A Whole Lotta Nothing

The Brazilian wave

Aside from the hype and dearth of useful ideas, social software has exposed some interesting trends that I didn't know existed. I know I'm not alone in this, but I'm fascinated by a trend that has been going on for about a year and shows no signs of stopping: Brazilians are dominating social software networks.

I guess it makes sense when you think about it. They've got a country with fairly free laws that promote creativity. While they're generally poor on a per capita basis, they have the largest online population in South America.

Recently, Orkut put them neck and neck with Americans on the system and new language tools were added so you could basically cruise the site entirely within groups that posted in just Brazilian Portuguese, or just English. Fotolog had the famous case of Brazilian cam girls competing neck and neck with American photographers last summer. I suspect even with pricing changes at Fotolog, the Brazilians won out in terms of membership numbers since then. Ever since Globo's Blogger install launched a couple years ago, the service has skyrocketed in user numbers. This person claims Brazil is likely to be the second largest group of bloggers after Americans.

Thanks to the enthusiasm of Brazilian users and the democratic nature of these networks, you see Brazil outpacing the participation and number of Americans. The virtual world is relatively new and doesn't have many limitations beyond the obstacles of getting online in the first place, so the world is on an even playing field so to speak. I find it fascinating that in this new, more open, and more equal environment, Brazil is doing so well. I don't know what it means for the future of Brazil or America, both online and offline, but it's certainly an interesting trend worth watching.

Get thee to firefox asap

Everyday there seems to be a new windows Internet Explorer bug or exploit that introduces a new virus into potentially millions of computers, but this new one takes the cake. Thanks to IE's security holes, someone can install a bug on your system that furishes them with your banking passwords. And IE is still the most popular web browser on earth. This is totally and completely insane.

If you don't already use Firefox as your default browser in Windows, download it right now and make it your default -- for your own personal safety and the safety of your investments.

Attention Oregonians

A nice neigborhood cop pulled me over today to remind me that as of tonight at midnight, most Oregon school zones will be 20mph 24 hours a day. The cop mentioned that while he was just giving me a word of warning, after midnight he would start writing tickets for it.

The new law could be for child safety, but it could also be an easy excuse to write more tickets. A rule like that makes me think Oregon cities might be looking for new sources of revenue. Are there really that many kids getting hit by cars after midnight in school zones? Do a lot of kids hang out after midnight at schools of all places?

How to kill a linkfarm

As much fun as it is to run PVRblog, recently it's been a chore. Last week, someone sent me an email congratulating me on acheiving a pagerank of 9/10. I had no idea and I guess that's nice and all (and surprising, given that the site is less than a year old), but it's turned into a giant honeypot for spammers. I would venture to guess there aren't any other 9/10 pagerank sites that allow you to submit information that results in a link to your site.

After waking up and deleting half a dozen posts every morning for the past several weeks (and banning their IPs), today I noticed even legit comment posters were tweaking their posting names to reflect a better google ranking. Instead of putting "steve" down as their name, their name would read something more like "info on pvr hardware" which would link to their site. When a feature gets abused by even those that should know better, it's time to do something about it.

I've considered turning off comments, and that's often what people do, but in this case I'm removing the URL request on comment forms and I'm no longer linking to anything from a commentor's name on the site, including all back archives. I had HTML turned on for comments, but in the last hour that I've had name/urls turned off, I've already received a few new spam comments, using HTML in the comment fields. So that'll be coming off soon too.

I noticed at a few weblogs, new comments don't have email or URL entry forms, and comments get posted with just names. I always wondered why, but now I know.

I don't use RSS readers... until now

After hearing news of Apple adding feed reading to Safari, I was a bit skeptical. As much as I like reading weblogs, I hate using RSS readers. Readers have a lot of basic problems: putting a count on every feed and item like weblogs are suddenly my work inbox that I have to keep down to zero, the counts are recorded by the program, so jumping from one computer to another means you lose count of your feeds, and viewing comments or the rest of a message requires jumping to a browser anyway. Personally I use an update montior, and track the newly updated sites with a sidebar.

But after seeing this quicktime demo of the Safari reader, it just might be the first one I ever use. Gone are the counts on everything telling me how many more posts I must read. In its place is something more akin to Kinja or LiveJournal: you get a universal home page of all the recent items you are interested in. The "personal newspaper" metaphor is one that has been thrown around for years, but few of the RSS readers offer it.

While this new feature isn't perfect (it still ties me to Safari running on a single computer), the display of all feeds on a single page and lack of incessant counting will probably be enough to make me switch over.

47.41

Today I went on a 50 mile ride, finishing it in just over three hours. The last time I rode anything similar was 8 years ago, back in college. I was surprised the ride went so well, considering I basically got up off the couch and started riding 10-15 miles every couple days, starting just a couple months ago.

Now I'm thinking that riding the entire Oregon Coast isn't an impossible task to accomplish in a few more months of training.

Shoot people but don't share files with them

This is insane. When you compare the proposed INDUCE act, which would make it illegal to create anything remotely copyright infringing and allow companies to bring civil suits against programmers, with pending gun legislation that would make it impossible for anyone to sue a gun company in a civil setting. So making a program that allows folks to trade files which may or may not be illegal will carry stiffer penalties, while a company making a cheap "saturday night special" gun designed to kill or maim humans at the lowest price point will be legally protected.

We do indeed live in strange times in which intellectual property seems to be more sacred than human life.

Indeed. [via aaronsw]

They found The Dude's tape!

I love The Big Lebowski, and I've always wanted to hit a Lebowski Fest. The costume competition is often the highlight and from the looks of it, this year's Lebowski Fest did not disappoint.

The winning costume was a Credence tape. That's probably too obscure even for fans of the film.

Supersized PR con

Last year, when I heard that TechCentralStation was a lobbying group that participated in some shady campaigns disguised as journalism, I didn't pay it much mind, since beyond simple politics, it didn't seem to result in a spate of bad articles there. Well, I guess that time has passed, when I found their concerted effort to discredit Morgan Spurlock's film Supersize Me.

Looks like some whacky conservative outfit even tried to replicate Supersize Me, but with tons of exercise and different choices to somehow show McDonalds was healthy.

update: Oh perfect, TechCentralStation receives funding from McDonalds, among other corporations.

Gmail problem solved

Sweet! After trying a couple registry hacks that didn't quite work, this program did what I wanted. It opens a new window with just the new message window populated (without the rest of the gmail "chrome") but I'm sure Google will create some sort of toolbar extension that does the same.

Cory's DRM talk

Here's the great thing about the public domain, I can grab Anil's copy of Cory's HTMLized talk, improve the readability (to me) and post it here.

Like other interesting public domain texts, I bet it eventually shows up on a t-shirt at the next tech conference (insert sound of a thousand keys punching up Photoshop and cafepress.com).

Damn those loggers

I have to say that I agree Dave Winer in this AP article:

"This thing has been blown so far out of proportion," he said. "It's just unbelievable to me."

While I think Dave should have posted a warning ahead of time to users and can take steps to get the sites back online sooner, making this front page news at Yahoo.com (screenshot) is insane, not to mention the ridiculous headline.

Getting your gmail on

Is there any way to specify your default email app as a website in a Windows XP system? Currently, my office workstation has an ancient copy of Eudora I haven't used in years, but whenever I need to email someone from my PC (I do all my email on a powerbook), I have to copy/paste addresses by hand and use my mac or use Gmail.

It seems like there should be a way to tell firefox my default email app isn't an app, but is instead gmail.google.com.

update: a bunch of people sent me some registry hacks to make this happen. Seems that all you need to change is this key:

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command]

Add the path to firefox and the URL to gmail, and it should work (I'll try it out in the morning)

How many voters would even see this?

Something tells me that after Clinton, we just can't have campaign stuff like this anymore.

It's all how you look at it

I spent some time with a conservative, Bush-supporting family member (in this recent interview I tell you why mentioning family names is probably a bad idea) recently and while avoiding discussions of politics altogether, I came to realize this person was enjoying benefits from the very things they were fighting against.

We were talking about the family member's long-time opposite sex partner that they've been living with for years, but not married to. They have signed all sorts of paperwork making sure that one can visit the other in the hospital if the need arises and act as decision maker if the other one is incapacitated. They also share health care benefits, through a partner plan at one of their jobs. And then we started talking about medical benefits, and how this family member benefited from Medicare in addition to other health coverage, which made doctor visits and prescription fills sound both cheaper and easier than my own high-end health plan.

Then it dawned on me -- this family member that supports a president that wants taxes low, gays not married, and totally privatized health care enjoys many benefits and rights that a gay couple can't have (while still being unmarried themselves) and also has access to socialized medicine. I never really thought about it, but most people in this country don't want socialized medical care for all, but everyone over 65 gets it. I know gov't health care has its drawbacks, but while people throw huge numbers around about how much it'd cost, how much debt we'd incur, and how much we'd have to raise taxes, we already have socialized medicine for a large (and growing) subset of our population. It's a strange world we live in these days.

Now with static FTP rendering!

I just got an email pitching the new Manila server. Talk about your bad timing.

Gmail contest winners

First off, let me just say I got a ton of response to my gmail photo invites thing and among the entries I got far too many good ones to pick just a few. I actually used gmail's built-in tools to track everything. By labeling all incoming entries, I can see in one click that 118 people sent a photo link in. Of those, I put a star next to 36 I liked on first view. Of those, I narrowed them down to 31. Among those 31, there was something compelling about the colors, lighting, and/or subject matter and any one of ten could have had the top spots. I'm going with my gut reaction on first viewing but here are the three winning entries:

a kite photo, a net photo, & a sunset photo

It was really hard to pick the top three, as any one of these could have also been there. If I had more invites to give out, I would have thrown them all into this list, in no particular order:

§ § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § § §

I learned some things in this experiment. The biggest one is that when I said "send in your best photo" I figured that meant the best composition with the best lighting and most technically superior image. What most people sent was their finest memory captured on film, regardless of photo quality. It was eye-opening to me, and told me a lot about over a hundred strangers. I got to see many, many photos from vacations and untold numbers of sunsets. It's a fantastic way to experience meaningful moments in peoples' lives, by seeing these photos. I've been getting way too far into the technical side of photography for the last year or two and forgot that photography is first and foremost a way to record memories.

Overall, I got to see (and share here) many wonderful photos and memories from those that sent them in. I wish I had more invites to give and thank everyone for participating.

Tortuous

Rafe highlighted some quotes on torture from September 19, 2001 that show incredible foresight and are not to be missed.

New Beastie Boys

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, a couple weeks ago I got a copy of To The 5 Boroughs, the new Beastie Boys album. It's not much of a growth for them, sounding a lot like their previous record Hello Nasty. Most of the songs are somewhat forgettable, but MCA gets props for the following rhyme in It Takes Time to Build:

We got a president we didn't elect,
The Kyoto Treaty he decided to neglect...

I never thought environmental treaties would make it into mainstream hip-hop songs, but the Beasties proved me wrong.

More free gmail

While I still go through the entries to pick my favorites, those still wanting a gmail account should check out the new Thinkum blog.

Photo contest for gmail

I have a few invites to gmail I'd like to give away. I don't want money, or favors though. I like creativity, so how about this: an impromptu photo contest.

Send me a URL to a favorite photo you've taken. I'll pick the three best photos, link to them here, and send invites to the 3 winners. Deadline is say, 24ish hours from now, noon on Thursday, Pacific Time.

update: the gmail photo battle is ovah! Looks like about 115 people sent me a photo. About 2/3 of them were superb and I kept track of the ones I liked best, which looks to be about 40 of them. I'll try to pick my three absolute favorites tomorrow and link to all the other ones that were good. I had no idea there was still this much demand for gmail accounts.

Blogspot and Firefox snafu

I'm glad to finally hear I'm not the only one seeing gibberish when I view a blogspot site in firefox. No one else I know sees it, but almost every page at blogspot is a page of hex garbage. I suspect it may be a mozilla gzip problem, but maybe it's on Google's server end of things.

End the FCC, begin innovation

I try not to fall for Declan's grandstanding, but his piece on why the FCC should die is spot on.

What it means is returning to bottom-up law rather than the top-down process that has characterized telecommunications for the last 80 years.

Maybe it's the programmer in me talking but I think the Internet and unlicensed wifi spectrum show that unregulated spaces produce the most innovation and create new markets for technology and information. In many ways, the FCC has spent the last few decades slowing technology progress and most recently is now in the censorship game, which doesn't make any sense at all.

A little girl on a bike with an ipod mini

As I was walking home this evening, a little girl was riding her bike in the middle of the street. She still had the training wheels on as she wobbled and struggled to peddle. It reminded me of when I was little and how badly I wanted a bicycle but couldn't get one. My parents wouldn't let me have a bike until I was 12; my mom was too afraid I'd hurt myself. I'd pass the bike section in the store and just look, having given up asking my parents about it long ago. I eventually did get one after much pleading and begging. Amazingly, getting my driver's license at 16 and the subsequent borrowing of the family car passed without incident.

That little girl's name was Nigritude Ultramarine. Critical IP still sucks. Andy Pressman is a talentless hack. I am part Jew.

Phantom pixels in CSS

Last weekend I helped get a great new FCC policy blog up called Wireless Unleashed. It's a cool idea about how once regular TV stations go digital, all the unused stuff above channel 13 could be reallocated as a new free wireless spectrum, kind of like a super powerful 802.11b.

Anyway, now that the site is up, I can point out a phantom CSS pixel problem I encountered while doing the layout. I used a basic three colum CSS layout, with some padding in the main content area. My favorite hack is that it's got a background image to make the post area and sidebar fill their space to the bottom (while using an alpha transparent png that degrades nicely in IE for windows). On this one page, the design called for full-width banners, so I put some inline CSS to override the padding in the white area, and to get IE and moz to display the full width banners I had to resort to an image replacement hack.

Now, here's the crazy part. The center column isn't fixed width in CSS even though it's a fixed width layout, and the banners with people's names on them are the full width of that space. If you look carefully, you'll see a pixel or two of white space on the right edge of the banners. In firefox I see one pixel. In IE/Win, I see about 3 px. If you scroll down below the right sidebar to the last banner, you'll see that it's flush and there's no gap at all. The background line between white and orange doesn't bend, but the banners don't appear all the way to the edge when content is on the right. I can't figure out why, and just gave up on trying.

update: stupid me for forgetting there was a 1px margin on the right sidebar. IE still shows a big gap but it's probably its own personal weirdness when calculating page widths.

And there was much rejoicing

The long national nightmare is finally over

Best Alton Brown moment ever

The fact that 'Dr' Phil has the number 1 cookbook on Amazon.com makes me want to end it all.
posted by Alton Brown, 7:38 PM

When times were simpler

Back in early 1999, Peterme half-jokingly came up with "blog" as a shorter form of "weblog" and despite everyone pretty much universally disliking the word "blog" or "blogger" or "blogging" ever since, the name has stuck. I've never really liked it and lately I've taken to using the word weblog as often as possible, but I'm reminded of the very first time I used the short form of the word every single day since.

If you take a look at the top right corner image of the MetaFilter design, you'll see "Community 'blog" which is oh so quaint because when I designed the layout in May of 1999, I was pressed for space and couldn't fit "weblog" there. I even added an apostrophe to blog, because the contraction seemed so odd at the time. And yet, five years later it still remains.

Rebel into a 10D

I've been waiting to hear news of software hacks for the Digital Rebel ever since I read about the similarities between the rebel and the more expensive 10D model. The mechanics and firmware are the same, but the specs are software controlled, meaning that someone was eventually going to figure out how to remove the software controls.

Personally, if I can up the rapid fire shooting mode from the rebel's limit of 4 continuous photos to the 10D's limit of 9, I'll make flashing my firmware.