i'm inclined to wait for further proof before declaring it official, but it appears that bill maher has a blog. if it's not him, someone is doing a fairly good impression of his "voice":

"Jurors in a Los Angeles police brutality trial were unable to reach a decision. A hung jury and yet no riot. Did you see the tape? The cop punched the guy and threw his head against the hood of the car. Black people shame on you! Ten years ago you’d be setting fire to a Korean grocery store right now. You’ve gotten soft. You’ve lost the fire in the belly. No more edge. It’s like watching The Who without John Entwistle. You no longer have it. Hang it up. Go ahead and be like the Chinese and Mexicans and go gently into the night. You broke my heart!"

evidence that it is an actual celebrity blog and not a well-designed parody can be found in its glaring lack of permalinks and - less decisively - the lack of visitor comments. [ via dangerousmeta ]

prompted in part by a fantastic post by cameron "blogdex" marlow on weblog churn rates, maciej ceglowski does some calculations on a subset of the blogcensus data and finds that 1 in 3 blogs are likely, "...abandoned, unused, or very much out of date..." and that around 8 weeks since the last post seems to be a good arbitrary point for determining whether or not a blog is "active".

although peter disclaims any specific intent to persecute jakob nielsen in the Report Review: Nielsen/Norman Group's Usability Return on Investment, it's still fun to look for evidence of mudslinging:

"Unfortunately, the NN/g report does not seem to follow this advice. Although it does make a reasonable anecdotal case for investing in usability, the report methodology is so fundamentally flawed that any financial analyst worth her salt would immediately question its findings."

kellan has graciously provided me with a headstart on something i've been meaning to look into for quiet some time - text summarization. why do i have the summary itch? i've been hankering to provide full-text and abridged version rss feeds, but i'm too lazy to handcraft a summary for each post. there's a web-based front end for for one of the most promising prospects, classifier4j.

could i ever get the time and motivation to whip together an xml-rpc interface so i could call it from my ugly xhtml2rss script?

so i'm reading the arstechnica story on the new riaa chief getting a chuckle out of their proclamation that "evil has a new face". from there i wander over to news.google, and find that they quiet literally feel that it does have a new face, and it looks suspicously like ozzy osbourne.

ibm developerWorks has an easy to swallow overview on how to install pebble on a soekris 4521. a more detailed version, using openbsd, can be found on the soekris router project. but it needs to go outside, you say? make it so.

the mozilla thunderbird 0.1 release is available for your downloading pleasure. don't be afraid on the low version number as it's based on the mozilla 1.5b trunk, so things seem to be pretty solid. after a few more days of testing, i might just make it my full-time mail client.

via pete, i discovered a very funny mailing list message, which leaves no room for doubt as to the degree of impending direness:

"...could you please, for the love of god, help me, my boss will kick my ass really strong if i don't fix it rapidly..."

admit it. you've been there.

i passed time on the plane to and from madrid reading seabiscuit the book in anticipation of seeing seabiscuit the movie , which kris and i saw today. although it's always dangerous to see a movie with the book so fresh in your mind, i still thought the movie was good - but not great. it will be interesting to see how it plays to the general public. our theatre was packed to capacity and filled with exuberent patrons, but one got the impression that they were all there to see how the movie and book compared.

as usual many liberties were taken with the original text to help the story move along quickly, while obliterating many of the nuances of the story. most of the decisions are understandable, given the fact that nobody comes to a summer move to see a fact-filled documentary; however, at times you can't help feel the pain of being bludgeoned with obviousness. yessir, all anybody ever needs is a second chance. but hey, it's summer and you can't blame them too much. interestingly, they decided to leave out any mention of the imposts, or weights, that seabiscuit was forced to run with. it would have seemed to add a good deal to the impressiveness of the horse's accomplishments to understand that he was often obliterating track records and opponents while carrying 20 pounds or more than the rest of the field. hi. ho.

regardless of a few minor flaws, if you want to see a good movie that's just a touch heavy-handed with emotion manipulation, but doesn't have one explosion or car chase, then go see seabiscuit .

it seems like i've been away for ages. i wonder if anything interesting happened while i was gone. i never did trackdown any madridwireless nodes, the hotel ethernet connection was expensive [ 12 euros / hour ] and only available in the lobby, and it seemed like a sin to sit in an internet cafe when i could be outside enjoying the city. so, for the first time in a long time, i was sans the internet for entire days. luckily, madrid more than made up for the loss.

but before madrid, i was forced to experience the most horrendously awful plane flight. ever. airtravel is always traumatic for me since i'm well outside the median size of the cattle that airlines design their seats to accomodate. if you're over 6 foot 4 inches and 220 pounds you know exactly what i'm talking about. no legroom is just the beginning. much worse is that the lumbar and neck supports are in all the wrong places, which makes sleeping difficult at best. on top of that you're constantly aware that if you were to rest your elbows naturally you'd be pitching them into the chest of your unhappy neighbor. so you're constantly trying to keep you're elbows and arms at an angle that guarantees you'll be in for a good case of knotty neck tension. and did you know that if you're 6 foot four inches, there is so little legroom that you can't properly put the tray down, since it's resting at a precarious angle on your thighs? between the tray situation and the elbow situation, you can imagine that it is nearly impossible to eat anything without getting a generous portion of it on your shirt. this will solidify the impression of your neighbor that you are a giant, unkempt buffoon. so it's hard to sleep on a plane.

it's impossible when there are 50 rambunctious teenagers coming home from a trip in the states. they really weren't doing anything teenagers don't do all the time; they were loud, incessantly talkative, unable to sit for more than 10 minutes at a time and completely unresponsive to adult supervision. i at least was able to turn up my ipod and escape the incessant talking, however i was still subjected to teens grabbing the back of my seat while they came up to talk to their friends who were sitting behind me. it was a seven hour exercise in tolerance. when we approached madrid, i overheard the stewards and stewardesses, looking very haggard after a night without sleep, silently cursing the kids and discussing what to do about the disgruntled passengers. when we approached madrid the pilot announced over the p.a. system that he, the crew and delta were extremely apologetic about all the disruptions and that the offending parties were ordered to stay on the plane after we arrived at the gate. a wave of nervous giggling spread through the place. kids will be kids. madrid is both a boisterous city and a cozy village, and it was fun to experience both sides of the town. kris and i were fortunate to be introduced through a mutual friend in the states to a longtime madrileno, jose, who took us out on the town for tapas and cervecas and a fantastic walk through the old part of the city at night. highlights included a festival with dancing in the plaza de mayor and the busting surround of the puerta del sol, which has as much energy as times square in new york.

jose also put us in touch with his daughter and son-in-law who took us on a daytime walking tour of the city, which included the prado, the palacio real and some of the best paella in th e city.

of course, these are just the highlights. most of the fun was to be had in the little moments with our very, very gracious hosts - the times in-between the monuments. after the pictures have been developed and the memories begin to fade, kris and i will have something far more valuable than trinkets and memorabilia - we'll have new spainyard friends who i anticipate keeping in touch with for a long time.

i'm leaving for madrid and will be there for most of next week, so things might be a little quiet around here. hopefully madridwireless will have a few nodes near me. maybe i'll try to contact a few local bloggers like the author of the puerta del sol blog. if there are any local bloggers who are willing to put up with my barely passable spanish, please email me.

many thanks to dave for his generosity. it looks like i'll have a 2.0 feed in the near future. this is a great thing for the community and dave should be lauded from near and far for Doing The Right Thing.

wherein jason ponders donuts, change and trust

i don't use cvs nearly as much as i should, which is a shame, since it comes with mac os x's development tools:

"CVS supports all sorts of additional operations that are useful to large teams. However, for our purposes (which are much less demanding than software development), we can take the functionality that we've just described and use it to solve the problem of managing our own data on multiple machines. Even if you are the only person to use your data, CVS can help you easily maintain it on as many machines as your bank account can fund."

i'm not really sure what to make of the announcement of the aol-backed mozilla foundation on the same day that aol-tw dismantled netscape. i suspect it will mean a whole lot of nothing once the dust settles.

here's to hoping the mozilla foundation can find stable sources of funding.

this article on animal emotions starts out with an obvious observation that bears repeating - that any animal owner can chew your ear off with stories about animals that appear to be just as emotional as humans.

mauja, our very emotive malamute, is goldmine for stories. malamutes are notorious for "talking". they don't bark per se, rather they'll "talk" to you in what sounds something like choppy, wolf-like howls and moans, and after you've been around a malamute for awhile you find yourself engaging in long-winded conversations about one thing or another. and if a malamute is unhappy, watch out. they'll let you know and give you and earfull. maybe they think you've been to park without them. or maybe you've been away for a little too long. or maybe they really think you might be able to be convinced to give them a little human food. they'll come up with a very convincing argument using all their powers of persuasion.

when we had to put harper down, we witnessed the depths of a malamute's emotions. he was in a royal funk. and bitchy. and he'd tell you how unhappy he was. endlessly. scoff if you will, but mauja was depressed and i don't need a new study to verify that.

is it just me or does the news.com title to the aol blogging story seem like a quaint anachronism, what with the space between 'web' and 'log'. i thought only the gray old lady did that kind of thing anymore.

i've updated the rss feed to make it ever so slightly more readable. i chop item descriptions off at 500 characters and previously, as jon udell noted, you could be left with a truncation that "didn't respect" word or sentence boundaries. well, john made those comments over a year ago and i'm just now getting around to fixing it, which should give you a peak into my profound ability to procrastinate.

for now, i've just added a "..." at the end of a truncated post. this might be a first step towards providing two different feeds, abridged and full-length, but i'm not sure. in case you're wondering, i didn't start truncating my rss feed in an attempt to drive traffic to my site. honest. at the time, i thought it did improve readability a bit, but more importantly the rss 1.0 recommends that the description field should have a maximum length of 500 characters.

just in case you're wondering. i did finish the flying pig marathon in may, i just never updated the site. mighty clever of me, no?

and i am now training for the chicago marathon in october. i'm on my own modified training schedule and my long run is already 10 miles, so maybe i'll hit a half marathon or two before chicago. anyway, what i'm really saying is that i'm back to updating the "accidental marathonists" section of the vast wasteland. so check it out, if you're into reading about someone who's just a sedentary as the guy trying to pretend that he can run marathons.

i'm confused. if the cia was asking britain to drop iraq uranium claim in september 2002, why is it now accepting responsibility for uranium assertion in the state of the union speech? perhaps i'm missing something obvious.

update: so much for being overly clever with falling on the sword title. thanks technorati!

it's nice to see dj adams back in the blogosphere after an extended hiatus. most notably known for his work with jabber, dj is one of those people who is a veritable font of fun and interesting code that inevitably makes you go, "hmmmmmm."

kellan has discovered what everyone who has spent any substantial amount of time in the northwest discovers - that whole thing about it raining all the time - it's a myth perpetrated on californians and other non-northwesterners. having lived in oly for 4 years, i can say with some authority that it's a sham devised to keep the whole place to themselves.

first, i want to make it clear that i don't actually believe what i'm going to say, it's just that my brain is far too efficient at pattern matching and induction even if it arrives at false conclusions. and second, i want i apologize in advance for appearing as if i might be making snarky comments about someone's death. having said that, one can't help but imagine the types of theories one could run through the conspiracy mill with the grist that a marine who helped rescue jessica lynch killed in crash on his first weekend back from iraq:

"Holly Coupe, his fiancee, said Speer sent her a letter from Iraq that said, "The first thing I'll do when I get back is put a ring on your finger.""

coindence or not that it's conveniently timed with news that the army describes what went wrong for jessica lynch's unit?

thanks in part to a link from mefi the autopsy report blog has exceeded it's allowable bandwidth and has been taken down for today. but you should check it out tommorrow, if you're into casual observations blunt force trauma. it reminds me of the the wonderful sense of wry understatement that you'd find around the various academic medical centers that i used to spend more than fair share of time in.

it's easy! anybody can do it:

"This step-by-step tutorial will get you up and running with a very basic XML-based content management system (or CMS). I don’t have the space here to get into a very complex example, but with any luck, the concepts and ideas presented here will provide you with the necessary springboard for your own exploration."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

wherein we learn that xp's origins can be found in the one of the oldest conundrums in the world. at least the software world:

"Up until then I believed better programming would solve all the world's ills. Yes, you can screw up the programming so badly you kill the project. Usually, however, the problem concerns relationships between the business people and the programmers, the budget process, poor communications -- factors unrelated to the programming. The context in which the software development takes place proves as important to the project's success as the programming itself."

[ via daniel berlinger ]

dave birthed a new technorati pinger service over the weekend. perhaps i'll have to add support for it into my homegrown rss generator.

one can only imagine just how bad edible gear tastes. but it doesn't matter, since i'm a sweathog:

"Question: How do your products interact with sweat/condensation?

Answer: People who are unwilling to regulate their sleeping temperature should not buy our sleeping bags or pads.

Excessively sweaty hikers are also advised to avoid the SnackPack."

[ via dangerousmeta ]

A Former Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis to Attack US Troops :

"Somewhere in Balad, or Fallujah, or Baghdad, there is a soldier telling a new replacement, "We are losing this war.""

Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom' :

""Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom," said another soldier, an officer from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq."

Anger Rises for Families of Troops in Iraq :

"The signs of discomfort seem to be growing beyond the military bases. According to a Gallup poll published on Tuesday, the percentage of the public who think the war is going badly has risen to 42 percent, from 13 percent in May. Likewise, the number of respondents who think the war is going well has dropped, from 86 percent in May to 70 percent a month ago to 56 percent."

so, you might have seen that the big hack attack amounted to no more than a damp squib . perhaps, like myself, you have no idea what on earth a "damp squib" could be. according to google , lots of things are damp squibs . who knew that calling something a wet broken firecracker could be such a common euphamism?

it's amazing, when you really stop and think about it, that it's possible - with the help of a little elbow grease - to get a full-featured pbx running on commodity hardware thanks to asterisk :

"To provide a brief introduction to Asterisk's capabilities, I will show an example that creates a very simple PBX with two extensions and voicemail on each. There will be no external connectivity to this PBX; we will simply be able to call from one line to the other. This would allow, as an example, two users to be in separate parts of the country but they could ring each other's desk phones. If the called party was unavailable, voicemail could be left."

i've heard of people using asterisk as a "feature server" for existing voip installs powered by vocal or iptel's SIP Express Router [ which also features jabber integration. ]

so much for a relaxing holiday weekend. today i helped install an underground sprinkler system for my sister-in-law, i painted a room in the basement that we're refinishing; i installed a bandwidth utility and finished putting cacti into production. and i ran 8 miles.

phew. as my grandmother likes to say, idle hands makes for the devil's work.

it's always educational and fun to someone like ray talk about trends in mobility and their potential impacts:

"If technology, molded into any of a variety of forms, can ultimately give us continuous awareness of the geo-location, activity, interruptability, and even potentially "state of mind" of those with whom we wish to "be close to", what will it do to the nature of the nuclear family unit? The local community? The collaborative work team?"

Echo...echo...alright enough already :

"Certain companies had better start looking at providing a whole load more features that can't be transferred via the standards they so crave - lest the CMS they charge for today becomes a valueless commodity through their own success tomorrow."

ev has posted an blogger api update:

"We will not be implementing or supporting the Blogger API 2.0. We apologize for having that out there in a semi-final looking spec for so long. We know it was frustrating for developers. But please forget that ever happened."

all of the hullaballoo surrounding rss makes me feel dumb. i don't understand how a spec for something as simple as syndicating content can become the center of such a soap opera. it feels like i'm missing something.

part of my problem is that, like kellan, i never really could understand how rss 1.0 got labelled as "hard". way back in the day, before blogger supported any flavor of rss, i used xml::rss to generate my feeds. after a few cups of coffee, i'd made a quick hack that produces valid feeds. i'll grant you that it's not exactly a "power feed", but it's not like it was rocket science to figure out how to produce the feed that satisfies my needs.

so what's the big deal? sure some things need to be clarified in certain specs and i wish echo all the best in making Cool Stuff, but do we really need so much drama?

truth. schmooth.

"And a majority, 52 percent, say they believe the United States has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

The number that believes this country has found weapons of mass destruction is 23 percent, down from 34 percent in May, according to a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland. "