interesting. thanks to a tip from peter saint andre dreamhost now offers jabber IM support . when i switched to cornerhost recently, i tried to pursuade michal to let me run a jabber and he pleasantly declined [ or more correctly, said he would consider it, if i was willing to pay more money ]. hmmmm.

wow. i'm a sucker for counter-intuitive analysis of current events to get the mental juuices flowing and "the talent myth" fits the bill nicely:

"The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest--and it is now in bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are complex, needless to say. But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?"

from the dubious-reporting-of-shaky-research-department comes the news that Positive thinking 'extends life' :

"A team of American psychologists found that people who were positive about ageing lived an average of 7.5 years longer than those who regretted the passing years."

hear that noice? that's the sound of a cottage industry being born.

ever wonder what would happen if somebody decided to produce a "behind the music" for fonts? well, now you know.

who knew that cooper black had such a long and sordid history?

[ via dean allen ]

by popular demand, i've gotten off my lazy butt and added a link in the navigation bar to the accidental marathonists blog , in which i document the trials and tribulations of training for the chicago marathon.

easy topic maps:

"Easytopicmaps was set up by PeterVanDijck in December 2001 to be a place to learn about topic maps. Most of the documentation on TopicMaps is very technical. I don't think it has to be that way."

[ via morelikethis ]

sometimes, such as when you're getting your hair cut, there's a world of difference between a quarter and an eight of an inch.

wooohooo! kris and i ran 10 f...r...e....a...k...i...n' miles today! that's right! 10 miles! i don't care if you don't like extraneous exclamation points! because 2.5 months ago i could barely run for 5 minutes. 10 miles. for those keeping track, that's within shooting distance of half of the goal! hoooray for us.

i'll probably post all the gory details, including miscellania regarding nipple chafing on male breasts on the accidental marathonists blog. but first, i need to replenish lost carbs with a few beers.

wowza. it's incredible that it has been roughly 3 years from the word blog's humble beginnings as a peter merholtz wordplay to the object of a william saffire discussion . and thusly, without proper attribution, he writes The Official Definition:

"Blog is a shortening of Web log. It is a Web site belonging to some average but opinionated Joe or Josie who keeps what used to be called a ''commonplace book'' -- a collection of clippings, musings and other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate one's curiosity. What makes this online daybook different from the commonplace book is that this form of personal noodling or diary-writing is on the Internet, with links that take the reader around the world in pursuit of more about a topic."

orbit3m is just like mozilla's best theme, orbit3 - only better - because it comes with smaller toolbar widgets.

while i was initially happy that earlier this week the reputable electronic frontier foundation released a first-cut list of "wireless friendly" ISPs , after reflection, i agree with some of the criticisms :

"The EFF list is purely amateur-quality work and does not reflect well on the EFF itself, nor does it serve any naive member of the public well. Everything must begin somewhere, but it is the quality rather than the quantity that bothers me. Most of the meager group of entities that have "made the cut" on the list are there simply because "the EULA doesn't prohibit it..." (i.e. wireless connection sharing), even when other comments in the EULA (or AUP or SA or whatever) strongly suggest a negative take on sharing. The lack of a specific citation may be due simply to the fact that the technology and practice came into vogue after the EULA was created and they haven't gotten off their butts to update it, and send it to everyone, etc., etc."

one of the most interesting things in a recent excellent post from douglass ruskoff's blog on aol time/warner is the admission that the new york times refused to run his original op ed bit:

"What I wrote was that AOL's purchase of Time/Warner heralded the end of the dot.com bubble. AOL was cashing in its casino chips. And just like the gambler who trades in his colored plastic disks for real cash, AOL's Steve Case understood that his run was over and that it was time to trade in his stock certificates for those of a company that had genuine assets.

The New York Times refused to run the piece. (I did get the "kill" fee.) They told me I was misreading the landscape to such an extent that for them to publish such a view would be irresponsible."

lets all stop and enjoy the delicious irony of this little revelation appearing on his weblog.

watch your head as i heave Reading Online News: A Comparison of Three Presentation Formats into the ol' annotated bookmark bin :

"With the ever-increasing progression towards online newsletters as a principal source of information presentation, the Web has offered many opportunities as well as challenges that are unique to this environment. For instance, the traditional newspaper presents information within the confines of evenly-spaced, gridded columns. This has worked quite well in the past, and readers have become very accustomed to this style of information presentation. However, with the advent of the Web, it is now possible to place information in multiple sources that are connected by link titles--permitting online newsletters to initially present only a small amount of pertinent information through the use of these links."

"Accordingly, this study addressed the question of how information should be presented within a news-style web page. For example, should all the information related to a single article be presented on one page, or should the newsletter contain a page that lists only the link titles that relate to each specific article, and which is presented on another page? Moreover, if the newsletter presents initial information in the form of link titles, should they present supplementary information that provides a general overview of the entire article, along with the link title?"

the results are straighforward. people prefer executive summaries. [ via webword ]

prolly old news for everyone else, but while i was on vacation, i apparently missed out on a bunch of new apple products . of course, it makes perfect sense that a 20 gig ipod would be announced since i just forked over the cake for a 10 gig version. hi. ho.

there's a nice discussion over on hack the planet about the calendaring spec behind ical .

got kids? know anybody who does? then maybe you'll want to read stephen talbott's excellent analysis of television and violence . think about this next time you're enjoying grand theft auto 3 :

"The news will stimulate little change, but should be mentioned anyway. A seventeen-year study of 707 individuals, published in Science magazine (March 29, 2002), concluded that

There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others."

"Anderson and Bushman also point out that the weight of the evidence from all the available studies is not trivial. The effects "are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass or of lead exposure on IQ in children". Moreover, "recent work demonstrates similar-sized effects of violent video games on aggression"."

cool. mark pilgrim has moved his "accessibility series" to its very own domain, entitled - appropriately enough - "dive into accessibility" .

after roughly 10 days with virtually no internet connection, i'm feeling very, very out of the blogosphere loop.

dang, i went the The Great Northeast and all i got was a lousy case of shin splints . hi. ho.

oh, and there was the superfine wedding at the grand isle lakehouse on lake champlain near burlington vermont where, as the best man, i gave the longest toast known to mankind.

matt and erin, it was a great wedding on a great day for a great couple. it really couldn't have been more perfect.

libraries rock! i'm in the bangor public library, which has free internet [ but no wifi ] and appears to be heavily subsidized by tabitha and stephen king. cool.

flights went well considering there were layovers in chicago and boston and puddle jumpers from grand rapids and to bangor. no major delays, although i did have to take my shoes off and unbuckle my pants in public more than once. hi. ho.

who's leaving the confines of the midwest to make a pilgrimage to The Great Northeast to the Land of Ones Youth? why me, silly.

i'll be in various various locales in maine, new hampshire, and vermont over the next week or so. depending on internet coverage and motivation, updating may be spotty.

please don't drink all the beer in the fridge.

sure, it might be academic hyperbole of the worse sort, but it still makes for a great sound bite :

""This will have the impact of a small nuclear bomb" in the field of human evolution, Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman told Nature. The discovery contradicts the idea that hominids -- the earliest creatures who branched off from apes to create the human family tree -- got their start in eastern Africa."

so, i bought an irock wireless music adaptor for my ipod today. coincidentally, i had been scoping it out around the same time that dave was pointing it out to the masses [ i suppose this is where i should probably point out in the interest of full disclosure that i am a motorola employee and the irock is produced by a motorola-off spin ].

to determine whether or not the irock is right for you will require being exquisitely in tune with your own personal sense of price and performance. the ipod lounge review pretty much nails it:

"Kudos to all who were involved in the product's design, the Irock! unit exudes future-geek modern looks. Now, if they had just paid all this attention to its reception capabilities, this product would truly i-rock."

"The Good: Inexpensive, small, easy to use, unique design, cool red glow.
The Bad: Noticeable static, must find the right placement for best reception."

are you an audiophile? don't get the irock. i drive a '97 camry sedan with stock stereo. my home system is a aiwa all-in-one that is almost a decade old. since there's no mistaking me for an audiophile, i figured i'd be willing to put up with the occasional static for the price [ 30 bucks at comp usa ].

post purchase, i'd recommend taking doc's comments to heart before plunking down your hard earned cash:

"The problem is that the iRock radiates on a choice of only four channels: 88.1, 88.3, 88.5 and 88.7. That's not enough. Say you're in the Bay Area, where KQED is putting out a 110,000-watt signal on 88.5. Even a good car radio (and most of them are remarkably good -- much better than home receivers), that signal is going to blow away not only an iRock signal on 88.5, but also on either of the two adjacent channels."

how big of a problem is this? well, the irock has a hard time with wyce, a local, independent community radio station that broadcasts on 88.1. it's probably a good bed that wyce is putting out considerably less that 110,000 watts. hi. ho. whoever decided on the price point was a genious, because $30 bucks hovers just on the upper edge of being cheap enough that i'll put up with having to move the unit around to occasionally pick up a better signal. if you're not that kind of person, then just spend 60 more bucks on a higher-end fm modulator like those found at c crane company.

Web application testing with Puffin :

"This first of four articles introduces the Puffin testing system. Puffin is an open source framework for testing Web applications. With Puffin you can build dynamically driven regression tests for even the most complex Web applications. Written in 100% Python, Puffin is easily extended to handle even obscure testing conditions."

there's must be a german word for that odd, jarring feeling that occurs when you're innocently googling for something and your site comes up first.

case in point - blogchalk reminded me of something i had seen on geographic metadata and syndic8 awhile back. and lo, inexplicably, i was staring at yours truly in response to querying for "syndic8 geography" .

anyway, i did end up tracking down bill kearrney's recommendation for adding location metadata to your rss feed :

"<META NAME="geo.placename" content="place name">
<META NAME="geo.position" content="latitude;longitude;elevation">
<META NAME="geo.country" content="xxx">"

in a recent profile of the creator of alice , richard wallace, we learn that he finds human's collective conversational capability to, er, lack in complexity:

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

and in related linguistics news, our humble lexicon puts kevin bacon to shame :

"Word association can link just about any two common words in the English language using an average of three steps, says a team of scientists in Arizona."

"he small-world network also means that apparently quite different concepts, such as 'actor' and 'universe', are closely linked by a short series of semantic steps. This, say the researchers, makes it easier for us to carry out mental searches when using language - we can get to our intended destination quickly, regardless of our starting point. A database cross-referenced in this way would be relatively easy to search computationally."

so we're optimized to not have to thing very hard about a limited number of conversational topics? sounds about right.

well, who'd a thunk that chicago would get top honors as the most "connected" city in the u.s.? of course, you'll need to take the following with an appropriately sized grain of salt - just because there are big, fat pipes all over town doesn't mean that you can get cheap, ubiquitous broadband:

"Chicago came out top because there were more net paths to and from it than any other city."

"History is also at work in helping Chicago to the top spot. The city was the site of one of the early internet nodes and has become a place where a lot of data traffic is swapped between networks."

i've seen an interesting thing or two on the things you can do with omnigraffle, but haven't been motivated to fork over the cake. well, it looks like the new version might warrant a closer look-see, if the reviews can be trusted:

"What this clever piece of software does is use Cocoa's beautifully rendered graphics classes to draw boxes and connect them with "smart" lines. Unimpressed? Let me put it another way: what OmniGraffle attempts to do is provide you with virtually anything you could ever imagine you need for drawing boxes and connecting them with lines. And that often surpasses what programs costing almost ten times as much can offer in that particular field."

"What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?" and cory's lament about how being fat sucks are timely since there's a lot of discussion amongst the accidental marathonists about the relative merits of zoneish diets.

interestingly, this month's runner's world reports on new studies that document potential health problems [ mostly due to dehydration and kidney strain ]for endurance athletes after only a few weeks on the diet. just to make things even more confusing, they also profile a doctor who used the diet as part of a successful program to run faster marathons. hmmm.

oops. hey! watch your head while i throw the daily crawl into the ol' annotated bookmark bin :

"DAILY CRAWL is a set of CGI scripts that allow you to track updates to a list of weblogs that you read though the update list at weblogs.com."

Reimagining July 4 :

"Feeling one's freedom is a little like trying to feel the rotation of the earth. It takes an act of imagination. Freedom isn't the perpetual existence of all possible choices. Freedom is the ability to choose whom and what you will become according to your own lights. "

amen to david sifry's homily on the dangers of playing somebody else's game with the language you use:

" Community broadband activists: We need to be careful about how the media portays us, lest we become painted with the same "hacker, cracker, pirate, lawbreaker" brush that the MPAA and RIAA love to paint users of file swapping services and internet radio. This starts with terminology and concrete example. Why do we call it wardriving, for example? Or Warchalking? Well, it sounds cool, and we techies like the sounds of the terms. It sounds cool and dangerous. But it plays into the monopolist's hands.

We can battle this. Get involved in, and promote a low-income or egalitarian use of WiFi, like a project to wire towns in the Dominican Republic or set up wireless access at your local library."

i'm not buying doc's assessment that it's too late to "repress" the words. this whole crazy wifi thing is still in it's infancy and almost nobody in the general public has an inkling on what wardriving or warchalking mean.

i do know that almost everybody i know outside the tech community thinks i'm doing something "wrong" just by wardriving - even though i have no intention of leaching off other people's bandwidth. the problem is compounded by the words we use and i doubt trying to convince people that it's just innocuous "[w]ireless [a]ccess [r]econnaissance" is going to make a bit of diffference.

maybe something like netmapping, airmapping or wapmapping? maybe not. but i'll bet that an alternative catchy phrase could sweep through the blogosphere just as quickly as warchalking.

Finding friends with XML and RDF :

"Edd Dumbill explores an XML and RDF application known as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF). FOAF allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities. Code samples demonstrate the basics."

so, what's an mba really worth? apparently not much:

"Still more pointed is an upcoming study by Jeffrey Pfeffer, a management professor at Glauthier's own business alma mater, Stanford. In it Pfeffer challenges the bedrock assumption of business school: that those who make the effort to get an MBA degree have more successful careers than those who don't. Pfeffer combs through 40 years' worth of data for evidence that this is true -- and uncovers almost none. He quotes Ronald Burt, a University of Chicago business professor and the researcher behind two of the studies in Pfeffer's paper, who says, "I have never found benefits for the MBA degree. Usually it just makes you a couple years older than non-MBA peers.""

using os x and wanting a virtual desktop pager like those other operating systems? well, space.app works pretty o.k. although it seems to get occasionally confused about what application is open in which virtual desktop:

"Provides up to sixteen "virtual workspaces" to help you to organize your use of the desktop. Each virtual workspace becomes independent "real estate" for open applications. Provides global hot keys."

via slashdot i discovered the windows-only streamer and opendj for linux etc [ which hopefully means it'll be easy to get running on os x ].

perhaps with a little luck "judio" is around the corner:

"We need net "radio" that pulls its content, as-needed, from a P2P sharing space.

The "broadcaster" would really just provide an ever-refreshing playlist, a window on the last X minutes of contiguous content, with reliable (hash) identifiers naming each segment of media to play. "Tuners" would fetch the playlist, and scour any and all available sources for matching content fragments, grabbing them seconds to minutes before they are needed, playing them for the local listener in order and without gaps, resharing them for as long as possible, discarding them when necessary.

" Call it "Judio", for "Judo-radio", because it emphasizes the use of a tiny, smart control channel to leverage a giant amount of content on outside networks."