awhile back i was wondering about worldwide blogging numbers by country . beyond doing a few google searches i never went anywhere with the idea. and it's a good thing, because the NITLE blog census is doing a much better job that i could have done anyway. it doesn't directly answer the "by country" part of the question, but there are some tantalizing nuggets in there already. and it's database of urls is growing at a good clip .

perhaps ben trott's why we need echo took dave over the edge. it looks like he's taking scripting news off the air for awhile:

"Scripting News is taking a break.

The lack of support, even name-calling, from people who think of themselves as my friend, has got me thinking that maybe this isn't worth it.

I'm thinking about all the services I provide and UserLand provides, for free, after years of pouring money and energy into community building, and the lack of appreciation for any of that in the community.

So I'm shutting down Scripting News now, to give me some time to think, and to give you all a demo of what it would be like if it weren't here. These last few days have been really awful. You can't imagine what it's like to have so many people screaming at you. It's inhuman, especially considering that my health isn't that good. The only conclusion I can come to is that I shouldn't be doing this.

Give it some thought. This is what it would look like if there were no Scripting News. What would it be worth to you, not in monetary terms, but in support terms, to keep this going.

I'm not willing to go on without more support.

Best wishes. Dave"

yowza. did you know that around 70,000 years ago [ not that long ago, when you really think about it ], there was a mother of all volcanic eruptions which reduced the earth's population to around 2,000 people ? talk about close calls:

"This means that, for a while, humanity was in a perilous state, vulnerable to disease, environmental disasters and conflict. If any of these factors had turned against us, we would not be here."

[ via peter ]

in the history of big, dumb companies being big and dumb, i think the t-mobile/sidekick debacle will be an amusing, if somewhat sad, footnote:

"Who owns your Sidekick? T-Mobile does, apparently, even if you spent full retail on it (I dropped $250 on mine). You need T-Mobile's permission to install software on their device. T-Mobile will, from time to time, decide to erase software from your device. And when you stop subscribing to their service, T-Mobile will delete all your data forever, without giving you any mechanism for moving it off the device (and without giving you the ability to design a tool that would let you do this).

I apologize, then, to all the people I've recommended Sidekicks to."

Pride (and $50) at Steak:

"The usual plot is this: Guy walks into restaurant. Guy is huge. Guy played football in college. Guy is hungry. Guy is boastful. (Or Guy is nervous -- it depends.) Guy starts strong. Guy starts to tire. Guy's friends chant "Chew! Chew! Chew!" Guy fails. Guy throws up."

Alas, Poor Microsoft ... You Used to Be So Interesting :

"Even if Longhorn is a big improvement over Windows, it still won't ignite a revolution. Why? Because--and believe me, I never thought I'd say this in a million years--Microsoft's software is good enough. We all bitch and moan about one shortcoming or another, as I've often done in these pages over the years. But there's not a whole lot Microsoft can do to make its programs so much better that they justify the suffering we have to endure any time we upgrade to something new. Longhorn might get geeks all sweaty with desire, but to the rest of us, it's still just an operating system."

hmmm. the article doesn't go into much technical detail, but annodex seems like an interesting new open source kid on the media annotation scene:

""Within five years it'll be on everybody's desktop," predicts Silvia Pfeiffer of CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences in Sydney, Australia. Her team is releasing the code as open source for others to use and modify."

ha. so, i had a rather official looking email presumably from paypal sitting in my inbox for a day, asking for me to verify my account information. when i clicked on the the link, much to my surprise, i found the link was dead. it was only at this point that i realized that the email was a very well-designed hoax. this is a very special hoax, because it's the first email hoax that has ever coerced me to click on anything. luckily for me the site was already taken down.

amusingly, after a little surfing, i find that our own cameron marlow is behind the big take-down.

in other apple news, the openoffice os x port is now officially available. it's a little ugly, but i'll give it a fighting chance, since i decided to not pay the m$ office tax when i purchased my ibook.

simon willison has written a nice little piece on form validation with php, which is a nice mix of education and implementation:

"My latest attempt... involves embedding validation and redisplay rules in the markup of the form itself. The form is written in XHTML, but with a number of additional tags and elements. Any form field elements can have a number of additional attributes which specify the validation rules of the form."

[ via morelikethis ]

how do you market without marketing? that's the question for pabst and its pbr brand. anyone who's spent time in places like chicago knows that all the cool kids have been drinking pabst blue ribbon for quiet some time. i'd chalked it up to the ever popular retro-chic-unironic irony thing that is so popular with the kids these days and thought it would die a quick, inevitable death with a nod in the "the hipster handbood", but it's still growing in popularity. and now, pabst is apparently trying to figure out how to grow in a market that has adopted the brand presumably because it hasn't done much marketing for 20 years:

"In theory, a company that discovers one of its products has started growing of its own accord could simply do nothing. But it's hard to do nothing. Especially for marketers. For P.B.R. it was clearly important to at least appear to be doing as little as possible. This is one reason that a traditional response to the discovery that ''alternative people'' were buying the beer in Portland -- taking out ads on local alt-rock stations -- was nixed. It's one reason that when Kid Rock's lawyer came sniffing around to work an endorsement deal, Pabst said no. It's one reason that the company has passed on the chance to back a major snowboarding event or to sponsor an extreme athlete. It's one reason that even upbeat five-year plans for where the brand may go envision no television advertising at all."

from the too-good-to-be-true department. it appears that powergen has officially denied any relationship to what some considered the best web site url ever - powergenitalia.com. and so, another internet urban legend is born.

matt haughey has a great discussion on the horribleness of the hinterland that the unwashed masses must endure. i've had almost the same experience of going to perform routine maintenance on a elderly relative's computer, only to find it crippled and invested with bloat and spyware that nobody seemed to know from whence it came.

a finnish company has released something they are calling the Radionet Open Source Environment ("ROSE") for building wireless lan access points. there are other options for doing this type of thing, including the popular nocat , but none of the other contenders were really designed to be deployed on "embedded systems". "rose" claims this with a fairly competitive feature set, so things are looking pretty intriguing:

"ROSE can be used with both embedded devices and personal computers. Initially, ROSE is available for Intel and PowerPC architectures and the software can be easily cross compiled to other HW platforms such as MIPS and ARM."

hmmm. it hasn't shown up in any stateside publications but the observer is feeling pretty confident that the iraqi mobile labs had nothing to do with germ warfare . and to add some spice to the conspiratorial special sauce:

"The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control."

webber is a configurable python and php system that allows you to easily display jabber presence information on a webpage:

"Webber is a multi-user Jabber presence indicator for the web. It is split up into two parts. Webberbot is a bot written in python which connects to a jabber server and stores presence information in a MySQL database. webber.php is a PHP script which you can include in your webpage to display your presence on the web."

i wonder how tough it would be to hack in support for geographic metadata and a map display, similar to the jabber world map.

i don't know how adweek narrowed it down, but you can go relive the absurdity known as The Lowest Moments in Advertising . [ via kottke's remaindered links ]

zeldman writes a pretty good eulogy for ie5/mac and points to the potential for trouble:

"We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers. We know that, on the Windows side, it will eventually release something that accesses web content, but that "something" will be part of an operating system - and that operating system won't be available until 2005, and probably won't be widely used before 2007. Whether the part that formats web pages will be more or less compliant with W3C recommendations than what we have now, we don't know. Neither do we know whether the unnamed thing that handles web browsing will support CSS3 and other specifications that will emerge during the long years ahead in which Microsoft offers no new browser."

A social network caught in the Web :

We present an analysis of Club Nexus, an online community at Stanford University. Through the Nexus site we were able to study a reflection of the real world community structure within the student body. We observed and measured social network phenomena such as the small world effect, clustering, and the strength of weak ties. Using the rich profile data provided by the users we were able to deduce the attributes contributing to the formation of friendships, and to determine how the similarity of users decays as the distance between them in the network increases. In addition, we found correlations between users' personalities and their other attributes, as well as interesting correspondences between how users perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others."

it's looks official. microsoft: no new versions of IE for mac. good riddance:

""No IE 6 is planned," Sommer said in a telephone interview. "Safari is turning into a better answer for (Apple) customers.""

i'm testing driving firebird on my ibook. it's smooth and sporty, although it seems a little on the sluggish side when launching. there doesn't seem to be a noticeable improvement in rendering speeds either. hmmmm. in related testdriving, i'm also tooling around in a thunderbird. me suspects that i'll be leaving the mozilla application suite mothership sooner rather than later.

new to me. the technorati keyword search . as dave sifry shows there's lots of goodness in the api.

whoa. i went to ft. lauderdale on business. who knew there were hotels in this world that not only don't have wifi, but don't even have wired broadband? jeeez. what is going on in florida?

interestingly, i'm 2 degrees away from britton chance , the venerable optical engineering professor whom is behind the seemingly goofy headband lie detector :

"Research subjects wearing the headband are told to answer some questions truthfully and others deceptively.

At the moment a subject makes the decision to lie, before even uttering it, there's a milliseconds-long burst of blood flow. Those bursts are read by the sensors and show up as spikes on a laptop computer. "

one of my undergraduate professors, clyde barlow , received his ph.d while doing his thesis work in britton's lab. in fact, i did "bioanalytical chemistry" independent research for clyde which had some similar themes, in terms of real-time monitoring of the specral properties of deep tissues to detect changes to stimuli. however, i studied beating hearts, not liars. i'll spare you the details of how and where i got the beating hearts.

anyway, the real point is that even the relatively simple model of monitoring heart tissues was hard to execute consistantly. it's hard to imagine an array of sensors that could reliably differentiate between something as complicated as lying. but i guess if anyone could do it, britton could. and probably clyde.

sometimes i feel a bit of sympathy for those folks that are forced to sit through movies for their living. but at least some of them look at it as an opportunity to hone their comedy writing skills:

""2 Fast 2 Furious" is among the most lethargic action movies I have ever seen: when Mr. Walker and Tyrese are not driving, it might as well be called "2 Slow 2 Tedious," since the script shows all the energy and sophistication of an old episode of TJ Hooker."

"The basic editing scheme suggests a how-to video on manual shifting techniques. Step 1: depress the clutch. Step 2: yank the gearshift. Step 3: grimace and shout in the ethnic slang idiom of your choice. Repeat as necessary until you crash into something or find it advisable to activate the nitrogen-powered booster rockets, now available from your dealer as part of the special doofus hotrod sport package."

hmmm. me wonders why 5 out of 6 pages are timing out right now.

i usually try to abstain from posting metafilter bits here because, well, you've probably already seen them. but the one on "Sewage machine company warns about 'Finding Nemo' flushes" is going to make the cut, for reasons that may or may not be apparent:

"A company that manufactures equipment used to process sewage issued a press release Thursday warning that drain pipes do lead to the ocean -- eventually -- but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."

"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,"' wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps. "

cameron mentions a debate which i never thought was debatable - which spice should go in the shaker with more and/or bigger holes . of course, everyone knows that salt goes in the shaker with more holes so you can get right to the business of coating all manner of frieds goods with a yummy layer of salt. or so i thought. apparently there are more than a few confused individuals who think it's actually pepper that deserves the bigger holes. blasphemers.

luckily the issue is quickly laid to rest by a commenter who points to the The International Guild of Professional Butlers FAQ :

"Protocol and Etiquette Consultant John G. Robertson responds: The salt shaker may be distinguished primarily by the size of the holes, and then by the number of holes. Salt is coarser than pepper, and needs the larger hole. It is also heavier and flows much more freely than pepper, accordingly there are often fewer holes on the salt shaker to help control the flow. However, there is no manufacturing standard."

what's amusing is how it really almost isn't even noteworthy:

"Scientists have grown chicken embryos with teeth which may lead to a breakthrough against baldness."

what next? i literally can't imagine.

yeah, sometimes i feel like saying something like this:

""Our actions will advance our goals of diversity and localism," FCC Chairman and noted sniveling GOP errand boy Michael Powell actually had the nerve to say, in public, as lightning, surprisingly, did not strike him dead on the spot.

And if you don't laugh at this, if you don't absolutely insist on enjoying the bitter ironies of the massive shameless corporatization of this nation like Satan enjoys shrieking root canals, if you don't passionately demand that your soul view U.S. political culture as a massive reeling circus masquerading as a solemn drama, you will be compelled to scream and narcotize and run off to the woods with a case of Grey Goose and the collected W.H. Auden and an iPod loaded with only Metallica and Chopin, never to be heard from again. "

justin frankel's .plan elaborates on his unsurprising decision to leave nullsoft:

"The company controls what I do with my code [in the past, it seemed I had freedom, but it turns out all of that was not really the case--rather, I was somehow avoiding the control illicitly (for 4 years)]

The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have.

This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav."

i just wanted to apologize to regular readers for all the spelling mistakes and grammer issues in recent posts. i went to college. honest.

read it, love it, learn it.

jeremy zawodny discusses the difference between "knowing something" and "knowing how to find something" :

"We're all just very efficient at scavenging on the Web. Some are simply more efficient (or can think of better keywords) than others."

amusingly, in a previous life when i was debating between becoming a doctor in the m.d. sense and a doctor in the ph.d sense, a professor once told me to think about whether i was the type of person who wanted to "know" everything or whether i was the type of person who wanted to "know how to find" everything. the former is suited for a life as an m.d. and the latter get shunted into the ph.d pipleline. the comments always resonated with me because i've always known that i don't know anything, but i do know how to quickly find most things.

which is why i secretly desire to be a librarian. jenny has my dream job.

so, you're justin frankel and you've just released a program which angers the mothership, presumably because it has been referred to as "scorched earth for aim". what, pray tell, do you write in your .plan?

"The last few days have been, erm, interesting, it will be, erm, interesting to see how they end up panning out. But I'm feeling pretty good, though like usual feeling misunderstood. I'll try to clear it up next week."

bloggers are often like npr personalities. you get used to them coming into your life day after day and after awhile you'll inevitably construct a face to go with the voice, or in the case of bloggers - the text. occasionally you'll be surprised to see a photo of said blogger and realize that you were wrong. oh so wrong. in this case, i would have never ever, ever guessed that phil is fully-bearded. not that there is anything wrong with that.

it's a good thing that adam kalsey didn't ask me to contribute to newly digital project, since on the surface, my story was nearly indistinguishable from his - same TI-99/4A, same small town [ only my small town was whitneyville, maine, same discovery that computers were more than just for games, same transition from the tape drive to floppy disks as my programs became more complicated. or at least more spaghetti-like.

i was fortunate enough to go to a grade school in rural maine that actively promoted the wonders of computing, which was quiet a novelty in those parts in the early 80's. it wasn't long before myself and a few other kids were being pulled out of regular classes to participate in the schools nascent "gifted and talented" program where we could sit around and teach each other, since we were already speaking a language much different than any of our teachers were fluent in.