A Whole Lotta Nothing

Analyzing iTunes giveaways

Signal vs. Noise posted about the results of Pepsi's iTunes 100 million song giveaway, where only 5 million were redeemed to this point. I posted a long comment there that I feel like reposting here:

---

For me, I think this doesn't illustrate how little people turn in coupons/rebates but how many folks are technically proficient enough to even redeem the prize.

Think about it, [to redeem your free iTunes code] you need:

- to have an interest in music so much that you'll go through the process to get just one single

- to own a PC or Mac modern enough to run the latest iTunes reliably

- know how to install software on said computer

- know how to navigate your new software to redeem your coupon (you have to go to the music store, then click on the icon to redeem, not totally intuitive)

- learn how to use the new store interface to find the song you like

- go through the apple user signup and login process

- have a fast enough connection to download your new 2-5Mb single

- have the means to play the song on your computer

Now, think about grabbing a phonebook from any city in the US, say [in] Montana. Now imagine going to page 143, then picking a name. Call them up and ask them if they know how to do all these things. If they answer no, then go to the next name in the phonebook. I'd be surprised if you got yes 5% of the time.

When you consider just about everyone from every walk of life in the US can readily find a bottle of pepsi and buy it, I'm not at all surprised that only 5% were interested and technically aware and adept enough to go through the process.

New iTunes

I've been playing with the new version of iTunes for the past hour or two and the first thing that strikes me is all those annoying little arrows that link to the music store. I could perhaps see this being useful every once in a while, if I think to myself "I wonder if there's a new record by Mountain Goats?" but I can't see doing that more than once or twice a month. Why not put a "Look up in the iTunes Music Store" right-click menu option instead? The weirdest part is that my own purchased music has links to the store... so I can purchase them again? I'm turning that off asap but I still wonder why the arrows are turned on by default. Perhaps, as Tom just told me, to blur the lines between "your music" and "the store music for sale" which would certainly increase sales.

The party mix is weird looking, interface-wise, I wonder if it's using any sort of BPM analysis to arrange songs next to each other. I can't really tell the difference between that and random shuffle at this point.

Andre pointed out compilations to me, which I didn't notice before either. It appears that they're reading compilation info from ID3 tags now, and putting albums by various artists in the Artists browse list, which is kinda useful.

Another reason to love bluetooth

I just loaded Blue Phone Menu on my laptop and had a friend call in. Holy cow is this a cool little app. It made my entire desktop blink on each ring, with a centered popup showing who was calling and what number they were using. I keep missing calls when I'm at my desk listening to music on my headphones so this is a killer app for me.

I also like the actual percentage battery life indicator on my desktop, it's something even my phone doesn't really tell me specifically (there's just a battery icon and estimated standby time left).

Ten years of mapping

I'm posting this mostly as a reminder to myself to look into this: Tagging photos to GPS data tracks.

Apparently he got this working with a digital rebel like mine, a powerbook, and a $300 GPS unit. I'd love to have a map of the world at the end of my Ten Years project, populated with locations where all 3,650 images were taken.

Where are they now?

American born, Venezula raised, Cuban influenced Nil Lara's self-titled debut was my favorite CD in 1997. I played it several thousand times that year after I saw him open for Rusted Root and it's been critically acclaimed since its release. I was reminded by him today and figured he must have released a few more albums by now, but amazon still only lists his one label disc from '96.

Finally I stumbled upon his new site. From the looks of it, he lost his recording contract and is doing a new "indie" album only via postal mail in small quantites, starting this month. That's unfortunate, but I'll be sending my $16 in.

It's weird, he had a broad fanbase way back when and I bet he could draw in all sorts of american and latin american audiences, but here he is selling small runs from someone's apartment in 2004. Maybe he had the worst management in music or the label didn't know what to do with him.

D'oh!

Brad's not kidding here. Gmail as it stands is hackable. I logged in today and noticed a bunch of read mail I hadn't read and it turned out that my friend got into my account earlier today. That'll teach me to set my password reminder to something I mentioned online ages ago.

update: whoa, turns out it wasn't Andy, though he did get my login from the question trick. I went and changed my password and secret question, and I've heard that Yahoo Mail and Hotmail do something similar. Someone wrote to me to point out they can get into their friends' Hotmail accounts no problem, so this isn't limited to Google's implementation. I hope any publications pick up on this point if they're writing it up tomorrow.

You can't handle the V-8!

Coolest car ever. I love that they included this photo with the listing.

Blogs in our everyday lives

Today my Oregon State Primary voter guide arrived and totally blew me away. It's funny how these silly things have gone from a diversion for web designers into a tool to help shape elections.

Also, I love that there's a bonus "b" in the term "web blogs." Ha!

Gmail feature surprise

Last night I left my desktop PC's browser open to my gmail account and took my laptop to the library to do some writing. I read some new mail on the powerbook, responded to a few things, then came home and slept. Today I came back to my desk to see gmail running, with all the messages I had read and responded to shown as read and responded to.

Since gmail just refreshes the page in your browser every so often, if you read your mail at one location, other locations are updated automatically. This is something POP3 mail rarely gets right and why I used to use IMAP when I would check mail from multiple machines. It's nice to see a web app get this key feature right from the get-go. If you read email at work and at home, gmail will work perfectly fine, even if you leave your mail windows open in both places.

The downloads of the Christ

My new favorite blog Sellout Central points to an interesting story on Christian Piracy. Quoting:

only 10 percent of Christian teens considered music piracy to be morally wrong, according to The Dallas Morning News

I plunge the depths of the internet from time to time just to see what the scene is like and I've been surprised by the presence of things like the Passion of the Christ movie and soundtrack being traded around, bible programs being swapped, and people openly requesting pirated copies of christian-themed files. I would think if anyone considered downloading stuff online to be akin to stealing, it would be faithful followers, but apparently that's not the case.

update: Andy sends this story of Passion bootlegs being used to route around the damage of non-distribution:

But the Israeli distributors who have the sole legal right to import the movie to the Holy Land have so far declined to do so... Robbed of the chance to view the film legally, the Holy Land's Christians - foreign pilgrims and minority Palestinian Christians - are finding other ways to satisfy their curiosity.

The dream is over

My quest for data comes to an end as the local 7-11 is no longer giving out iTunes cups and I can't seem to find any iTunes Pepsi bottles anymore. If you've been following my progress, the final tally was 5 for 7. Only two losers in seven outings, putting my winning percentage at 71%. Given that they claimed 33% would win, I'm either really lucky (doubtful), they wanted almost everyone to win, or demand wasn't nearly as high as they thought.

The big gig that solves eveyrthing

I spent the weekend in Seattle, enjoying a lot of good food and fun and last night I got to see Scott's big opening gig. I took a whole mess of photos and put my favorites up here, and I'll be eeking out the best of them on my ten years site this week.

Scott's show was fantastic. Amazingly enough, he wasn't very nervous before it started, and he sounded better than ever with Michael playing violin and mandolin as backup. Michael cracked up me too, he spent all day working on his fence, then threw on a hat and we gave him a ride to the show. A couple hours later he was on stage duelling licks with Josh Kelley's kickass slide guitar player Ben Peeler. Then there was the crowd, and the people that clustered around Scott after his set to get autographed CDs. It was nuts, and great to watch others experience Scott's music for the first time.

Josh Kelley was really good, much better than his album. His voice has more range live and he can really play a guitar. Actuallly after seeing him play, his CD sounds like they engineered out all the personality and warmth in his music, which is a shame.

In the big picture, it was just an opening gig for Scott, but then I think back to the years I've known him and worked with him; I've seen him playing coffee houses and doing open mic shows, and seeing this show was like all that hard work finally paid off. Josh liked the show, the promoter liked the show, and the audience liked the show and he sold a bunch of CDs. It seems like stuff is finally falling into place for Scott and it felt like I was watching him take the first steps on a road to albums and more shows and touring and the like. All in all, I had a great time and was stoked to see a friend succeed.

Gmail's new promise

I can't believe how much flak Google is getting over gmail. Hotmail and Yahoo feature 5 or more obnoxious ads on every page view, plus advertising in each and every mail they send out, but Google creates a better version of web mail and we have state representitives introducing laws to ban the service before it even launches.

Has the whole world gone crazy?!

They've gone and updated their policy at gmail, and it boggles my mind that they even have to go to such great lengths to explain how their subtle ads aren't the new red menace.

They should introduce a new promise for gmail users. Every message that gets sent to a gmail account will result in a kitten getting petted one time. They could rival the old fishcam at Netscape, by having a big room with a kitten-petting robot showing everyone how much love the kittens are getting from the PetBot2000. And remember, no humans would be involved in the kitten petting.

Would that make things better finally?

A confession and a song

I eschew reality TV in most all forms, but that kind of ended last year when I happened to catch the first episode of American Idol and I've watched every episode since. Most of it is pap and watching a show requires fast forwarding through almost all of it, but once in a while you get some magic moments. Here's Fantasia's song from last night's show (which I got from Caroline's site). It was easily the best performance of the last two seasons. It wasn't just singing it right, the way she presented it onstage made it look like it was ripped from a Broadway show. This is what you get when you totally commit to doing something creative, it's freaking amazing.

Pieces of the Future

I haven't rented movies in months (seen plenty on HBO thanks to TiVo and *cough* downloaded from the internet) but recently grabbed a couple gems. Pieces of April was something I wanted to see last summer, but its life was short-lived on the Oregon art house movie circuit, and before I knew it, it was gone. The movie is fairly strong, it's a little slow in parts, a little flat here and there, but has some really great emotional parts that make up for its shortcomings. I guess I'd give it a 80/100 if I rated movies on a quality scale. But while I may consider this a pretty good film, I think it's a real breakthrough work; a milestone of sorts. The real breakthrough was the format. Now, I'm not focusing on it because I know it's sort of a gimmick to do a mainstream movie on cheap DV cameras, but it's worth looking at this movie as a sign of things to come. I'm sure someone in 1979 (or whenever Wordstar first came out) made some bold prediction that in five years the Great American Novel was going to be typed out on a computer running their software and I'm sure people laughed. And when you think about how 99% of the publishing industry works today, through laptops and copies of Word, the Great American Novel is being written every year, thousands of times over, on cheap computers running cheap software that allows for easy writing and editing. Pieces of April is the first thing recorded on digital video I've seen that finally felt like a "proper" movie. I'm going to say it was the performances and script, not just the actors involved that made it shine. The picture quality definitely feels like a step down from regular cinema, but after the first 10 minutes or so you don't notice any jaggies or the harsh exposure and focus instead on the story. The entire film was made for about $160k, using prosumer-level cameras. When iMovie came out soon after MiniDV cameras became popular, I heard a lot of people predict that someday soon, the next great film was coming out of some unknown person with a computer, a good script, and a few grand to film it. There has been a few attempts at this already. Sundance recently screened a film edited in iMovie. Although Pieces of April came out of the "Hollywood Machine" it's the first DV feature I've seen that made me forget it cost nothing and was produced with cheap gear. It was a good movie that happened to be shot in DV, and as technology marches forward, there's no doubt that ten years from now anyone will probably be able to buy a high-def DV camera for about a grand that could shoot a feature. Of course, you're still going to need the basics that no piece of software or hardware can provide: great story, actors, locations, sound, and editing, but the prices of tools are dropping so fast that maybe someday we'll get to the point where an artist won't be limited by the cash in their pocket, but by the ideas in their heart.

All Hail Bluetooth

While I've known about bluetooth phones for the past few years and heard you could do cool stuff like use it as a modem, control your pc, and sync your computers with your phone, I didn't really give it a try until I got back from Etech this year. In the few months I've been playing with it, I can say one thing's for sure: it's like living in the goddamned future.

What it is

Understanding bluetooth is pretty easy, it's just a name for a low-range networking standard. It's essentially "personal area networking" meaning you can connect a phone to a wireless headset or a mouse with a computer, all without wires. There are a bunch of bluetooth enabled phones and PDAs out now, and thanks to USB adapters, powerbooks and PCs can play too. My current setup entails a Sony Ericcson t68i phone on t-mobile, paired with a 12" aluminum powerbook. The follow's a run down of how to set it up and what you can do with it once it's in place.

The setup

I started by swapping the sim card from my old phone (a samsung I bought specifically to take photos and post online) into my partner's t68i and vice versa. I was surprised that this Just Worked, but it did. Once it was my phone I called t-mobile customer service and dropped my t-zones service for transferring photos and signed up for their unlimited GPRS internet service for $20/month. I asked for setup help, and they forwarded me to a tech that helped me figure out how to setup the account on my phone and what the CID settings were. I got an SMS a few minutes later with all my settings automatically stored onto the phone as well. I fired up my powerbook, updated bluetooth to the latest firmware, then ran the "Setup a new bluetooth device" option in the bluetooth menu. I left everything on the defaults then when it asked for an access number to get online, I simply entered in *99***(your CID value)# where (your CID value) depends on your phone but is simply a number. That should add a bluetooth modem to your network preferences and I added the icon to my menubar so I could connect whenever I needed to. And just like that I had a permanent backup connection whenever wifi was not available. No more worrying about which hotels have network connections and how much they cost. No more getting lost while traveling because I forgot to print a map. I just pop open my powerbook, start the bluetooth connection to my phone, and I'm connected. In the 20-30 hours I've gotten to use my phone as a modem I've enjoyed a connection that seems to run right at the reported 20kbps speed. It's just a tad slower than a 28.8 modem, but is entirely serviceable for email and web browsing. Reading weblogs with lean code and CSS and RSS feeds is easy as well as reading email on the connection. Bluetooth does seem to suck some battery life out of the phone. I went from a full charge to about 50% left after a couple hours of bluetooth'd connection at an airport recently. The time to connect is fast, only taking a few seconds to establish a connection and bluetooth seems to work fine if I leave the phone in my pocket. There's something impressive about leaving the phone in your pocket and getting a connection just fine (though you do have to fight the urge to yell "Hey everyone! I've got the internet in my pants!"). WiFi is revolutionary but I take it for granted. Playing with data connections over bluetooth, it feels like the first time I tried WiFi. It's almost magic that I can stand almost anywhere in the US, and pull down data from the air, via a wireless local connection to my phone.

While operating heavy machinery

You know how you can talk on your cell phone while driving at a high rate of speed? If you've got a good cell connection, you can transmit data as well. I'll give you a second for that to sink in. This means while you're (or better yet, someone else is) driving down the freeway at a high rate of speed, you can connect and browse the web and download email from your laptop. I don't know why, but at first I figured this was impossible to do reliably. I've had tons of calls drop off in the last ten years I've used cell phones and voice quality is often less than 100%. If I want to downlaod 50kb of email, at some level I thought every byte is sacred and less than 100% perfect service would result in an unreliable data connection. In practice however, driving across the country at 70mph while downloading email and browsing the web works just fine. It even worked perfectly fine when I tried it on Caltrain, the commuter train line in the Silicon Valley.

Connected via bluetooth on the Caltrain, my laptop near the window as the houses roll by

This recent revelation that you can connect on freeways and trains has really opened up the possibilities. There's little stopping someone from doing a 2004 version of Travels with Samantha, but using a cellphone to post stories and photos from the road along the way.

Bridging the usability gap

One thing about cell phones that's always annoyed me is the keypad interface. You end up spending hours keying in your contacts whenever you get a new one, only to lose them afterwards if you ever switch phones or lose one. Bluetooth on the mac makes this problem a thing of the past by allowing you to link the address book application to your phone via bluetooth. When I switched to this new phone, I simply added a few entries to the Address Book that weren't already there, then sync'd up my phone and I suddenly had 40 phone numbers loaded up. As long as my future phones are bluetooth equipped, I'll never have to key entries in by hand. This is a very cool thing and one of the reasons why all my phones will have bluetooth from now on.

Nerdy fun

A cool bluetooth/t68i helper app I had to try out was Sailing's Clicker app. It installs a whole bunch of little applescripts that can be fired off from your phone. While it was fun to stand 10 feet from my laptop, point my phone and advance songs in iTunes, change the volume, and give powerpoint and keynote talks using my phone's buttons, I can't see this being totally practical for frequent use. The only actual useful feature I did find was incoming calls could be triggered to pause iTunes and set your iChat status to away. I usually leave my phone on vibrate and unless it's nearby on my desk or in my pocket, sometimes I miss calls. With the visual and audible changes on my mac desktop, I most certainly would know there's a call. The downside of this app is battery life on my phone. Without bluetooth on, I can go 3-4 days before I need a charge, but with Clicker connected via bluetooth all the time the phone's nearly dead in about 24 hours. After a day of playing around, I haven't used it since.

More Gadget Freakdom

Lastly, there are a whole host of bluetooth devices out there that you can connect to your phone, laptop, or both. I've got a Jabra Freespeak wireless headset, and it can connect to my phone and my mac. The sound quality is really good on phone calls and after you get used to tweaking it around your ear and jamming the piece into your ear canal, it's really comfy and you hardly feel it after a few minutes. On the mac, you can use it to iChat people using video or just live audio (using iChat as a phone), and it's ok, though the sound quality is kinda so-so. I haven't tried out bluetooth mice or keyboards on my powerbook since I hear they don't wake sleeping macs (you can't just shake a bluetooth mouse to wake it up like you can with a usb mouse), and I hear the battery life is an issue (changing batteries once/month or recharging often). I'm looking forward to the integration with cars. This has been problematic so far, but I think it's only because we're in the early stages of adoption. I can't wait until I have a car that is aware of my phone and can turn down my music when it rings, or transmit data (directions, car status, location, etc) to and from my phone.

Conclusion

It all started when a friend smuggled a phone from Finland into this country 2-3 years ago, and I saw his wireless headset that seemed too Star Trek to be real. Fast forward to today, and my own personal setup isn't just feeling Star Trek, it's actually useful. So far the killer app is data over the connection. Whenever I'm out of my office and beyond the reach of free wifi, I'm on bluetooth. I hear that pricing for Bluetooth is still all over the map (which can bite you in the ass if you travel a lot) but my t-mobile plan has been a solid $20 in the months I've had it, and it even allowed for free data use when I was in Canada recently (on the rogers network I think). I'm still amazed you can speed across the land while downloading email at the same time, and the little gadgets like headsets are also quite useful. I know Bluetooth has been around for a while and no one ever thought it'd be ready for prime time, but that time is now, and the useful applications of this technology are plentiful and easy to use. updates: A lot of people have sent in tips but here's one I didn't know about: "One thing your article didn't mention is the how Mac's Address Book can work with Bluetooth. When you have Address book open you have the little BT button enabled, address book will have a popup with the name (if in the address book) and number of the person calling. This is great when you're at the computer but you're phone is across the room or in your pocket or whatnot. The popup will let you send the call to voicemail if you don't want to take the call." -- Kirk

New feature

Some of my posts have been getting kind of long, so I figured I might as well move the wordier pieces over to the feature section (and I could finally rid the world of Anil's mug). Pieces of the Future is a collection of thoughts I had tonight after watching Pieces of April for the first time. It was pretty good as a film, but I think it could be a milestone in filmmaking.

Adventures in being a bandwidthaholic

I've been sharing a remotely hosted server at Rackshack.net (which became EV1) with friends for over a year now and it's run amazingly well. The account started with 700Gb of montly bandwidth and after the unfortunate SCO license flap, we got upped to 1 terabyte of monthly bandwidth, with seemingly no network speed cap. For the past year, the server's pushed out a couple Gb of bandwidth a day, tops, from all the sites it hosts. Even when I put a bunch of music online last spring, it hardly made a dent.

This month I figured I'd see just how much a terabyte was. It started when I offered to host the Beatallica songs. After a day the bandwidth jumped to 10-15Gb and it was humming along nicely. Then it hit Pitchfork's news page, and the bandwidth skyrocketed. The box was pushing out 20Mbit/sec and after a a couple days I had to tell the gang to de-link songs as my monthly bandwidth total reached 100Gb just a few days into April.

I was pretty impressed that the box held up ok (after Chris limited the site to 1 download per user) and was amazed at the traffic a site like Pitchfork could generate from a tiny news blurb. I thought to myself "wow, aside from slashdot I couldn't imagine a blog ever generating this kind of traffic and demand for files."

Then Cory linked my 66Mb file of a Jon Stewart interview over at BoingBoing, and it completely blew away the previous bandwidth numbers. In about 12 hours of the link being directed at the box, the network throughput jumped to almost 60Mbit/sec, and it pushed out 131Gb of data in half a day. The box served up all the other sites fine but as I watched my monthly bandwidth allottment reach 40% of the total before the first half of the month was even over, I took it offline and Andy put it up on his tracker, where it is being downloaded like crazy, but off-loaded to everyone's personal connection sharing the load.

Here's a cool graph of the network utilization on a weekly, 30-minute moving average (click to see the full image):

You can see the initial rise from a bunch of blogs linking to Beatallica, then the peak is the pitchfork hit, which subsided after song links were eliminated. Then a few days of relative calm and Boingboing is the huge peak, which only lasted half a day. I grabbed this right after I started redirecting folks to the torrent.

I've learned a few things from these large bandwidth experiments:

- Ridiculous amounts of bandwidth is out there for a cheap price (the server is only $100/month, shared among people using it). If you're paying $30 a month and getting hit with bandwidth overage bills that go into the hundreds of dollars, find a friend that knows some linux server administration, get one of these leased boxes, and never worry about bandwidth again.

- A thousand gigabytes is a ton of bandwidth and it's nice to have around when you want to share large files with friends or the general public. I host my ten years site there and don't really care about the size of photos or the number of people pulling down the RSS feeds with large images embedded.

- That said, when you get hit with a huge amount of traffic, bandwidth is still going to be a problem. Most colocation hosts cap your line at 10Mbit/sec and I was surprised to see the box creeping up near 60Mbit/sec yesterday. It's still a problem to host one giant file for a ton of people, even with an absurd amount of bandwidth available to you. Bittorrent is the savior here, Andy tells me even though he seeds all the files on his server (which means the original file's still on his server being downloaded if no one else is sharing it), his bandwidth is a fraction of what it'd be if it was just a direct download. The best part is the more popular the file (like the boingboing traffic hit), the more people download it from each other instead of your server.

- Setting up your own bittorrent server still a pain in the butt. This needs to be as difficult as setting up apache on a windows desktop. I want to see a BT server exe I click, install, then seed files easily using a web or desktop front-end (yay! Andy sent this and this). Or make an apache module. Also, build BT support into Mozilla, right now. BT is a great technology that solves a fundamental problem we all face everyday, but we have to walk people through how to download the clients first. In some of the data I saw on the Lessig book downloads, only about 5% of users opted to use BT to download, the rest just got it off the server directly. We need more regular folks using BT, by having it built into browsers.

Another feature: bluetooth

I've been writing a review of bluetooth for the past few months and thanks to some late-night caffeine keeping me awake, I finally put it up as another new feature: All Hail Bluetooth. I loves my bluetooth phone and laptop.

It's official, Nickelback is the new Creed

Music fans throw rocks until Nickelback stops and leaves the stage. Heh.

TTY scams

This is an unfortunate story about TTY machines being used by scam artists, while at the same time they are protected by confidentiality laws. It's a tough situation...on the one hand the laws are good and just for people with disabilities trying to get through their life, but on the other these rules are being exploited to carry out crime. I don't know what solution there is to this, but it's a sad story.

Jon Stewart interview

If you missed Jon Stewart last week on Al Franken's radio show, here's a 66Mb zip of the segments in mp3 format.

update:I couldn't handle the bandwidth hit anymore, so Andy was kind enough to take it over on his bit torrent server. Thanks Andy!

Not you. Sorry. Ok, you can come in.

I never thought I'd say something like this but this is a great church commercial.

Gmail review

I don't know if it's due to the increased pressure on spammers or what, but since I put the post up Friday night begging for spam I've only gotten one spam email. It showed up about 5 hours after the post was up and I haven't gotten anything since. It didn't flag it as spam, which I assume is a feature Google will be developing more as time goes on (or perhaps auto-recognition of spam isn't turned on yet). A lot of friends have imported spam to see if gmail would auto-flag it and no one seems to have tripped any spam filters yet. Oh, the spam was also in Chinese, which gmail didn't do such a hot job displaying, but I'm sure they're still working the unicode bugs out in the beta.

update: apparently the spam filters are turned on and working well, because checking my empty spam folder this sunday afternoon, I found three Nigerian 419 scams, automatically filtered into the spam folder. Cool!

I can say that after using gmail for a few days I finally get what everyone is raving about. On first glance there's nothing impressive there. To see what it is capable of doing well, you have to use it: get a few email discussions going with folks and the more you use it the more obvious the benefits become. I bet you could say the same thing about blogging. Show a blog or the Blogger.com app to someone that has never seen it or heard of blogging. I'm sure they'd dismiss it as nothing special, one page being some sort of boring public diary, while the app itself is just a giant form and a button marked "post and publish", whatever that means.

Gmail is pretty incredible about tracking discussions. I've tried several email packages that offer threading and gmail's is simpler and more straightforward. It automatically trims replies and shows email threads as top-down discussions, so it's easy to keep track of where people are in a discussion. Replying to email is really easy, you just start typing in the textarea below a message and it automatically starts a response.

Gmail relies on the universal inbox with good searching and flags. A lot of email power users I know have no filters of any kind, prefering everything to drop into the inbox with custom quick searches to find stuff and generous use of the flag message command. It takes a little getting used to if you've been using filters for a long time.

Everyone's raving about the keyboard shortcuts, but I haven't gotten to use them much. I assume that's a power user feature I'll pick up eventually. So far I've been impressed by email address auto-completion. That's something I've never seen in a web app before and it's quite a time-saver. As I get more familiar with it, I hope to be able to navigate all my mail with simple keystrokes.

I think Google's really got something amazing here. It's a useful app that feels almost like desktop software, the storage means you never have to delete anything, and the simple flags and searching in a threaded inbox is both a power users and new users dream setup. As this develops along, I just might convert over to it from pop and imap based accounts.

This is broken

Did anyone else staying at the Hilton during SXSW notice the misleading elevator up button?

Spam in gmail: the test

Well, since everyone and their mother has a gmail account and is posting screenshots, I figured there's one important test left to do that no one else has done yet. I want to test out the limits of this new email app, see how long it stays spam free:

mathowie at gmail dizzot com

Let's see how long it takes until I've got some junk in the ol' inbox, and what the tools are like to deal with it. More later, whenever some spam shows up.

update: email auto-link turned off after half a dozen spams in a couple days, plus I like the account, so I might as well not further pollute it.

Guh?

What in the hell happened on the daily show tonight? Jason Bateman was on and his interview featured two or three odd jump cuts, leaving me to wonder what happened, then at the end Jon Stewart makes a joke about the interview that makes no sense. I hope someone leaks the full interview, just so I can know what really happened.

Tools for future-proofing MT

I've been thinking about future-proof ing URLs in Movable Type lately, and it seems like what is really missing is a migration tool.

Say all your MT archives are setup to use the default system, that relies on ID values, like:

http://example.com/archives/000184.html

And you want to move on to something like:

http://example.com/04/03/12/my_post_title

It'd be nice if there was a simple little perl script that could look at your MT post titles and figure out what your final urls would be, and then pull the post ID to create one giant text file listing where old pages were and what their new names are.

Basically, I want a script that can produce a .htaccess file on the fly. It can't be that hard if this plugin had access to MT IDs and titles. It's just a text file as output, which perl is perfect for. Is there already something out there like this that I've missed?

update: Brad Choate sent this as a possible fix:

<MTEntries lastn="10000">
Redirect 301 /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>.html /weblog/<$MTEntryDate format="%y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>
</MTEntries>

Thanks Brad! I could just make this a new template, then move my archives around and load it up as the .htaccess file. Nice.

John, Paul, Ringo, and Hetfield

More great illegal art, again involving the beatles. Beatallica does Beatles cover songs, but in the style of Metallica. I Wanna Choke Your Band is my current favorite.

I wonder what the legal precedent is for tribute bands selling anything featuring cover songs and these sorts of derivative works? (Beatallica doesn't sell any music though, just wondering how other tribute/cover bands do it)

Key to wealth in Medium Density Fiberboard, not motherboards

Whoa, that's a lot of Björäqë bookcases: IKEA founder overtakes Gates as world's richest

Corpses not Corsets?

This new site by a newspaper designer is fan-fucking-tastic, as he breaks down how different papers handle the news. Reminds me of what Brill's Content used to do, critique the media, and I was wondering if anyone would ever fill some of their vacuum.

Currently, the site is focused on the use of grisly images from Iraq this past week. As folks at MetaFilter pointed out, it's striking that in all the calls to curb "indecency" on our airwaves, we focus on sex and bad language, but photographs of burnt corpses hanging by ropes and being trampled on by people is just fine for the neighborhood newspaper.

Which is worse, seeing an almost bare breast or looking at photos of burnt remains of our soldiers?

Think globally

The only thing I think Bush is doing better than Kerry is handling the problem of outsourcing that is hitting the computing industry. Personally I've never been much of a protectionist, I never understood the trend ten years ago to only Buy American (say, whatever happened to Wal-Mart's commitment to that?), rather I've seen myself as a global citizen that doesn't care where my shoes or car gets made (though I would hope people get paid and treated fairly wherever that is). As barriers to other parts of the world continue to fall, we're only going to become more of a global community. And that ultimately means things will get better for everyone socially and economically that participate in it. I know in the short term that means things can be difficult, but in the long term it's a good thing.

Bruce Sterling's talk at SXSW hit on this well. He mentioned that a lot of people getting protectionist about American grunt jobs going India reminded him of how we used to treat the South in America. He said something to the effect of "When you hold a region down technologically and economically, it will have drastic future consequences...just look at how the US used to treat the South and how long it's taken them to catch up to the rest of the country."

Brad DeLong's a fairly liberal economist at Berkeley and he's written a long piece about offshoring worth reading. I also want to point out my new favorite topic blog BlameIndiaWatch as well.