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April 30, 2005

The suckiest suck that ever sucked


(The dyson's maiden voyage, originally uploaded by mathowie)

I have to say, I'm totally buying into the Dyson vacuum cleaner hype. This is after I vacuumed the whole 1600 sq ft. house, half of which had been vacuumed earlier today with a conventional model that broke.

I've bought a string of $200 vacuums that worked so-so and required new bags every few weeks so I figured it was worth it to splurge on a $400 model that was better than anything else (according to my friends with one). It's about half as loud as my old vacuum which is an added plus I wasn't expecting.

Posted by 03:47 PM | Comments (3)

So long Pair, hello Gmail

Today marks a bit of a milestone for me. I've been with Pair.com since 1998, hosting my haughey.com domain and email. They have served me well, with the longest downtime being about 24 hours when the changed data centers around 1999. I've always recommended them highly as they offer a lot of features, but in the past couple years I had trouble justifying the $35 a month I've been paying them while I already had my own servers to pay for. I could have moved the site to my shared linux server ages ago, but what held me back was moving my personal email.

Changing DNS is always a pain and changing mail servers is often asking for trouble. I've kept paying Pair while I put this inevitability off, but with the loss of Knowspam coupled with my attempts to budget my money better, today I made the change. The web stuff is now hosted on the same box as this blog and for email I'm now forwarding all @haughey email to gmail.

I've long been impressed with gmail's features and flexibility. It's great to be able to jump onto any computer and check your email in a browser, and now that they've added pop support (I wished for IMAP, but for offline email reading, mirrored POP makes sense), I can keep reading email in an application when I don't want to have a browser open all the time (or when I want to use a better email composing interface). Gmail's search can't be beat and that was another factor in the move.

Of course, before I changed email servers for the first time in 7 years, I tested it out, forwarding what little email I get at @metafilter addresses to gmail, and it's worked out great. I just bit the bullet and did the switchover of haughey.com DNS and got my first forwarded email minutes later (remember when this used to take 48 hours?).

About the only downsides I can see have to do with my From: address always being my gmail address. If Gmail let you customize that, you could basically use Gmail as a mail server while still maintaining your domain identity. I'm wondering how hard it will be unsubscribe via email from lists, since I can no longer send things from my old address, and I'm also concerned about everyone in the world that has white listed or filtered my haughey.com From: address.

Of course, those concerns are minor compared to the limitless storage and flexibility Gmail offers.

Posted by 09:37 AM | Comments (11)

links for 2005-04-30

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 29, 2005

Uninsured

Today I've been getting a steady stream of church-based spam about Cover The Uninsured Week, so I was skeptical about a site using those means to advertise, but it really seems on the up and up. There seems to be bipartisan support in all the leaders they've chosen to represent them, and all the messages seem to be based on common sense instead of money or politics. So despite the spams, it looks like a good cause, and while I have little hope we'll ever see any level of universal healthcare for all, it would be nice if the "culture of life" included covering medical expenses for the 8.4 million children that are uninsured. I bet it doesn't take a freakonomist to realize covering children today will reap huge rewards 15 years down the line.

I've also long believed if we could offer healthcare for all in the US, the explosion of creativity and entrepreneurism could have the potential to pay for it. I know many smart, motivated people filled with ideas that work boring jobs just so they can have healthcare for their family. Who knows how many business ideas, technology applications, and clever inventions are going to never see the light of day because their creators waste away at a desk somewhere. In that respect I see universal healthcare as good for business, since small business owners are off the hook for paying for it and everyone with a good idea won't be terrified of leaving their job behind to pursue their dreams.

Posted by 09:08 PM | Comments (1)

Baby watchers central

I didn't know Flickr has a feature that lets you not only email a photo to them that gets posted to flickr, but you can also set it up to go directly to a blog. This is great for something like a late night hospital run to have a baby, so I setup a new blog to accept these shots on the go, when the time arrives (should be any time within the next week or so). If you're friends or family, subscribe to the new site or remember to check it daily: Not without my daughter

Posted by 05:14 PM | Comments (0)

huh

A random person just emailed me saying they mentioned my name on Attack of the Show, on the TechTV G4 network. If anyone saw it or has details, feel free to drop a comment here.

Posted by 03:34 PM | Comments (3)

links for 2005-04-29

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 28, 2005

Tiger

I've been running Tiger for a few hours and so far things seem good. Mail is much faster (but the UI is uglier in my opinion), my phone finally works with iSync, and the spotlight searching is terrific. What I don't quite get is Dashboard.

I mean, I get that it's a flexible way to build little single-purpose applets and that's cool (I run konfabulator on my PC for weather, to-do list, and a calendar), but what I don't like is how it runs on a second quasi-virtual desktop type layer. Why not let me display the weather in a floating window all the time? I reference the small calendar on my PC desktop all the time while using apps like travel websites. It seems kind of lame if I have to toggle F12 whenever I want to use them.

Or am I missing some obvious way to keep them visible at all times?

Posted by 11:34 PM | Comments (5)

links for 2005-04-28

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 27, 2005

Obi-Wan Mathowie


(Obi-Wan Mathowie, originally uploaded by fandango_matt)

The hits just keep on coming. I thought I loved the Tron one the most, but this Star Wars themed one takes the cake.

Posted by 09:55 PM

Strange bedfellows

There's been a lot of talk about the DVD filtering bill on various copyright/law sites, but what I find most interesting is watching reactions to it outside of the tech law realm. It turns a lot of traditionally friend and foe relationships on their heads.

It all started with CleanFlicks, which rents and sells what are essentially derivative works, movies clean enough that they could be played on an airplane. There are obvious legal issues when they resell and rent modified works, and Hollywood directors were not happy. Then came ClearPlay, a DVD player that takes regular DVDs and has essentially a text file associated with movies, telling it what to skip when you play them. Like CleanFlicks, but in a device. This one skirts most legal issues because it's a box running in your private home, on your own DVDs that are unaltered. But still, some Hollywood folks disliked the idea of it and this bill passed through congress to protect them.

The best part for me personally is watching where people fall on the issue when they discuss it online. A lot of folks fed up with the rise of religious influence in this country have a knee-jerk reaction against the bill, due to the backers. A lot of artistic types are also reacting against the bill and these services because it doesn't consider the original artists' work and how it was meant to be displayed.

Personally, I'm happy to see it, and not because I'd ever use a device or service like this, but for the sake of the law surrounding technology and art. In a way, President Bush just signed a law making derivative works legal and home hacking projects OK for sale to others. There's not much of a difference in the abstract between a DVD player that skips scenes and creates a new movie and a XBOX that can be turned into a web browsing, weather reporting, movie and music jukebox. Selling a copy of a DVD with scenes removed and language tweaked by an outside company unrelated to a movie studio has obvious parallels with DJ Dangermouse making the Grey Album.

To further complicate matters, the bill also upped the crimes of taping a movie in a theater and pre-releases of music and films online, but it also allowed Orphaned Works to survive.

There's a lot of good and bad in this bill, but I look forward to seeing what can come from it, in the realm of sampling and hacking.

Posted by 11:00 AM | Comments (3)

links for 2005-04-27

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 26, 2005

Free Flickr contest over

I got a handful of great responses in my earlier Flickr Pro giveaway thread. I love the idea of repurposing flickr for a wedding photographer -- you could use the private gallery options to show photos to clients and keep the negatives. I love the idea of helping out budding photographers, limited by the free account's storage boundaries, I've always felt artists should never be limited by tools.

But I love helping non-profits more, so I have to give the top nod to the Free the Slaves site. I think having a way to email photos from the field or from members worldwide could really shed light on their work and hopefully help end the practices of forced labor and child labor.

Several others said they might give away their extra flickr pro accounts to other posts in the thread, so if you hear from a random stranger about it, that's why.

Oh, by the way, if anyone from the Free the Slaves site could email me their flickr free account name, I can then upgrade it to pro status.

Posted by 04:29 PM

Unclench people! Unclench!

For some reason, someone took my recent tongue-in-cheek post way, way too seriously.

I feel like a person that told a knock-knock joke at a party and in response got a 15 minute lecture on the nature of door design, acoustics, and various wood grains that affect the sound of knocks from a materials engineer that specializes in forest and forestry products.

There's a million things I could say to explain how big corporation news in this country is breaking down and how blogs are on the rise; how the continum between my pissings in the wind here and Bill O'Reilly is a million shades of gray that blurs daily; I could write several thousand impassioned words about how the mass democratization of everything (thanks to the internet) is changing our society for the better; I could tell you tales of working on the Blogger.com code and interface five years ago and being thrilled when we heard "blog" used on TV the first time, but it all seems pointless.

The things I say here are pure opinion, mostly meant to crack up the dozen friends that read it. I don't aspire to be the NY Times, though other webloggers are certainly heading there, much to their credit. I do think "MSM" is a silly term that makes people sound like outsider cranks, but if I say I'm going to avoid a blog that uses it, that's about as earth-shattering as my neighbor saying they don't care for the color orange.

I don't take myself too seriously, so treat my words accordingly, as I will treat the 50 or so raving emails I've gotten in the past 12 hours. Another hint: look up at the address bar and see how seriously I take my words. A whole lot of nothing, get it? No? Try the second definition here.

Posted by 07:30 AM

links for 2005-04-26

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 25, 2005

Pour 40Gb on the curb for your dead torrents

Bummer to see TvTorrents get shut down. I didn't use it much, but I did become a huge fan of Arrested Development after catching one episode on TV and going back to TvTorrents to find all the previous shows. I ended up buying the first season DVD in order to get high quality versions and the extras. Torrents leading to DVD sales, imagine that.

I also downloaded a few episodes of Desperate Housewives after I heard so much good buzz but couldn't stomach more than 3 episodes before I quit entirely. That's a great show crippled by bad writing and caricatures instead of characters. It's like if you took Six Feet Under and dumbed it down until Carrot Top could be a guest star.

Anyway, TV Torrents was useful when I wanted to see a show and couldn't find it anywhere else. TV Networks should pick up on this as demand instead of piracy.

Did you hear that ABC, Fox, and NBC? I wanted to watch more TV and the only avenue was this site, which is no longer working.

Why the networks don't allow their shows to be downloaded (heck, with ads even!) I don't know. There are people going to great lengths to watch more of your shows you play once and then take off the air until a DVD may roll around a year later.

update: cool, a dozen people mentioned btefnet. I'm an occasional user of bittorrent but if there's ever a program I missed and wanted to catch I'll be sure to try them out.

Posted by 11:11 PM

Free! Pro! Flickr!

I have one extra 1-year pro account at Flickr to give away.

If you want it, write a comment stating why you want it and I'll give it to the best one. You have 24 hours. Thanks!

Posted by 12:55 PM | Comments (19)

matt jackson


(matt_jackson, originally uploaded by glassdog)

These are all great. One dorky photo and the madness begins.

Posted by 10:15 AM

links for 2005-04-25

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 24, 2005

links for 2005-04-24

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 23, 2005

The Plague!

While trolling usenet looking for strange documentaries, I found exactly that. This piece is very odd: it's a 30 minute video of a news desk practicing for an all out terror attack on the US (featuring real news guy Forrest Sawyer). They are imagining that someone deployed the black plague in New Jersey, detonated a suicide bomb, and used a plane to deliver chemicals to civilians in Connecticut, with thousands of dead and injured. It features experts, eyewitnesses, and reporters in the field, and it seems like everyone is improvising, as you can kind of sense people making stuff up when pressed during questioning.

It's 81Mb and I have no idea who did it or why, but it's clearly just a drill, and a weird one at that. It's on my blogtorrent server

(sidenote to server geeks: if anyone's gotten server-side seeding to work in the new blogtorrent beta, let me know -- I'm getting python script errors when I try it.)

Posted by 12:38 PM | Comments (7)

New rule

I'm usually not one to throw around ultimatums, but here's a new personal rule: If you use the term "MSM" in a unironic way to denote the "Mainstream Media" I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.

There is no "mainstream" media that is well-defined as Them, nor are webloggers suddenly Us. The term "The Media" is so nebulous that it includes us all. The line between the imagined "Us" bloggers and "Them" media outlets is so gray that it can't be drawn. Media outlets in all forms are absorbing blog format, subjects, and culture and blogs of all forms are absorbing media outlets' format, subjects, and culture at a speed so swift it will soon be difficult to tell one from the other, if it hasn't happened already.

You are the media. I am the media. Blogs are a fixture in the mainstream. So when you decry the "MSM" as an imaginary villain, I know I'm done with your site.

It used to be pretty easy to avoid mentions of "MSM" as only a narrow swath of blogs used the term but more and more I keep seeing it show up on the pages of technologists that should be able to see the big picture instead of propping up strawmen to slay on their sites.

Still not with me?

We are the media:
jarvis.jpg

Stories about blogs abound daily:
guckert.jpg

And we make up TV shows:
cnnblogs.jpg

Even dorks like me:
mecnn.jpg

So get over yourself and drop the "MSM" bullshit, please.

update: an update, for those new to this site.

Posted by 09:09 AM

links for 2005-04-23

Posted by 01:15 AM

April 22, 2005

Like a random royale with cheese

I have an aux input on my car stereo (thanks to Honda for putting one in at the factory -- I love my Element) so I've been using an iPod in it since I drove it off the dealer's lot. I noticed recently however, I prefer using my iPod shuffle over my 20Gb iPod.

I know it's less music and even less information about that music, but the shuffle mode beats the standard iPod shuffle mode. When I autofill my shuffle randomly from iTunes, I have it pick high rated songs more often, so when it plays, it's not a completely random sampling of my gigs of music like the full sized iPod, it's actually random music plus a bunch of songs I love. This means when I'm driving around 1 in every 4 songs or so are my absolute favorites (I'm miserly with my 5-star ratings) and makes for enjoyable driving. Now I just use the full sized iPod for long trips when I want to go from audiobooks to music or pick specific new albums, otherwise it's all shuffle all the time.

While I'm talking about my shuffle and iPod use, I heartily recommend Matt Webb's thoughts on his shuffle. Like him, I too wish the "next" button was the largest one on the device and I also feel much of the attraction of the blind shuffle playback is in the rediscovery of your own music.

Posted by 09:46 AM

links for 2005-04-22

Posted by 01:15 AM

April 21, 2005

links for 2005-04-21

Posted by 01:14 AM

April 20, 2005

links for 2005-04-20

Posted by 01:15 AM

April 19, 2005

Greasemonkey and MT

I hate comment spam as much as the next guy, so I was surprised when I found out a vacant blog on my system became a giant spam farm over the past few months. I hadn't seen the site in months so when I logged in to check on a configuration, I noticed all the recent trackbacks and comments were for the old standbys of the spam world. Luckily, I had installed the nofollow plugin months ago, so they weren't getting any benefit, but it still hurt to know that I was hosting approximately 3k spam comments and trackbacks.

I killed all trackbacks by selecting them on the all trackback page and de-selecting the 4 or 5 legit ones. The list all comments page was too large and I was getting errors deleting them in a huge batch of 2500 at once.

I figured out a workaround using a handy greasemonkey script. Using checkrange I could go to the edit screen for an entry, select the most recent spam comment, then scroll down to shift-click the very first spam.

mtspam1.png

mtspam2.png

With all of them selected, I could wipe them out in one go.

mtspam3.png

It would have been easier if the edit entry pages had a "select all" link, but it's nice to know the all-purpose greasemonkey tool is there to fill the voids (I could have made a custom script to add the check all link to the MT admin, but this was already written and easy).

In other news, I recently upgraded to the new MT 3.16 version, which seemed to fix a lot of little problems here on the site. One of the big ones was a problem using TypeKey for comments. It seems to be good now which means I'll be opening comments on posts from time to time. I got a lot of email on the ajax post from yesterday, so I've turned comments on for it. Now I just need to finish moving the rest of the site to a new template.

Posted by 10:29 AM | Comments (1)

links for 2005-04-19

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 18, 2005

Note to geeks: look beyond the end of your nose

I know this has been going on for quite a while, but recently I've seen so many examples of it that I feel like stating the obvious that so many seem to be missing. Every time I see the new term ajax talked about online, there's a harsh knee-jerk programmer/geek reaction. "We don't need your stinking labels" and "XMLHttpRequest is a perfect fine name and has worked for years" are things you often read. On some level, these reactions are to be expected when you give a new label to an old technology, but lately, those reactions have been drowning out more substantive discussions.

But what baffles me most is that programmers are missing the big picture. Yes, XMLHttpRequest has been around for years, and ajax is just a pretty term for DHTML and javascript, but the beauty of the term ajax is that we now have an easy way to sell the technology. I know engineers have a natural fear of anything and anyone in the marketing world, but now that managers, VC, and funders all know what ajax is and that users want that kind of application interaction, they're much more likely to pay for it.

When a programmer drops the umpteenth comment on a weblog saying the term ajax sounds stupid and is unnecessary, they don't seem to realize how much more business they can pull in (if freelancing) or how they could score a raise (if salaried) if they would just add it to their next web application. Yes, the term is simply a marketing one and yes the technology has been around for a while, but it has been misunderstood and/or unknown until now. Ajax now means more money will funnel to your projects and users will prefer your products over the competition. In the end, the more people that use and understand what "ajax" means, the better off you'll be as a programmer.

Posted by 09:17 AM | Comments (1)

links for 2005-04-18

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 17, 2005

New Design Tinkering

I'm playing with a new design for this site. My old site was basically a "temple of ego" that covered just about everything I was doing online and when I stripped it all away to start over, I knew eventually I wanted to bring back a bit of the clutter.

I just started working on this CSS monstrosity and it's only applied to the main index page at present, but I hope to refine it over the following week and mold it into something more attractive and orderly. For now, I figured I might as well redesign in public, warts and all.

Oh, and be sure to use Firefox or Safari to view it, IE/win can't understand any of the first-child, first-line CSS nor any of the png backgrounds.

Posted by 12:29 AM

April 16, 2005

BBC 1! BBC 2! BBC 3! BBC 4! BBC More!

Wow, my little trip down memory lane on Google Maps has made it all the way to the BBC: Google maps give fresh perspective. Pretty cool.

Posted by 11:52 PM

Best Monitor Ever.

When Dell announced they'd be releasing a 24" widescreen LCD monitor for under $1200 early this year, I counted the days until it was available and bought one soon after their release. Thanks to an initial sales push, I got it for $120 off with free shipping, so $1079 total (no tax).

Since it runs at 1900x1200, you need a pretty good video card and I had to also pick up a $100 ATI card with DVI inputs, but now that I've had it running for about a month and a half, I have to say it's my favorite monitor ever, surpassing the old SGI widescreen I loved back at UCLA. 1900 pixels is a lot to work with, I keep Homesite running constantly and a firefox window or two. I usually overlap them still, but when I need to read two documents at once, I can easily do that. Photshop is also a dream to work with, as I still have a good 600 free pixels off to the side while I work on comps and photos. The color, gamma, brightness are all great though you have to use your graphics card's software controls as the monitor offers little in terms of adjustments. I no longer have any CRT on my desk, relying on the color reproduction of this monitor for graphics production. Here's a full-sized capture of my desktop, and here it is on my desk.

Soon after I bought one, they pushed the price back up to $1199, but as I was searching for something tonight I see that they have taken $200 off, selling it for $999.

It's now the same price as an Apple 20" monitor, but bigger than Apple's 23" monitor, which sells for nearly double the price. Heck if you've got the extra money around, for $1998, you can buy two dells and have FOUR FEET of screen space, still a full thousand cheaper than Apple's top flight 30" display.

Anyway, I don't get any kickback and Dell doesn't have an affiliate program, I just love this monitor and now that it's less than a thousand bucks, I can heartily recommend it to everyone. It's a tax write-off for computer business work anyway, right?

Posted by 10:22 PM

links for 2005-04-16

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 15, 2005

Strange, Troubling Privacy

There's a new service that will delve into the background of anyone in the US and it's freaking reporters out, even though it hasn't launched yet. But you know what's even freakier? Why reporters hadn't written about this sooner.

Last summer I was trying to figure out what strange phone area code I missed a call from and one of the Google text ads in my searches was for "USA People Search." I tried it out on my own name and what I got back astounded me. I tried friends, spouses, ex-lovers, coworkers, and family. Everyone's entire life story was easy to locate and I would IM friends asking "Did you go to school in Philly back in '92?" then I would show them how I figured it out and we were collectively freaked out. I never made a post about it because I wasn't comfortable exposing my life story online, but since it's in the news I might as well tell you it's not only as bad as they say it is, but potentially much worse.

The problems these sites present is many: any employer, friend, or foe can examine your life history if they simply know your name and your age. Famous and the non-famous abound on the service. For violent stalkers, this is the goldmine. For a low price you can not only track your victims, but get their phone numbers, addresses, list of all assets, and any tax problems they've ever had.

To see how scary it was, I tried it out myself, buying the $40 background plan for one George Walker Bush, a 58 year old from Washington DC and Austin Texas, including a criminal report on every George Bush in the state of Texas found in arrest records. I could see his entire home ownership life history, though the criminal background checks were off and none of his DUIs showed up.

I see these services as a problem, not by profiting from the sale of public data, but that this data gets out in the first place. I've had problems in my past with people harrassing me, and for the last 5 years have paid PacBell, SBC, and Verizon several dollars a month to keep my home address, name, and phone number out of phone directories. I read privacy policies when I sign up for services and I drop notes to companies when I disagree with their terms.

I value my privacy, pay for it, and spend some effort maintaining it. When I found out that my most recent address shows up in several of these services, I contacted each and requested that I be removed, to no avail. I believe the only thing tracing me to my two previous addresses are my having signed up with local utilities. At one address, my name wasn't on the water, electricity, or cable bills, but one of the others must have allowed them to trace the location back to me. I find these services disturbing and wish politicians would draft consumer protection legislation to keep this sort of basic, yet sensitive data from ever getting out. I don't mind if the police or gov't need to do background checks, but I'm not comfortable knowing that anyone that's ever had a beef with me can find me and contact me.

Posted by 02:18 PM

links for 2005-04-15

Posted by 12:19 AM

April 14, 2005

.

A MetaFilter user passed away and my condolences go out to his family. I recall his contributions and his entry in the recent redesign contest.

An odd reminder of this will stick around for years on my computer. I now have three names in my email client that can auto-complete, but the recipients will never see them, as they've left this world.

Posted by 10:44 PM

links for 2005-04-14

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 13, 2005

Xeni on Dennis Miller, via BT

I'm trying out blogtorrent on my server here, and my first test file is a 12 minute clip (MPEG2, 224Mb) from tonight's Dennis Miller show with Harry Shearer, Xeni Jardin, and Mickey Kaus, as they talked about blogging. I think all three were great though I can barely stomach Dennis Miller these days.

Throughout the late 90's, I used to get HBO solely so I could see the new Dennis Miller shows live every Friday night and I used to look forward to watching them. But then everything changed and his sense of humor was replaced by anger, and his show died soon after. Oh well.

Posted by 10:35 PM

links for 2005-04-13

Posted by 12:19 AM

April 12, 2005

links for 2005-04-12

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 11, 2005

Note to self

I'm just posting this as a reminder to check out week in review every so often. Last week's was great, and I always seem to lose this site's URL, so it's here, in my archives for my personal retreival.

Posted by 08:45 PM

links for 2005-04-11

Posted by 12:18 AM

April 10, 2005

Flickrsphere growing


(vorkjes, originally uploaded by graafschap)

9 months ago, I posted a picture on Flickr of a bike problem I was having, so a friend could see and suggest a fix. Alison joked that few would ever search for the tag "forks" because it was the first photo ever tagged with that. Today, there are four pages of photos tagged with the word "forks" including this most recent one, which I thought was quite cool.

Posted by 01:34 PM

LazyWeb, while you sleep

I often have dreams that feature technology ideas, but I don't always remember them and more often than not they're just goofy ideas. This morning's dream is somewhat in the goofy category but might be useful to some, and since I remember all of it in detail I'll relate it here.

So I'm stopping by Andy's office in Santa Monica to go have lunch (I think I was on a roadtrip in my dream), and while he steps away to grab his jacket I notice there's an IM window scrolling past with loads of text. When he gets back a few seconds later I ask him what that is, and he says he's watching the Simpsons over IM.

I say "you're doing what? how?" and he explains it, and this is way more detail than I normally remember in dreams, but I thought it was such a cool idea I think I kind of "saved" it so I would remember later. So he goes on, explaining how he built a chatbot that is wired to a stream of TV closed captioning, so you add captionbot to your buddy list, then talk to it. You ask it what's on TV right now, and it returns a list of shows, you pick a show and it starts streaming out dialogue from characters, directly via closed caption data. "It's like watching a show in text" I say and then we go off to lunch.

And that's all I remember. Andy built a really cool text adventure bot last year, and TVeyes is basically Technorati for TV (though they predate Technorati by several years), searching caption histories for words or phrases. I doubt you can get real time caption data and I'm not even sure if reading a tv show would be interesting, but I figured I'd share the dream with everyone, in case someone feels like building it.

Posted by 10:38 AM

April 09, 2005

links for 2005-04-09

Posted by 12:17 AM

April 08, 2005

links for 2005-04-08

Posted by 01:22 AM

April 07, 2005

Chaos with a side of order

Today I finally figured out how to use a shuffle in both predictable and unpredictable ways. A couple weeks ago I took a flight and I wanted to listen to 10 tracks that made up a short audiobook, but then load up the rest of my shuffle with 150 songs to listen to during other parts of the trip. The problem was, I couldn't figure out how to load certain tracks at the beginning, and play just those in order, while still being able to switch to random and fast forwarding through the occasional audiobook track amid the music mix. It's not that hard to accomplish, but there are a few sticking points I figured I'd share.

- Create a new playlist with your audiobook tracks, then add a bunch of songs and albums you want to hear to fill out the remainder of your shuffle.

- Fill your shuffle from that playlist. You must order the songs so that the audiobook tracks are first in the list. If you can't get this sort by clicking on any column headers, highlight the first column with numbers and drag the tracks one by one into the first slots in the list -- that's the only way to arbitrarily order tracks in iTunes. This is one "feature" I didn't learn until recently and seems to be lacking from playlists (even though every other software mp3 player lets you arbitrarily reorder tracks in playlists). It might be a royal pain to do this one by one, through hundreds of tracks. Be sure to update when you've got the order done before removing the shuffle.

- Now, if you want to jam to music, go to shuffle mode and enjoy. When you want to listen to your audiobook, switch to ordered mode (non-shuffle, first click on the switch) and hit the play button three times to go to the start of the playlist.

Sometimes you want order and chaos in the same package and that's how to do it. Even when I don't have an audio book on my shuffle, I like to find my favorite song of the moment and keep it as the first track, so at any point I can switch to ordered mode, hit play three times, then switch back to shuffle and hear it.

Posted by 10:40 PM

links for 2005-04-07

Posted by 01:21 AM

April 06, 2005

I don't know why I still store this stuff in my head

Andy just sent me a couple Google Maps images he thought were bizarre and when I first saw them all my years of schooling (I have a MS in soil chemistry I don't use) came back in a wave. I may be talking out of my ass here, but here are my best guesses:

This set of pools in Utah look like evaporating pools. You can kind of see a progression in the pools next to each other, as they get clearer. My guess is the whitest pools are precipitating salts. It's likely agricultural runoff that's high in salts that they don't want making the soil saline or sodic or they want to keep the runoff from getting into nearby streams so they let them sit in shallow pools to evaporate the water vapor off, and the salt is recovered and processed or disposed of. I don't see any nearby irrigated fields so a fish farm or mining operation is also an outside possibility, but I'd put money on evaporating pools.

I mentioned to Andy that when you drive around the Silicon Valley you see shallow areas of the San Francisco bay evaporating down to salts and he showed me this cool section of the bay. Now this is a bit different, the red and green colors appear to be due to algae blooms, and since they appear to be in contained areas, they're purposefully there in order to help "scrub" fertilizers from agricultural runoff heading into the bay. When runoff high in nitrogen or phosphorus hits these ponds, blooms form and the algae consume the nutrients, leaving cleaner water to pass back into the bay. Without this kind of cheap natural wastewater management, the blooms would happen in the main areas of the bay, choking out oxygen and often leading to fish kills and other problems. Red and green algae bloom in response to varying levels of nutrient load and temperature, so I'm not sure if the green algae blooms are in deeper pools or less nutrient rich ones, but that's my guess as to why the big colored pools are there.

When I told Andy all this, he said: When I looked at it, all I thought was "purty..."

update: freaky small world moment #2 from Google Maps: Heather's shot here includes those pools, off to the right, where you see a sliver of silver-blue. Heather says they were evaporation ponds for collecting potash, and that it was a windy high desert pass. Makes perfect sense to accelerate evaporation in a hot, windy place and I wouldn't doubt someone could create a economically viable business just evaporating runoff and selling the minerals as fertilizer.

A bunch of folks familiar with the area have emailed me saying there's a nearby mine and they are most likely ponds to capture tailings. That seems more likely the more I drag the map around, since there do seem to be mines nearby but no agriculture. So in this case, the runoff from processes in the mines would produce wastewater filled with all sorts of nasty heavy metals in solution. The tailings would get moved to the ponds to evaporate until the metals precipitate and fall out of solution, and then they probably have to pay an arm and a leg to dispose of it. This way makes it easier to keep their mining waste contained, if they were to simply send the water to the nearby river the metals getting into the ecosystem would have toxic effects to river flora and fauna. A little copper or lead that gets out can cause a lot of harm.

Posted by 11:21 PM

My childhood, seen by Google Maps


(My childhood, seen by Google Maps, originally uploaded by mathowie)

Something I never anticipated in a million years was finding out that my good friend Kathryn Yu recognized names and places in this shot, then over IM we realized we attended the exact same elementary school (she, 8 years after me, and it's just off to the right edge of the screenshot). Turns out that she grew up less than a mile away from my house, and though I've known Kathryn for 3 years, it never came up until today. Unbelievable.

Posted by 04:08 PM

Hacking MT book coming soon

I've been working on a few chapters for this book going on at least a year now, if not more. Let's put it this way: when we started, we had barely any contact with folks at Six Apart and I had to strain my friendship with the Trotts to get them to answer questions about the someday-beta MT 3.0 we heard was on the horizon. When I wrote my chapters, MT 2.6 was new, but Ben and Jay completely rewrote the rest of the book when 3.1 was released (and two authors ended up employed by 6A so they know every in and out of the software).

Don't listen to what Ben says here, he was a superhero (along with Jay) that saved the project and made it what it is.

Posted by 02:47 PM

Sploid's good

I didn't think I'd like it as much as I already do, but Sploid is pretty damn good. Simple, bold headlines that grab your attention and are presented in a nicer format than something like the drudge report, and it's got none of the pesky personal politics of drudge (yet). Denton should have done this site years ago.

The funny thing is when you realize this "fresh new take" on the news is just another view of things commonly seen on weblogs like delicious links or link sidebars. In fact, with about 15 minutes of tweaking, I could create a clone of sploid that used my delicious feed as the source for headlines. I just might do that later tonight, as a lark.

Posted by 10:57 AM

links for 2005-04-06

Posted by 01:22 AM

April 05, 2005

Using peer pressure to your benefit

Announcing something I've been playing with over the past few nights: Fitlog

The reasoning behind the site is in the first post to it, and I'm also fulfilling a promise to try out WordPress, especially the "custom fields" option, which I'm using to track my daily weight, time ridden or run, and distance ridden or run. Since it's all in a database, I'm also using PHP/SWF Charts to plot a live graph of my data over time (eventually I'll graph all the new fields, once I start running and riding more).

So far it's fun and a great motivation to get out and exercise each day, and my hope is that I succeed in front of everyone's watchful gaze instead of failing miserably, which of course, is always a possibility.

Posted by 03:12 PM

links for 2005-04-05

Posted by 01:20 AM

April 04, 2005

Google Satellite Maps

Google's new satellite view on their maps is kinda freaky (I can see my car in the driveway), but it's fun to revisit my past.

I grew up across the street from the small city lake seen here, which used to be in the middle of a bunch of orange groves and then a golf course, all of which are long gone and replaced by houses (a bunch of childhood stories, in that view). My high school. After college, I lived near this restaurant, which has the best thai food in LA. I lived here when I first moved to San Francisco.

Posted by 10:34 PM

links for 2005-04-04

Posted by 01:20 AM

April 03, 2005

Shuffle me up some products

The other day, I caught up with an old friend that now works in the movie business. He was always a bit of a tech guy, but it still surprised me when he pulled out an ipod shuffle as we drove to brunch in his car. Then I noticed how he used it. It was hooked to a cassette adapter in his stereo, but he held it like a wired remote control, controlling volume and next/previous tracks while he drove, never letting go of (or having to look down at) the shuffle.

I've had a shuffle for a couple weeks and I hadn't thought to use the device in that way. For him, it was both a controller/UI and the actual music player. There seems like limitless possible other ways you could use a shuffle that no products exist for quite yet, so someone create these:

- create a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the headphone jack and transmits audio to a cassette adapter with bluetooth. Then you could just velcro the shuffle to your steering wheel or gear shift and change tracks that way. Also, a call on your bluetooth cellphone could mute/pause the player.

- create a usb slot in aftermarket car stereos to act as a dock. You could use the stereo's display as the shuffle's non-existant display and charge it at the same time. Also, add USB/dock functionality to factory stereos so owners can use their existing steering wheel stereo controls. If really want to do something cool, also add a hard drive to car stereos with shuffle docks. Then I could just add 1Gb of my music collection each time I dock it. Eventually, I could fill a 20, 40, or 80Gb hard drive that way.

- put a camera into the shuffle. I'm surprised it didn't come with a tiny 640x480 cameraphone-style attachment for the usb end, and I'm surprised no one has offered one for sale yet.

- Go higher capacity with the shuffle. I suspect in 2 or 3 years we'll laugh at the dinky 1Gb shuffles, as we pop our 8, 20, and 40Gb shuffles into our car stereos like cartridges.

I also went running with my new shuffle for the first time and was amazed by how small and light it was. I put on my earbuds, slid the shuffle under my shirt, dropped it into the back pocket of my running tights and I couldn't even feel it. Stashing my keys is a bigger problem while running than a shuffle -- that's how compact and light it is.

I've tested myself running with and without music and I tend to run farther and faster and I feel better afterwards with it, so my shuffle will be going along with me on every run. I might just velcro a house key to the back of it and kill two birds with one stone.

Posted by 11:41 PM

links for 2005-04-03

Posted by 01:20 AM

April 02, 2005

Our little copyfighter


(Costco, originally uploaded by mathowie)

As we were buying our first diapers ever (will be needing them soon), Kay noticed they had some sort of cross-promotion with disney, putting characters all over the diapers. I knew what she was thinking when she mentioned it; it is a little scary to think infants are being marketed to by the Disney Corp.

But I cast away all fears when I realized something and said "Yeah, but think about it, these are diapers -- our daughter will get to shit right on Mickey!"

Posted by 05:16 PM

links for 2005-04-02

Posted by 12:20 AM

April 01, 2005

links for 2005-04-01

Posted by 12:20 AM