well that didn't take long - Ted mulling AOL Time Warner bid:

" "He's talking to people about buying AOL Time Warner," said Turner biographer Porter Bibb, managing director at investment firm Technology Partners. "When a company is trading at book value of $55 billion, some would consider this a steal.""

besides filling me in on a boatload of info that i didn't know about ted turner, steve maclaughlin finishes "the wounded animal" with a spot-on prediction:

"Having watched most of his personal fortune go down the tubes thanks to the AOL whiz kids, Turner might be game for a little revenge. I wouldn't be surprised if Turner is the first person to pull out his pocketknife to help carve up the media giant's fallen carcass. Play ball!"

Securing Systems with chroot.

it's amazing to see the geourl database begin to get a crazy number of submissions. there's even a movabletype plugin that allows you to geocode and register individual posts. as usual, such low barriers raise the spectre of abusing the system, which prentiss riddle is pondering:

"What happens if every business, blog, or blog entry -- in the standard metaphor, every lightbulb -- has a GeoURL? Aside from the question of whether a central GeoURL server can handle the load, won't the concept soon cease to be useful if every GeoURL report consists of a jumble of 500 "things" in the immediate neighborhood? Imagine you hit the GeoURL button on your PDA while walking down the street and it coughs up Joe Bloe's five-year-old report of what he was thinking while eating a sandwich at Subway, thirteen competing business directory listings for Toy Joy, a bit of GeoSpam about a sale at Buffalo Exchange, the current status of the 29th & Guadalupe traffic signal, the locations of any GPS- and WiFi-enabled vehicles or pedestrians waiting for the light..."

[ via morelikethis ]

800 missiles to hit Iraq in first 48 hours :

"It is based on a strategy known as "Shock and Awe", conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 GulfWar."

Analyst confirms US nuclear war plans :

"One of the most respected nuclear weapons analysts in the United States says he has been shown documents which confirm the US military is considering using nuclear weapons in a war with Iraq."

so i get this e.mail from a certain someone and it's the kind of e.mail i enjoy getting. smart people discussing interesting things. as usual i'm left with a feeling of mild unease. you know - maybe since i was born three months premature, i'm finally seeing the effects of that bit of brain damage that everyone suspected would show up sooner or later. except this particular email is freaking me out even more so, because it's reminding me that my xml processing kung fu is so, well, 2001.

dang.

mozilla just crashed on my ibook . for whatever reason i suddenly became intensely aware that i couldn't remember the last time this happened. sometime over the past few months, averages and probabilities and statistics have been unconsciously calculated, and it's now notable when the browser crashes. worth commenting on even [ or not, i suppose ].

sometimes it's your time. and sometimes it's not:

"A teenager was catapulted at least 25 feet in the air during an auto accident but grabbed onto overhead utility wires like an action hero and dangled for about 20 minutes before a rescue crew brought him down by ladder."

Fugu - A Mac OS X SFTP, SCP and SSH Frontend

"Fugu is a graphical frontend to the commandline Secure File Transfer application (SFTP). SFTP is similar to FTP, but unlike FTP, the entire session is encrypted, meaning no passwords are sent in cleartext form, and is thus much less vulnerable to third-party interception."

[ via rasterweb ]

despite all evidence to the contrary, this is not the all- foaf -all-the-time channel. however, i will say that i'm all for kellan's suggestion for a foaf support group . i humbly submit that all members of the group shall feel free to add all other members to their foaf files.

l.m. orchard has also wondered about foaf relationship etiquette . he points to eric vitiello's relationship module , which takes a stab at formalizing relationship semantics:

"relationship is a module for extending the usefullness of the foaf:knows element. This is accomplished by aliasing the foaf:knows element into elements that describe the relationship between people in more detail."

i'm not sure how much traction the module has seen, but over at internet alchemy you can get a glimpse on how to integrate in into a foaf file .

yeah, baby. i ran 6 miles today and it felt good.

interestingly, it seems that besides myself there are a goodly number of people wondering about the etiquette surrounding foaf friend declaration. while it's mostly a social and not technical problem, it's precisely the sort of thing that will keep foaf from reaching any kind of critical mass.

An Inquiry into the role of weblogs in online community building.

"Given the vast differences between conventional forms of virtual communities, such as MUDs, and weblogs, it is surprising that the idea of weblog communities has been accepted by so many people and with so little resistance. Thus, the existence of weblog communities should be investigated, if only to uncover how and why the weblog can support the activities normally associated with online communities."

while it's not perfect, ever wonder why google still kicks ass? people. the point is proven nicely as Ovidiu Predescu gives us a glimpse at a new employee's first impressions:

"The scale of the deployment is just beyond any imagination, it's hard to imagine a system more complex than this. The interesting/scary thing is the current system is still expanding...

The work environment is very free, engineers can contribute to internal projects as they wish. The cool thing is that most ideas that you see on the public Web site are driven by engineers. This freedom is something I enjoy very much, as I don't like being constrained by a particular project.

In short I'm having a lot of fun."

cameron chronicles his 24 hour essay marathon on the topic of social networks. too bad he didn't post his answers, 'cause i bet they'd make for some mighty fine readin'.

What Is PhoneBlogger?

"PhoneBlogger is an automated voice application that first asks you for info about which pre-configured blog you wish to post to. After collecting the necessary information, PhoneBlogger records your audio message. Finally, it posts a blog entry that links to the recorded audio."

What is fotolog?

" Fotolog lets you easily put your latest, greatest digital photos on the web in a log format. If friends/family have their own Fotologs, you can see everyone's latest photos on one page."

well, while icommune rearchitects, there's always iHam on iRye :

"Ham on iRye is a set of applications designed to allow you to control iTunes 2.0.3 or higher from another computer on a WAN or LAN network. iHam on iRye lets you control just about every function iTunes provides from any other Mac OS-based computer on your network. Great at parties (use it as a remote jukebox)!"

ross mayfield gathers some interesting, if unscientific, statistics comparing livejournal and blogger.com and starts a ruminating on communication, communities and emergent properties:

"LJ is a closed community from which insular communication is an emergent property. Blogging platforms provide open communication from which community is an emergent property."

i never could figure out why livejournal has remained perpetually on my periphery. looking at the age distribution of lj users, maybe it's simply because i'd quickly be found out as being The Man.

so i'm reading laughingmeme as i'm wont to doing and am enjoying his allconsuming soap client, which is inspired by dj's booktalk. a few posts down, i start getting a little wierded-out because he's written the post i would have written yesterday had i been sufficiently motivated to fully articulate my thoughts about allconsuming. i didn't get it. it seemed like this thing on the periphery of my understanding, something that seemed like it should warrant further investigation, but it took dj to bring it out of the aether and make it concrete.

kellan also points out something i've been struggling with regarding defining "friends" in these kinds of applications:

"I clicked on the "edit friends list", with a certain trepidation, as I never know the protocols for declaring someone "a friend" in these online communities. Allcomsuming short circuited this problem by asking Google who my friends are: rabble, dru, micah, pseudopunk, and a few names I didn't recognize."

i mean, who is my foaf friend? what are the rules? allconsuming solves the problem in an interesting way, but are there some sort of generalizeable ground rules? as is not unique in the blogging world, i'm acquainted with many people, but does this mean i can just willy, nilly put them in my foaf file ? do i have to e.mail them and ask them if they'll be my foaf friend, pretty please?

anyway, i'm ruminating on this and much more as i'm slowly scrolling through his post and that's when i see that he's linked to me as the source for discovering dj's booktalk and i'm reminded that sometimes the universe has a very dry sense of humor.

mike pinkerton has been posting some interesting and honest thoughts on how safari has been affecting his moral as a chimera developer:

"It's easy to get sidetracked on the "woe is me, we lost again" tangent (especially if you've been at Netscape for 5+ years), but it's time to get back to why we're doing this at all: because we enjoy it. It's fun making a product that more than seven people use. I wish that was 7 million, but I guess we have to set our expectations appropriately. Chimera's not going anywhere, regardless of whatever I post on this blog."

PHP's PEAR on Mac OS X :

"In terms of functionality, [ the PEAR Package Manager is ] similar to Perl's CPAN or Fink for Mac OS X in that using this command line utility you can browse, install, update, and remove PHP packages from a central, remote PEAR server to your local system. Installing, configuring, and using the PEAR Package Manager on OS X 10.2 is the focus of this article."

i wonder if all the naval gazing about a blog rapture , bloggerdom ho-hummedness , blogging-newness-wearing-off and renewed commitments to getting back to basics are related to the blogosphere subconsciously trying to deal with the impending release of "weblogs for dummies" .

i remember a similar cyle of activity occuring a few years ago. i think it might have been around the new year as well. much lamenting about focus being lost, concurrent with site redesign after site redesign and a rash of prominent bloggers going on extended leaves of absences. in fact, i think there may have been a site that tracked people going off the air. some came back, some didn't and life went on. i have no idea what it means, if anything. all i know is that i'm still giddy with excitement at the possibilities inherent in booktalk .

dj adams is back from an extended hiatus and, well, blowing me away with the simple little script called booktalk that makes use of allconsuming to provide a nifty little service :

"What booktalk does, crontabbed on an hourly basis, is to grab a user's currently reading and favourite books lists and then look at the hourly list of latest books mentioned. Any intersections are pushed onto the top of a list of items in an RSS file, which represents a sort of 'commentary alert' feed for that user and his books. It goes without saying that the point of this is so that the user can easily monitor new comments on books in his collection by subscribing to that feed..."

it looks like i know what i'm doing this weekend.

hmm. zoe has improved imap support. maybe it'll work for me this time. and in related news jeremy got exim and ssl working with substantially shorter notes than the ones i wrote when i tried to do the same thing with postfix. and truth be told, i never did get postfix to compile correctly on a redhat box. so is it jeremie's use of exim or debian, which made all the difference?

ray liotta is hosting saturday night live, which - oddly - reminds me that ray liotta makes me want to kill myself.

being perpetually behind the times, i just watched Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and was utterly impressed. it's the first movie i've seen in a long time that didn't find me reaching for the laptop about 20 minutes after the opening credits. in fact, kris was quiet impressed that i didn't open the laptop once.

maybe i should start reviewing movies based on number of minutes before the laptop gets opened.

there is so much going on in trackback in motion that i'm suffering a sense of disassociative vertigo. or something like that:

"This experimentation has all been very intriguing and worthwhile in our discovery and understanding of the network and social effects of two-way hyperlinking systems. In reviewing this work I'm beginning to see some emerging issues and topics coming into focus."

Cleaning iTunes :

"Very quickly I have a powerful set of tools to fix most of the problems I find in my MP3 files without having to do a lot of typing. Now I can spend time listening to my music rather than categorizing it."

i'm interested in worldwide blogging popularity. the eatonweb portal and syndic8 give one a high level glimpse at activity, but aren't really comprehensive. if you've seen a study or research related to worldwide blogging numbers by country, i'd be mighty obliged if you pinged me .

update: the always-helpful tara at researchbuzz recommends going with a little google-fu such as "(intitle:weblog | blog | "web log") site:br" , which looks very promising. thanks, tara!

from the shooting-fish-in-a-barrrel department. Are Hummer Owners Idiots?:

"Perhaps it is worth noting, in this time of imminent, useless war, when our country is being run by, essentially, a failed Texas oilman, that it might be about time to rethink our all-American, bigger-is-better, screw-the-environment, high-fivin', the-world-is-our-prison-bitch mentality. "

[ via sotto ]

The Internet Topic Exchange:

"This is the first public implementation of the Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept. It's a central server to host TrackBack-powered channels. It's designed to let anyone effortlessly create a channel to archive pointers to information on a given topic."

[ via aaronland ]

safari tabbed browsing petition:

"To: Apple Computer, Inc.

Dear Apple Computer,

We, the undersigned, are excited about your new browser release, Safari. However, we feel that the product misses one vital component, namely tabbed browsing.

As your human interface guidelines state, you strive for elegance and simplicity with the design of Aqua applications. We believe that tabbed browsing would not only greatly enhance the usability of Safari, but also help it embrace these guidelines even more by greatly reducing on-screen window clutter.

Also note that several competing Mac browsers, namely Mozilla, Netscape and Chimera already include tabbed browsing, and that the feature has been a hit with users.

We sincerely hope that you choose to include tabbed browsing in refreshed betas of Safari, as well as its final version.

Thanks, and keep thinking differently.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned "

SIEGE: An Open Source Stress Tester:

"Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows the user hit a web server with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users. Those users place the webserver "under siege.""

[ via morelikethis ]

i'm in chicago for a good chunk of this week and somehow the days are disappearing into the void. if you've sent me an e.mail over the past few days, i haven't seen it as it's buried in my inbox under a mass of unread messages.

it's cold, chicago-style.

i ran morbus' script on the xml file that itunes spits out. the result was a spiffy album summary which proves that i have no taste in music. i still have miles to go in cleaning up my id3 tags, so the list isn't complete.

i imagine it matters to exactly nobody, but the low "tracks played" values are due to the fact that i'm usually streaming somafm on the laptop, with most of my mp3 listening getting done on the ipod.

note to self. check out icommune:

"iCommune is a plug-in which extends Apple's iTunes software to share music over the network. Your friends' music libraries appear in the iTunes source list. You can browse their collections, and choose to download or stream their music. It also allows you to make your own music library available to others."

yeeeehaaaw! i ran 5 miles today. the recovery continues.

wow. this week's "this american life" is an amazing treatment of secrecy and the us government:

"Most people don't know there's a secret court in the United States. Perhaps even more surprising, it's been around for over two decades. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court authorizes wiretaps on people the FBI and other intelligence agencies suspect of being spies. It meets in secret, and all its proceedings are sealed. Recently, a big battle you probably heard nothing about broke out between the court and the Ashcroft Justice Department. For what may have been the first time in its history, the court turned down a department surveillance application, and for what is certainly the first time in history, the department fought the court's decision. The document you see above, (note the filing number 02-001) is the first public document ever produced by the The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the super-secret body convened to solve this super-secret dispute. This and other stories about government secrecy from what many people call the most secretive Presidential administration in history."

What does Safari mean for OmniWeb? :

"But the most interesting thing about Safari where OmniWeb is concerned is not the application itself: the wonderful news for OmniWeb is that Apple has based it on a fast, compatible (and small!) rendering engine which is tuned for Mac OS X, and which they are making available to the entire Mac OS X development community! (For details, see >http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/< .) This means that we may be able to reach our compatibility and speed goals for OmniWeb much more quickly than when we were working alone, and then return our focus to doing what we do best: providing a rich browsing experience. Thank you, Apple! Ken --"

whoohoo! twice in one week i find that someone in blogosphere has come back from the dead. this time it's eric "glish" costello.

geoenabler looks like it has potential to be a great resource:

"We consider topics fair game if they have something to do with modeling, visualizing, or connecting geospatial data into a more coherent infrastructure. Admittedly, this is an ambitious undertaking and we don't intend to directly do much about it here on this site. However, we do think that this site can serve as a venue for people who are involved in this massive public works project to get together on neutral ground and talk about issues. "

[ via langreiter ]

dang it. william gibson doesn't have permalinks, which would come in handy for linking to gems like what do if you were to meet him:

"Well, you might try keeping mind that behind whatever mediated projection of "William Gibson" we're both, in our different ways, complicit in, there's a guy who once sat on the cold kitchen floor in his bathrobe, trying rather unsuccessfully to squirt disturbingly black fluid down the throat of a small, intensely uncooperative dog.

i think william gibson's new weblog is going to break some records for link diffusion rate .

cool. safari enhancer solves the import side of my safari bookmark import/export criticism.

then again, maybe i'll be waiting for an update, given the indications of recent problems.

i really don't think i can add anything to matt's characterization of "bridging the bubbles":

" Browsing blogs, I've often had what I call the "glittering cave moment"; when I leave the dowdy, familiar surrounds of my blog-neighbourhood and get taken by the hand (or link) by someone I trust into a new and sparkling world of scary new knowledge, opinions, thoughts and views. That bridging moment has a tangible excitement to it."

jwz gives his interpretation of what the safari team is really saying with its choice to not go with mozilla:

"Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can't even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?"

mod_rendezvous 1.3 :

"mod_rendezvous is an Apache 1.3.x module which when installed and enabled makes causes all running Apache 1.3.x servers to register themselves on rendezvous, and thus be visible in Apple's new Safari browser under the Rendezvous section of the bookmarks, and in any other application which browses for Rendezvous enabled web browsers."

[ via archipelago ]

morbus kindly pointed me to his own homegrown script for wrangling itunes xml into an easy to read web friendly album [ sic ] list, which is a nice alternative to the script i pointed to earlier in the week .

i was also inspired by seeing his bookmark count to check my own. through the wonders of 'grep -c "HREF=" bookmarks.html' i now know that my 5,024 bookmarks are in need of some serious pruning.

i'm glad to see john "genehack.com-no-genehack.org-no-i-mean-genehack.org" anderson is back to regular updates. i'm embarrased to admit just how good a gut laugh i got from the custom error docs that he linked to. yes, i'm fully aware of the horrendous grammatical butchering that was perpetrated in the prior sentence.

as you've doubtlessly heard, there were scads of macworld announcements from apple .

perhaps predictably i'm intrigued with safari , not leastly because they made the design decision to go with khtml over mozilla's gecko for page rendering. this is made all the more surprising because of the rampant speculation surrounding the motivations behind apple hiring david hyatt who is well known for his involvement with chimera .

hopefully after david gets a breather from responding to reviews of safari , he'll shed some light on the reasons behind the decision. [ update: well, if i'd have read sotto before rambling on, i'd have had all my questions answered with this and this ]

fwiw, i think safari is a perfectly adequate beta release and look forward to seeing how it evolves. my primary criticism would be the glaring lack of an import/export bookmark feature. i use far too many operating systems and rely far too much on my bookmarks to lock them in to particular platform. that said, i'm sure the feature will be rolled in sooner or later.

in other under-reported minutia apple released an officially sanctioned x11 implementation so you can really get yer geek on.

iTunes and ID3 :

" Since July, I've ripped (and re-ripped) CDs through iTunes because it's just so quick. iTunes does a very nice job of organizing a music directory, and collects a lot of data from CDDB.

Unfortunately, none of this data ever winds up in ID3 tags, so copying MP3s from my Mac to my FreeBSD laptop loses information. The trick is to mine the "iTunes Music Library.xml" file for data and populate the ID3 tags using pudge's MP3::Info."

[ via aaronland ]

i've commented before on my ruminations as to whether or not i should enable comments on the vast wasteland and i think nick denton hits the nail on the head with "comments and communities" :

"Nope, this is the way to deal with flamers: let them post on their own damn sites. And then let everyone else ignore them. Weblogs are a gigantic interlinked discussion forum, in which it's trivially easy to route around idiots.

One day, everybody will have a weblog, and a place to comment, and indexing systems will track the discussion as it reverberates around the web."

proof i think is in the pudding of mark pilgrim's "Further reading on today's posts" feature. the generally high-quality of the comments indexed from other sites provides a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than traditional commenting systems.

i guess some of my skittishness comes from the very brief period in which i enabled comments on the photo gallery . it took exactly one hour before clever readers starting leaving spam comments. and while photos of dogs may seem like an open invite for inane comments, in the words of nick, "...let them post on their own damn sites."

just in time for the international illuminatus meetup day - it's the top ten conspiracy theories of 2002 .

geourl is getting some link love from the likes of jon udell , jim mcgee , eric vitiello amongst others and thusly is actually becoming an interesting resource. i've added the requisite metadata to this site's page and you can now see who's nearby [ relatively speaking ]. if you run a website, think about taking a minute to add your site to the database and things might get interesting, because someone, somewhere is going to build an interesting app on top of this data.

stop the presses! 'Abby' and 'Annie' Answer the Same Letter :

"In a rare duplication, both the "Dear Abby" and "Annie's Mailbox" columns have answered the same letter from a man who wanted to be the best man at his gay brother's commitment ceremony but didn't know if he should ask for the honor."

who knew the italians and english were so, er, generous in their definitions of binge drinking , compared to our stodgy ol' puritanical definition of five drinks:

"Then, too, the CDC's notion of a binge is different from that of alcohol researchers in other countries. Hanson notes that "a recent Swedish study...defines a binge as the consumption of half a bottle of spirits or two bottles of wine on the same occasion." An Italian study viewed eight drinks a day as normal, while "in the United Kingdom, bingeing is commonly defined as consuming 11 or more drinks on an occasion.""

i'm at a loss to explain exactly why, but if i were to have a personal soundtrack that perfectly molded itself to the nooks and crannies of my head, amon tobin's "out from out where" would come close to fitting the bill. this is made all the more odd, since more than one person has commented that listening to the album is equivalent to being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

Top 10 Google Myths Revealed. [ via via inluminent ]

HOWTO: Encrypting a users's home directory on Mac OS X:

"This document explains how to place a user's home directory on an encrypted device image (DMG) under Mac OS X 10.1 or later. This is useful to ensure that all the files for the user you decide to encrypt are safe from prying eyes. This document will be of interest to attorneys, doctors, programmers, or anyone else who has sensitive documents (personal files, tax documents, secret or classified documents, etc). Placing the entire user's folder on an encrypted disk ensures that every file belonging to that user will be encrypted (as long as it is saved within their home directory). This includes many log files, preference files, email, AIM or ICQ logs, internet history and cache, etc."

thanks to eric vitiello for pointing out an entity encoding problem with my snowdeal foaf file and reminding me that there is a rdf validator available. everything is all fixed-up and i'm literally on the foaf map .

in honor on my non-new-year's-resolution, i've started trying to get my head around the "friend of a friend" or foaf project by whipping up my very own snowdeal foaf file, using the simple interface provided via foaf-a-matic.

i've only just begun tinkering, but i think i correctly added nearest airport support. and while i tend to be stingy about putting badges on the site, if you scroll down on the right side of the page you'll see a banner which i copped from leslie.

what's all this good for? well, i'm not quiet sure yet, that's what tinkering is for.

i'm not one for making new year resolutions, but if i were, it might sound a great deal like matt's:

"A year or two ago I read an interview with Groening, and when asked about any regrets he had, he mentioned not delivering on ideas, not completing things he started, and generally leaving good ideas aside until he completely forgot them.

His answers resonated with me, and I figured one of my resolutions for 2003 was to deliver on ideas instead of resting on my laurels.

to kick it off he's given the world ticketstubs .