstrong, Bryan Harvey, etc) had at least 1 career win before 1993.
So we could find many examples of pitchers who fit this description. However--are they any who had more than Perry's 297 wins when he accomplished this "feat"? It would have to be a 300-game winner going to play for a pretty young franchise. The first guy who pops into mind is Randy Johnson, who joined the Diamondbacks in 1999 after they had won 165 games in their first 2 seasons. However, at that time, Johnson had only 143 career wins.
Anyway--can anybody come up with a pitcher who beats Perry's total of 297?
As Seen on TV: Law and Order SVU
Welcome to our newest recurring feature: As Seen On TV. We will be bringing you awesome crafts based on TV shows, both popular and obscure. If you have a favorite TV-related craft let us know for possible inclusion in a future edition!
For our first As Seen On TV we have these awesome onesies that Urka embroidered with the faces of the main characters on Law & Order SVU. Her best friend is a fellow fan, so Urka created these onsies as a baby gift. She also includes a great, easy tip for creating portraits that anyone can use. Check it out! Thanks, Urka, for sharing your project and your method!
Green
via www.flickr.com
Does Paying Sources Even Work?
There’s a segment of the journalism and media-product-making world that believes that paying sources for their exclusive version of events is a great business technique. It’s competitive, it’s efficient and it’s not usually terribly expensive. (Unless you are talking about pictures of Angelina Jolie’s babies, in which case it’s very pricey—in 2008, People and Hello! together paid $14 million, to charity, for pictures of the Jolie-Pitt twins.) Over the weekend, Gawker paid an acquaintance of the insane balloon boy’s family—I’m not even going to use their names, if that’s okay?—to tell his story. It was pretty interesting, and damning, if not entirely conclusive.
The going price, reported elsewhere, is that the guy wanted between $5000 and $8000 to talk about his experience with that family and his theories about what they were up to now. Gawker said up front that they paid him, but didn’t disclose the amount. The story went up at 5 p.m. on Saturday.
For their money, they got about 300,000 pageviews to that specific story over 24 hours—not bad at all for a weekend. Presumably a lot of that traffic came from a prominent link on the Drudge Report. By Monday at noon, it was up to 400,000 pageviews.
Gawker actually might not have paid a set amount! What the site wanted to do, as of a year ago, is make sources “authors” and pay them a rate based on the incoming traffic. That is smart—why pay speculatively, like People? Gawker used to pay $7.50 CPM (that means “per thousand” essentially!) to its own writers for their traffic; that rate steadily decreased to $5 CPM. So the site’s own effective CPM was at least $15 CPM—if not more like $30. (You wouldn’t pay your content creators more than half of your income, obviously.)
Say this source wasn’t paid his ask, but instead was offered a $5 CPM for the post. At 400,000 pageviews, that’s a mere $2000. A bargain, sort of. At $10 CPM, that’s, obviously, $4000. (And at least that much again, presumably, for the site, in ad income.)
What else does $4000 to $6000 get you at a blog? Well, it’ll get you base pay for a blogger for a month. Take Hamilton Nolan, who produced 204 posts on Gawker in the month of September, and who garnered almost exactly 2 million pageviews that month (not including any traffic to the front page itself, which, according to their stats, drew 7.8 million pageviews).
For Hamilton, that’s just a bit over 9 posts per weekday, which would be an average of almost 10,000 pageviews a post. (That last is not actually a good number—his total pageviews also include all his own posts from previous months. For instance, Jessica Coen earned 66,000 pageviews last month, and she hasn’t worked there in years.)Still. Gawker paid some thousands of dollars for 400,000 pageviews—and lots of those were drive-by pageviews from Drudge readers. (Drive-by readers aren’t all bad! In their visit, those readers gain familiarity with the site. Maybe they come back. Maybe they’ll tell a friend about the site.)
So what’s a good investment?
Jezebel did much the same thing previously, with a good rationale and for a good cause—to bribe people who ran the risk of being fired to deliver before- and after-Photoshop women’s magazine covers. Jezebel’s winner in that contest drew 1.3 million pageviews. That’s a lot of traffic, but still, it’s a small number compared to that site’s monthly traffic—five of the women there each pull in more than a million pageviews a month. It was, though, a great way to introduce the then-new site to readers.
Let’s return to People and Hello!—the real spenders. “An important exclusive sells an extra 300,000 to 500,000 copies—providing less than $1 million in added earnings,” wrote Richard Perez-Pena in the Times after that sale. But that’s just the newsstand. People supposedly doubled its web uniques for the month with those pictures. Still, at whatever millions of dollars they paid, it still couldn’t have been worth it, unless you’re counting “prestige” or “attention” as a currency—which it really isn’t.
And on the micro-scale, in this latest example of a few paltry thousand dollars, it doesn’t quite add up either. It certainly sounds efficient—one post, by a one-time writer, can garner the traffic of a week’s worth of work by a staff writer. Yet you still end up with far less bang for your buck than what you actually get from your boring old employees. And then, even if the goods are good—and in this case, it did move the story along, in some way—the Times won’t even cite your exclusive, because you paid for it. Though they’ll certainly host an AP story that does credit it… though they won’t even toss in an actual link. Harsh.
27+ Beautiful Examples of Infographics
Infographics refers to visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. They are also used extensively as tools by computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians to ease the process of developing and communicating conceptual information.
Infographics allows you to see the and understand the concept in a more interesting and useful manner, Here I’ve listed 27+ beautiful infographic design, that will help and inspire you to design a complex data in to a simple attractive design.
1.) The Largest Bankruptcies in History
2.) Housing & Poverty
3.) Crisis Of Credit 1
4.) Crisis Of Credit 2
5.) The Great Pacific Garbage
6.) On Words Concordance
7.) infoGraphic On Driving
8.) Show do Milhao
9.) Seeking Refuge
10.) Michael Anderson Resume
11.) Biking to Work
12.) Infographic Bicicelitte
13.) A History of Gay Marriage Bans
14.) Exploding Internet
15.) Where are all the fish?
16.) Piggy Trouble
17.) Classifying Experiences
18.) History Lesson: The Story of Beer
19.) Browser Wars
20.) On Currency
21.) Digital Media Weights and Measure
22.) Bulgarian Labour Force
23.) Bono: When Did He Get Into This Stuff?
24.) Where did all the money Go
25.) Ulip Cver Drive
26.) What’s in You mail
27.) Aniversario de la VESPA
28.) Crisis Of Credit Animated infographics
Source
Flickr Info graphics Group
Good Magazine
Visualizeus
- Design Inspiration | 36 Fantastic Photo Manipulation Designs
- Design Inspiration - 20 Beautiful Coke Art Illustrations
- Splash Screen Design Evolution of Famous Design Software’s
- 36 Beautiful Twitter Theme Backgrounds
- 25 Impressive Email Newsletter Designs for Your Inspiration
- 45 Creative Business Card Designs You Should’ve Seen
headline: man bites self
Richard Lacayo on Shepard Fairey's massive fuck up.
Judges really don't like it when you lie to the court and manufacture evidence. And the real irony is that a lot of knowledgeable people who have been following this case thought Fairey had a good chance of winning no matter which photo his poster was based on, because he had transformed the original image sufficiently to meet the fair-use test.
Regarding the Pricing of the Wolfram Alpha iPhone App
Wolfram has released a native iPhone app for their Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine”. It looks good, but what’s getting the most attention is the price: $50. MG Siegler says it should be $5 or $10. Rafe Needleman says it’s overpriced.
I haven’t bought it, but I’m glad they’ve set the price high. There’s widespread consensus that the current race-to-the-bottom in App Store pricing discourages the development of deep, significant applications. If all anyone is buying are quick-hit apps, then all anyone will make are quick-hit apps. We can’t have it both ways, folks. By pricing the app at $50, Wolfram is clearly saying, “This app is significant.”
It’ll be interesting to see how they do on the top-grossing list. Maybe it won’t work, but I’m glad to see someone try.
absolutely debatable
The Footnotes of Mad Men on Aqua Net:What do you think is holding up Betty’s honey colored bun Just her crushing sense of isolation and despair?!Well, now that you mention it...
MySQL-Memcached or NOSQL Tokyo Tyrant – part 3
This is part 3 of our series. In part 1 we talked about boosting performance with memcached on top of MySQL, in Part 2 we talked about running 100% outside the data with memcached, and now in Part 3 we are going to look at a possible solution to free you from the database. The solution I am going to discuss here is Tokyo Cabinet and Tyrant.
I am not going to give you a primer or Tutorial on Tyrant and Cabinet, there are plenty of these out there already. Instead I want to see what sort of performance we can see compared to MySQL and Memcached, and later on other NoSQL solutions. Tokyo actually allows you to use several types of databases that are supported, there are hash databases which are very similar to memcached, a table database which is similar to your classic database tables where you can add a where clause and search individual columns, and a ton more “database options” beyond just those two. Again my goal is to not make this a Tokyo Tyrant tutorial but rather show one potential role it can play.
More details can be read about here:
http://1978th.net/tokyotyrant/
http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/So if we can get performance similar to memcached with Tokoyo Tyrant when using disk based hash tables it would be a compelling replacement for our application here. It should provide the interface and the same access we saw in memcached but with disk persistence. So let’s look at the numbers:
Tyrant’s disk based hash was over 2x faster then combining memcached and MySQL, and about 20% slower then the all memory memcached approach. So for this particular application I would have been much better off not storing my data in MySQL and instead looking outside the database for an answer. Now sure there are other reasons you may want to keep data in the database… but I am trying to get you to think about your application and if those reasons are really valid. Helping clients pick the right solution is one of the things we do here at Percona. If an application requires a database great, but if there is a better solution we want to suggest it. It’s our goal to make your application perform optimally.
Finally, one concern you have to have is the scalability of your storage solution. As load, number of threads, and data size increases how does performance differ or change? One knock on Tokyo -vs- Memcached is Tokyo is not distributed by default. Now that’s not to say we could not shard it based on a hash, or even build an api with the capability built in ( or use the memcached clients which works! )… but native support is lacking. It does support replication which could make some rather interesting architectures in the future.
So lets look at some scalability benchmarks, my server resources are rather limited but I thought I should try throwing more threads and work at the server until it hit its limit and fell over dead. It’s interesting to see the number of transactions that occur with a given number of threads. let’s look at some of these:
As expected the smaller buffer pool struggled ( why a smaller buffer pool? This simulates a much larger data set. A BP of 256M with 1GB of data, can give similar performance to 20GB of data and a 5GB BP ). Adding more threads even up to 128 threads increased overall throughput but my load average on the server hit 40 and my CPU was pegged. At 128 threads I was pegging out my CPU across the board. Also interesting is I started to hit bottlenecks in MySQL/Innodb when I had enough memory but I increased the threads from 64 to 128. As time permits I should revisit this and look at increased datasets, and look for area’s where Tyrant may stumble a bit.
Bottom line given a specific application and data pattern sometimes a relational database is not the appropriate place for storing data. A tool like Tokyo Tyrant may not be for everyone or every application, but neither is a relational database. Before building your next application try and understand whether an RDBMS is really needed or not.
How did I do these tests:
The above number were run with 32 Threads, Tyrant was started with 8 threads and 128M of memory, memached was started with 16 threads ( 1.4 memcached ), mysql was 5.1 XtraDB. Each environment had 2 tables each with 2 million rows. The data was identical. memcached and Tyrant stored a comma delimited string to represent the row. Mysql was running with 256M allocated to the innodb buffer unless otherwise noted.
What’s next? Well next I am going to try and continue this series by exploring and benchmarking other NOSQL options and comparing them to database based solutions. I think showing the performance of a couple of different Tokyo database formats would also be interesting. What other solutions are people interested in? I know I have gotten a lot of requests for cassandra #’s, but what else? Drop a comment and let me know!
Entry posted by matt | No comment
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Mad Men, the megamovie of the moment
Writing for The Atlantic, Benjamin Schwarz says we've got it all backwards regarding Mad Men: January Jones is a bad actress and the show's appeal lies not in the accuracy of the production details but in the emotional intelligence.
Then there is the miraculous Hamm, playing the lead character, Don Draper. Here is an actor who at once projects sexual mastery and ironic intelligence, poise and vulnerability. That alchemy has created the greatest male stars, from Gable to Grant to Bogart to McQueen to Clooney, because it wins for them both the desire of women and the fondness of men.
For my money, Jones is just as good at Hamm in portraying her character's multitudes.
Tags: Benjamin Schwarz January Jones Mad Men TV
Samantha Morton’s Inspiring Screen Test
I love Samantha Morton. She’s in a lot of my favorite films: Morvern Callar, Code 46 , Control, Jesus’ Son and In America and she always steals the show in a really good way. So when I saw that she was in a New York Times “screen test” video in advance of her new film The Messenger coming out I got quite excited. And after I watched it I was even more excited because in the video she discusses how when choosing a role she has to make sure the film has a message, that it might be able to create change:
“But even if I don’t like the characters I play, there does have to be a message for me as a person. I always think that if I give myself to this character, something will change. The audience will see someone that has an impact on them. ”
Yes! She also talks about how animals in captivity upset her and about being a foster child. In short, I don’t think it’s possible for Samantha Morton to be any cooler.
Go HERE to give a watch to the video.
*photo from TheMessengerFilm
Google Voice voicemails appearing in public search results
We're not exactly sure what's going on here, but it certainly seems like at least some Google Voice voicemails are being indexed and made publicly available somehow. If you punch in "site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*" as a search string you get a few pages of what appear to be test messages, with a couple eye-opening obvious non-tests scattered in there as well. Dates on these messages range from a couple months ago all the way until yesterday, so this is clearly an ongoing issue -- hopefully Google patches this up awful fast.
P.S. - Google Voice transcription accuracy really falls off a cliff when it's listening to muffled audio, doesn't it?
Update: Google says it's changed how shared messages are indexed and made available to public searches, so we're hoping this was just a one-time thing.
[Via Boy Genius Report]Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Google Voice voicemails appearing in public search results originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Emoji RubyGem
New Ruby gem by Ryan Orr, making sense out of the emoji chaos:
There are 3 carriers (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank & Au by KDDI) who’ve all created they own set of emoji glyphs in differing areas of the private-use range Unicode character space. Basic emoji supports 176 glyphs plus an additional 76 for C-HTML 4.0 for a total of 252. The iPhone — which uses the SoftBank implementation — supports 471 emoji glyphs and to top it off, Apple and Google have been working on a standards proposal for inclusion in ISO/IEC 10646 which proposes 722 glyphs in total. Confused yet? Right then.
With millions of mobile phones supporting emoji & Internet connections, web developers want to take advantage of the extended glyphs in the data they send to mobile devices but in the Ruby community there doesn’t seem to be a clear library that implements all 4 standards. Hence Emoji for Ruby.
Roger Ebert on ‘Rashomon’
Ebert on Rashomon:
Its very title has entered the English language, because, like “Catch-22,” it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.
Life Imitates 'Arrested Development'
from the Guardian:
Prisoner escaped after swapping identity with twin brother
Identical twin Simon Maclellan wrongly released from custody after pretending to be his brother, court told
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a remarkable film.
Hello. I am Vincent Price and I like to play the organ in my shiny rain poncho.
I always put on my face before I go out.
This is my beautiful and silent assistant Vulnavia. She wears a vast array of deco costumes and helps me kill people. In the background you can see the wax busts I've made of my intended victims.
For instance, this bird cage is filled with murderous bats.
This man is being exsanguinated.
And this gentleman has been brought down by a booby-trapped frog mask at a fancy dress ball.
The police are stymied.
Oh, I see. Vincent Price is following his own version of the ten plagues of Egypt, as he kills off all the members of the surgical team who failed to save his wife four years ago. Thank you, rebbe.
This movie also stars Joseph Cotten. Hello, Joseph Cotten!
It turns out that while everyone thought Dr. Phibes had died in a terrible car accident while rushing to the side of his dying wife, he was merely horribly disfigured. He'd also been rendered mute, but he's used his great acoustical expertise to rig up a way to attach an amplifier to a hole in his neck (through which he also drinks martinis) and connect it to a phonograph. This allows Vincent Price a number of excellent scenes in which he stares balefully and inflates his throat like a toad while a recording of his voice plays from elsewhere.
I think my favorite murder is death by locusts. First, Dr. Phibes brews up some highly concentrated essence of brussels sprouts, as you do:
Then he drizzles it all over the head and neck of his sleeping victim through a hole in the ceiling and sends in the locusts.
They naturally chew all the flesh from her bones, because of the well known irresistible allure that brussels sprouts hold for all grasshoppers.
One thing leads to another, as it will. Joseph Cotten is forced to surgically remove a key from the torso of his young son, an elaborate acid-dispensing device hanging like the sword of Damocles over his head. Dr. Phibes takes his leave.
That's his dead wife there next to him. Dr. Phibes will be joining her in the afterlife, or so it seems, via an infusion of embalming fluid. Then the floor closes over them, and the police are left, once again, at a complete loss.
Best of all, there's a sequel!
Flying in a WiFi wonderland: Free Internet from Google on Virgin America flights
We know the holiday season seems to come earlier every year (sorry, Halloween), but before you make your final travel plans, we're excited to let you know that we're partnering with Virgin America to provide free WiFi on every Virgin America flight between November 10, 2009 and January 15, 2010.
The holidays can be full of dates and details to remember, and it's easy to get stressed out somewhere between planning a long distance, multi-generational family gathering and combing the Internet for the latest impossible-to-find furry contraption for your toddler. And when you have to do all that while coordinating air travel at the same time as several million of your closest friends, things can get downright dramatic.
Whether it's using Gmail to confirm an airport pick up time with your brother, doing some last minute gift shopping for your niece on Google Product Search or searching Google.com for a good sweet potato pie recipe before touchdown — we hope this makes it a bit easier to stay connected with family and friends while you're up in the air.
You can find out more about our partnership, where Virgin America flies and how the in-flight WiFi service works at www.freeholidaywifi.com.
Posted by Jeff Aguero, Product Marketing Manager
A Survey Asking For Your Help
Photo by Donna, Apples at North Union Farmers' MarketI'm asking a favor today. It's fall and fall has gotten busy, happily so. I hope soon to be making some changes to this site and truly want to know why you click here. Will you help me and take 90 seconds to click through an 8-question survey? I'll be grateful for any and all comments. What do you like about this site, what don't you like, what would you like more of?
I'm also gathering emails for what will be a newsletter. The great majority of you who comment here leave your actual email, which comes to me via typepad. This is great because sometimes I like to respond personally to your comment. But I don't collect these addresses or do anything with them. A newsletter, offering additional content (no spam, filler or crap, I promise), is email based, and there will be a question on the survey noting this. My ingenious incentive for you to take the survey and leave your email address is to give away to one such person a copy of Michael Symon's new book, Live To Cook, AND Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc At Home, respectively signed by Michael and Thomas to whomever you choose (and by me if you wish—I'm the "with" guy on these two books, and proud to be so). It's not imperative that you leave an email address if you simply want to answer the questions anonymously. Either way I'll be grateful. Click Here to take the survey.
Why Fresh Eggs Are Harder to Peel
As fresh-from-the-hen eggs become more available at farmers' markets and as more people jump on the backyard chicken coop bandwagon, peeling hard-boiled egg shells may become trickier. According to Wired Science, fresher eggs are scientifically harder to peel. You may think you're a pro-peeler, only to end up with a crater-filled blob. As Harold McGee points out in On Food and Cooking:
The best guarantee of easy peeling is to use old eggs! Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it coheres to itself.
But don't worry—this doesn't mean you have to cook questionably spoiled eggs. Just put the hot eggs into a bowl of ice water for a few minutes first before peeling to help loosen up the shell a bit.
Related
The Food Lab: Perfect Boiled Eggs
Egg in Toast: What Do You Call It?
Video: Cracking Open a Big Egg
Football Night In America
Conor argues that Rush Limbaugh is not a racist, but the greatest race-baiter of our time. His evidence is pretty undeniable. But this last quote really got me thinking:Oh, and don't forget the NFL. As of this week, it is "an outpost of racism and liberalism." (Strange that a league that is supposedly racist against white owner candidates has so many white owners.)
There's more. But that last quote says a lot to me. It's fairly clear that the NFL is neither an outpost for racism, nor liberalism. In fact, I'm willing to be that no organization does a better job of bringing black people and conservatives together, and indeed converting some black people to conservatives, than the NFL.
There's a measure of truth in Rush's critique, because conservative, in Rush's mind, is nothing without white populism. There's a difference between being, say, pro-life, and thinking, say, that Barack Obama is "the biggest reverse racist in history." I'd bet there are a lot more NFL owners who are the former, than there are the latter--and then some who qualify as both.
But since the 60s, white populism has been an indispensable plank in political conservatism's foundation. White populism is Ronald Reagan fighting for a tax exemption on behalf Bob Jones University, despite a school-wide ban on interracial dating. White populism is John McCain standing for the Confederate flag in South Carolina while he still could win in 2000. (Props to McCain for reversing field.) White populism is Mike Huckabee, eight years later, insisting, in the same state, that ""if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do."
White populism isn't simply yelling"You Lie!" at a black biracial president, it's yelling "You Lie!" at Strom Thurmond's 78-year old black biracial daughter. White populism is Trent Lott insisting that his state was proud of supporting segregationists and that had they prevailed electorally, "we wouldn't have all these problems over the years." White populism is The Ron Paul Political Report asserting that New York City should be named "Welfaria" or "Lazyopolis," predicting an oncoming race war, and asserting that, in the wake of the Rodney King riots, order was restored "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began."
And white populism greatest modern exegete is Rush Limbaugh::
Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now. You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,' and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.It's quite wrong to dismiss the Tea Parties as racist cabals. But when protesters are toting signs like this, and the movement's interlocutors are on national TV claiming that the president of the United States, who's mother was white, is "a racist" with a "deep-seated hatred of the white culture," the specter of white populism hovers.
The NFL may be run by conservatives, but they are, in large measure, Don Draper conservatives. They are not benevolent. They are not enlightened. They are not "friends of the Negro." Their motto is Get Money, and if white populism aids that effort, they will ally with it. If it hurts that effort, they will damn it to hell. The same people who sent Warren Moon to the CFL, gave us the Rooney Rule. There is respectable genius in that kind of shape-shifting.
The GOP, on the other hand, is locked in. There are conservative arguments to be made about climate change, health care, tax policy, abortion, affirmative action and so on. A significant slice of GOP voters are there for the principals. But another significant slice are there because of who they think they are not. Likely it's now an marriage of the two. Lee Atwater knew:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"--that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.How do you undo an alloy without destroying it? How do you break the GOP down to its root elements, preserving what you believe in, disregard what you don't, without crippling your party for a generation?
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me--because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
October 18, 2009
Somebody yelling at somebody else
"Cuban Linx II" sounds like an old Wu-Tang record: scraggly samples from soul records and rapid, gnomic bundles of rhymes about drug-selling and agitated encounters. Almost every skit involving Raekwon or his partner, Ghostface Killah, involves somebody yelling at somebody else.That's Sasha Frere-Jones on the recent Raekwon album
. It's true!
Here's "The New Wu":
Come On, Shepard!
The drama with Shepard Fairey continues…While the position that some of the Justseeds' members take on the work of Fairey is public knowledge (see Mark Vallan's 2007 essay, written with Josh MacPhee, Favianna Rodriguez, and Lincoln Cushing or see Favianna's blog or Liam O'Donoghue's article), recent news stories continue to look bad for any "progressive" street artist-turned capitalist entrepeneur.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Fairey admitted to using Mannie Garcia's photo of President Obama as the source for his famous HOPE poster. While Fairey has greatly benefitted from this poster, Garcia has received little. Today's LAT states:
"Shepard Fairey admits to wrongdoing in Associated Press lawsuit"
In a strange twist to an already complicated legal situation, artist Shepard Fairey admitted today to legal wrongdoing in his ongoing battle with the Associated Press.Fairey said in a statement issued late Friday that he knowingly submitted false images and deleted others in the legal proceedings, in an attempt to conceal the fact that the AP had correctly identified the photo that Fairey had used as a reference for his "Hope" poster of then-Sen. Barack Obama.
"Throughout the case, there has been a question as to which Mannie Garcia photo I used as a reference to design the HOPE image," Fairey said. "The AP claimed it was one photo, and I claimed it was another."
New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...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."
In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster. In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.
After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."
Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken."
The artist expressed his remorse in his statement, saying that he is taking "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. "
He added: "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."
Fairey's statement said he regretted that his actions would distract from the issue of fair use for artists. "Regardless of which of the two images was used, the fair use issue should be the same," he said.
Keep checking back with Culture Monster as this story develops.
-- David Ng
Is Locavorism For Rich Folks Only?
[Photo: Kerry Saretsky]
In what is surely meant to provoke controversy, James McWilliams posits that very theory on a guest post on the Times' Freaknomics blog. It may be controversial on the face of it, but he's saying nothing new or even particularly perceptive here.
Yes, it's true that heirloom tomatoes grown and sold locally are not going to be affordable for anyone who cannot afford to make any discretionary spending decisions involving food. I've often made that very point to people who blithely say that we as responsible citizens of the world are just going to have to pay more for locally, sustainably grown and/or raised food. Locally grown food is invariably not the cheapest source of produce in a given market.
That being said, there are efforts underway to set up greenmarkets and farmer's markets in low and lower-income neighborhoods in many cities across the country. The farmers at those markets are most often selling locally, sustainably and responsibly grown, non-designer fruits and vegetables to diverse populations at reasonable prices. In fact, in many of these neighborhoods there is precious little easy access to fresh fruits and vegetables anywhere. Let's face it. Bodegas are not good sources for reasonably priced fresh produce, locally grown or otherwise. So for McWilliams to suggest that locally grown produce stifles diversity and discourages community is rather bogus if you ask me.
Damn you, James McWilliams. Your little gambit worked. Your post got my locally raised goat.
PubHubSunday
Which is to say, It’s Sunday and I just wired up my little publishing empire here to the new hotness in Web syndication technology, PubSubHubbub. If you’re running a hub and you’re not evil, let me know and I’ll ping you.
PubSubWhat?
It was initially a private project by a couple of Googlers which seems to have gotten legs here and there around the Web. The idea is best explained, with a slideshow even, on the home page; take a minute to read through it.
It seems painfully obvious that this whole thing was at least in part provoked by Twitter. Which is a new and very general-purpose communication medium; but it’s owned by a single company, and no matter how much we like them (and I do) it’s all wrong for a general-purpose Internet medium to be owned by anyone.
So I see PubSubHubbub, as much as anything, as an attempt to capture Twitter’s pattern of information flow in a reproducible, interoperable way. I think what we’d like to see is a large number of micro-publishers (just like on Twitter) and an even larger number of subscribers (just like on Twitter). But I think we’d like to see a moderate number of hubs to move all this goodness around — unlike Twitter which by definition has only one.
The effect I imagine is quite a bit like my Twitter client looks to me; except for, among the 140-character micro-posts there’d be summaries of real, meatier posts, with links to the full content, all produced as an automatic side-effect of people hitting their “publish” buttons.
Easy and Hard
Hooking up a publishing system to the PubSubHubbub machinery is damn easy; I know because I just did it. You have to put
<link>element(s) in your Atom feed pointing at one or more hubs that will be aggregating you. Then, when you update your site, you need to ping the hub(s) using HTTP POST. (In fact, you might not even have to; the pubs are perfectly capable of polling publishers to check for updates.)Subscribing through a hub is bit trickier. You have to process a potentially-asynchronous callback from the hub to verify that you really want to subscribe and aren’t just a spammer. What’s going to be even harder for a lot of people is that you have to be prepared to accept POSTs from the hub when it wants to tell you that there’s an update in something you’re subscribing to.
This last one is a key limitation of the system as it stands. The vast majority of desktops, at the moment, can’t accept POSTs because there’s a firewall in the way. So the utility of PubSubHubbub for ordinary end-point subscribers on ordinary computers is pretty limited. I can think of a few different ways you might try to work around this, but they’d require some community energy, so let’s see if any develops.
Building a really big scalable hub would be a challenge too, but far from outside the scope of what we know how to do. Me, I’d use Erlang in a flash, but there’d be other ways to go too.
The Spec
I first read the 0.2 spec yesterday and, since I’m a hopeless specification pedant, had to send a bunch of comments to the discussion group. It’s not terrible. I thought there were a couple of places where it offered unnecessary flexibility and probably wandered into YAGNI territory.
But there’s really only one thing that made me seriously nervous. Let me quote from release 0.2 section 7.3, Content Distribution:
... the feed-level elements SHOULD be preserved aside from the atom:entry elements. However, the atom:id element MUST be reproduced exactly. The other atom:updated and atom:title elements required by the Atom specification SHOULD be present. Each atom:entry element in the feed contains the content from an entry in the single topic that the subscriber has an active subscription for. Essentially, in the single feed case the subscriber will receive an Atom document that looks like the original.
Um... Excuse me!? Is the space between the lines here crying out that a syndication hub should be considered within its rights to change anything in my feed that’s not
atom:id? Like for example, insert a Cialis ad in my first paragraph?Protocols can’t enforce good behavior; if a sleazeball hub operator wants to fuck with the content there ain’t no protocol specification that’s going to prevent it. But in this area, the expectations need to be very clearly set.
Conclusions
I really don’t know. I just don’t see how, absent heroics like Skype has to use, POST-to-the-client is going to deal with the reality of ubiquitous firewalls. On the other hand, Twitter clients which rely on polling seem to make their users happy. I see nothing in the spec about supporting polling, i.e. how a client might ask a hub for its version of a feed, but that seems to me like it might be a real useful function.
So, in closing:
If you’re running a hub and would like ongoing to ping you when I update, I can fix that up; the latency should be a single-digit number of seconds from the time when I hit the “publish” button here on my laptop.
If you know of any interesting PubSubHubbub clients, let me know; I think I’m probably exactly the kind of person who’s apt to get good use out of one.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Big in Bulgaria
She has an uncanny ability to talk about uncertainty in a way that yields revelation—or, rather, to accept uncertainty as a condition of revelation. Describing her path to becoming a writer (she began writing stories around the age of five, quit around fourteen, and didn’t pick it up again until well into her twenties, while acquiring three M.A.s and a Ph.D., in Renaissance Studies) via www.newyorker.com Macy Halford on the appeal of Jhumpa Lahiri.
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