bulleted

• comments on joel on offshoring
  [ " I'm not a software broker, I'm a software developer." ]
• minimo
  [ "The Minimo (Mini Mozilla) project is focused on code-size and runtime footprint reduction, and porting to small consumer devices." ]
• scoble is a microsoft blogger
  [ "I wanna own "Microsoft Blogger" on Google" ]
• The DIY Zoning Project
  [ ... the complete solution is under $500 while the "professionally installed" systems start at about $5000..." ]

on the dogs getting ready to rumble with a skunk

great. there's a skunk meandering around close to the house and the dogs have started to notice. given their prior successes with killing a raccoon and a squirrel , i'm sure they're up for a tussle with skunk. at this point the skunk appears to be taunting them by staying on the other side of the fence and unfortunately i don't think the dogs know that they can get sprayed regardless of which side of the fence it's on.

so, anyone want to place bets on how long it'll be before i'm writing a post on how the dogs lost the battle with the skunk?

new york times doublespeak on personal blogs

is it just me or does the new york times' position against personal blogs due to a "burden of complete transparency" make no sense whatsoever? it would seem to me that a completely transparent organization would do just the opposite.

bulleted

• The Economist: The case for gay marriage
  [ "It rests on equality, liberty and even society" ]
• blo.gs supports xfn
  [ "...you can add information on your relationship to the people behind the blogs in your favorites list..." ]
• tucows buys blogrolling.com
• Groove Networks Announces Role In Newly Announced Homeland Security Information Network
  [ "Tom Ridge [called it] "a key part of our national homeland security strategy."" ]
• Use iTunes Groups and AppleScript to sort music
• iPod mini battery tests

bulleted

• livejournal supports foaf
• feedburner
  [ "FeedBurner enhances your current RSS or Atom feeds in a variety of ways that YOU control" ]
• Installing Apache 2 and PHP 5 on OS X
  [ "My scholarly ambitions were foiled once again" ]
• "Off-shoring" Manifesto/Rant: Sixteen Hard Truths
  [ "Big companies do not create jobs, and historically have not created jobs. Big companies are not "built to last;" they almost inexorably are "built to decline."" ]
• Great Books
  [ "Readers: tell me in the comments which five science and technology books you would have every student read." ]

bulleted

• Can you have too many choices?
  [ "..."unlimited choice" can "produce genuine suffering."..." ]
• Predicting Future Sales: Bottom-Up Sales Forecasting
• talkr.net proposal
  [ "...talkr will be a distributed identity system that ties Movable Type to Flickr's authentication service via an MT plugin..." ]
• Online Publishing Risks Create Need for Libel Insurance
  [ "...In many ways, online publishers face even greater liability risks than traditional media." ]
• Presence, Positioning, & Proximity

content:encoded decoded

the great thing about this whole blogging thing is how easy it is to make yourself look like an dope. in response to my plea for help with content:encoded , i'd like to thank the many people who more or less gently reminded me to think about the encoded part of content:encoded. that's right, i actually forgot to CDATA-escape the content. d'oh! you would think that since i run all content through tidy before posting that i would have remembered just a basic fact. hi. ho.

in any case, the feeds now not truncated and contain html, which is a good thing. i think. oh, i and fixed a stupid date error, so halleleujah my feeds are valid again.

so if it took me this long to fold-in html into my feeds how long do you think it'll take me to play with xml::atom ?

pregnancy update

if we've done our math correctly, the baby is 30 days old and now has a "rudimentary" face and is growing over a million cells a minute! one month down and only eight to go - it won't be long now.

help with content:encoded and rss 1.0

so i decided that i was going to do a simple task that i should have done a long time ago - produce non-truncated versions of my syndication feeds without the html tags stripped. the feeds are all truncated at 500 characters and have the html removed because way back in the day, that's what the spec said was the Right Thing to Do with the 'description' element.

in response to the restrictiveness of the traditional 'description' element aaron swartz created content:encoded which was generally regarded as the Right Thing to Do with html-laden content. naturally, it took me two years to get around to playing the with "new" element.

after remembering how to get XML::RSS to import the content module, i'm off to the races and producing what looks to my naive eye to be a valid feed with content:encoded elements , but alas, it's not valid . i'm getting a "Undefined content_encoded element: p" error from the validator and netnewswire lite won't render the element at all, even though i'm fairly certain that it can handle content:encoded. so what gives? it anyone has any idea what dopey thing i'm going feel free to give me an earful . and before you ask, i'm pretty sure that doesn't have to do with the css class in th html, although i should just strip that out because it's useless legacy artifact.

happy belated blog birthday to me!

somehow it escaped my attention that january 31st marked the 4 year anniversary of the vast wasteland. how time flies when you're having fun. here's to 4 more years.

minor site fixes

i just noticed recently that the parallax and accidental marathonist sections were not loading the background color properly in safari due to my missing a closing paren in the in-line css. firefox and ie rendered it "properly" which is why i didn't catch it. it's all fixed now. considering that i know that a fair number of you are using safari and that you also visit both of those sections, i'm feeling a bit like the guy who walks around with a big piece of spinach stuck in his teeth while onlookers silently chuckle amongst themselves.

on pregnancy and hormones

yeah, we've all heard the jokes about pregnancy and hormones. well, kris informed me that according to The Unofficial Guide to Having a Baby there's some truth behind the "raging hormones" humor:

"During pregnancy, your body will produce as much estrogen as a nonpregnant woman's body would make in 150 years - at mid-pregnancy, as much in a single day as a non-pregnant woman's ovaries produce in three years."

bulleted

• Print permanence results for Epson papers
• Clayton Christensen at MIMC
• MindCad Pyramid
  [ "Visual Thinking for OS X" ]
• NNW Subscription to iPod Contacts v1.0
• Upcoming.org to iCal
• Plaxo and FOAF: What's the right model?

bulleted

• Race and Blogs
  [ "...John Lee blasts weblogs, Gawker and Wonkette, for perpetuating a "phenomenon" he describes as "white hipsters adopting a casual racism."" ]
• Returning to Yahoo!
  [ "[It] passes what I call "The Russell Test". ]
• change for america
  [ trippi's still blogging ]
• RSS/Atom dust-up: I don't understand
  [ "I really don't get it." ]

we're pregnant!

although it's a little tough to tell in the picture, that ept stick is positive for pregnancy! great geegaws, i'm going to be a daddy!

and now, we'll all pause for a moment while i hum (you're) Having My Baby.

it's still pretty early, less than 25 days, but the baby's first heartbeat was on sunday.

mom's doing fine. she's sleeping a lot more, but that's o.k.

i'm sure i'll have much, much more to share as events unfold.

and in related news, there must be something in the water, because my sister-in-law and her partner are pregnant as well - and if everyone has done their math correctly, the baby's due dates are within days of each other.

bulleted

• Dogs much older than once thought, experts say
  [ "..."They literally walked out of the caves with us."..." ]
• Research and Development in Interaction Design
• sociopath social network framework
  [ nascent social networking framework ]
• Home Automation with Mac OS X
  [ i wonder what's going on with misterhouse these days ]
• ars technica on garageband
  [ "...[The third child is] cute but people do not take them seriously. GarageBand is kind of like that." ]
• PieSpy Social Network Bot
  [ "Inferring and Visualizing Social Networks on IRC" ]
• Java: Failure or Crime?
  [ "It is no crime for a language to fail. What is a crime is for its failure to blight the careers of the myriad young, impressionable, and naive who fell for its blandishments." ]

bulleted

• colloquy
  [ open source os x irc ]
• Topix.net and the "Add to My Yahoo" button
• apple's options
  [ "... their market is people who work differently than others." ]

bulleted

• Six Things First-Time Squid Administrators Should Know
• Tribe.net to support FOAF
• Did you ever wonder what it would be like to pop a water balloon in space?
• The myth and math of Kerry's electability [ see also a kerry affair ]
• DIY PowerBook Repairs
• telecom: old and new [ and again . quiz at 11. ]

NetNewsWire Atom Beta

well, despite all the rss/atom controversy, i'm happy to see the netnewswire atom beta is out. choice is good. may the best protocol win. maybe someday i'll get around to rolling my own custom atom feed and let my readers decide. relatedly, in a sign of smartness on yahoo's part, it looks like my yahoo's rss module can parse atom feeds.

autumn of the mouse - updated

"am i still dreaming?" i thought, as i rubbed my eyes while listening to a breathless bbc reporter announce that comcast offered $66 billion for disney. a few moments later i realized that i wasn't and smiled at the perfect timing of the announcement, given the fact that i had spent the night dreaming about the implications of the thesis put forth in the "autumn of the moguls" , which i had finished before falling asleep - that the pathological ambitions of moguls have brought about the impending collapse of the "media business."

michael wolff makes him his most important point early. the modern "media business" is collapsing, because it's not really like any other business - that the word itself, media , is a made up concept. and that along the way, the morons that "architected" the aol time warners, the vivendis and the disneys of the world forgot that the, "...the entire industry is a fluke of semiotics." things started to go bad in the fifties when ad agencies started using the word to describe physical artifacts, such paper or film. one natural leap later the word became added to the saleman's vocabulary, as in "i sell media." notice the change? it went from something concrete to something less concrete. and from there is was twisted to mean all things related, "...to the abstract function of communication." (p.34) and on and on, towards more abstractions such as mcluhan's mantra on the media being the message. until in the 70s you had the emergence of something that hadn't existed before - media companies:

"This was just inflation. A useful bastardization of an already obtuse word. It was a Wall Street thing. We're more important that we were yesterday becaue we're no longer a broadcast company (notice how old fashioned that word sounds), we're a fucking media company.

But at no point in the development of the word and the of the concept of media was there an assumption that the television business and the magazine business and the radio business and billboard busines and music business and the movie business were the same business - that they should be run by the same person, that they required the same talents, or would, even, logically have the same investors or the same stars or the same audience." (p. 35)

it takes a little while for that to sink in, because we're so accustomed to thinking of "media" as an abstract concept that's merely packaged in different ways and sent along different distribution channels - cable or broadcast television, print or the internet. it doesn't even strike us that this might be an overextended metaphor that might be a trick of language. but it wasn't so long ago that the idea of a media company was considered absurd. wolff tells the story of a memo circulating in the new york times in the early seventies, "...advising reporters and editors that, in fact, there was no such thing as the media per se.." and that basically you were a lazy schmuck for using the word. it still seems odd, though, you might think. maybe wolff is pulling the old philosophical trick of "proving" that something doesn't exist that you know damn well does, in fact, exist. wolff finally beats you over the head with a reductio ad absurdum :

"It's as ridiculous as if someone had come along and invented the "transportation" business and, within the same company and under the same management, because they were all somehow related to the same word, put car companies and train companies and ship companies and airlines together." (p.35)

and yet the moguls - murdoch, isaacson, eisner, redstone, karmazin and diller et al, glossed over this, didn't understand, or didn't care - and went on building dysfunctional, disjointed, hollow, creaking empires held together only by the inertia of the next big deal. on and on, it went from one deal to another until things starting breaking down, with aol time warner and vivendi only being the most obvious effects of the underlying symptom [ he goes on at great length about the decaying carcass called disney, waiting to be devoured by the next big deal, if not for michael eisner's own obsessive mogul freakishness ] - that there really isn't anything synergistic about a vast media empire. and sooner or later, wolff believes sooner, the whole charade will come completely and totally flying apart.

in wolff's world each bigger deal is not a sign of the strength of super-consolidated media corporations, but rather the last dying gasps of an industry based on something that doesn't even exist. a giant bubble that has been expanding for over 30 years.

i don't know if it's true, and the book certainly has its flaws, but go read "autumn of the moguls" and you'll find the latest big media deal a whole lot more interesting. or sad.

updated: while he might not agree with the above reasoning, tim oren more succinctly states the premise in "Comcast / Disney: Dumb and Dumber":

"Let's keep this short and sweet. Anyone thinking they are going to merge a content business and a network transport business and add value hasn't been paying attention for at least ten years. "

bulleted

• Cory's etcon notes [ "Google AdWords is a Blue Book for words, eBay is a Blue Book for everything. Graph AdWords pricing for tech-related words against the sale of books on the same subject and they correlate" ]
• Selling people to each other, redux [ "User contributions are the key to market dominance." ]
• PHP Mapping and Visualization Resources
• total credit market debt as a percentage of GDP [ is that an upward trend? ]
• technorati top products [ i bought kris the Extraordinary Chickens 2004 Wall Calendar ]
• Google: The Reverse eBay

bulleted

• Technorati Keyword Search
• Apple responds to complaints over Panther-only Safari upgrade [ due to increased os/browser integration ]
• Failing Miserably, If Not Inventively [ "...desperate attempts to scratch a bothersome itch." ]
• calpundit follows the gw awol papertrail
• branding firefox
• Introduction to the Firebird Database

on mozilla firefox [ and thunderbird ]

while some people of a certain age may have reservations about the new name given a clint eastwood movie of the same name, the fine folks at mozilla have released the successor to firebird - firefox. a word to the wise, if you're on os x. export your bookmarks from your existing firebird/phoenix/whatever profile and delete the profile directory. i followed the install instructions and disabled extensions and firefox appeared to start-up fine, but icons were missing in the nav bar, tabbed browsing didn't work, the scroll bars didn't appear on long pages etc etc. amusingly, it took me awhile to track down my bookmarks because it never occured to me that they would be in an old "phoenix" profile. after i backed-up the bookmarks and deleted the old profile everything is a-o-k. better than just o.k. actually. firefox is noticeably peppier than its predecessor in terms of start-up, windowing and page rendering. oh yeah - and if you delete your existing profile os x will default back to thinking that safari is your default browser, so then you have to remember that you have to change your default browser preference from within safari's preference instead of a "control panel" preference where it should be. nice

i just noticed that thunderbird 0.5 is also available. i guess i've got one more new thing to play with.

bulleted: on voip codecs

• openh323: Codec Bandwidth and Latency Calculations
• cisco: Voice Over IP - Per Call Bandwidth Consumption
• Voice over IP bandwidth requirements
• packetizer: VoIP Bandwidth Calculator

on virtual hanging chads

despite some of scepticism regarding voting via the internet i did just that today by voting online in the michigan democratic caucus. amusingly, the online form had a bug in the "write-in" text fields that followed a set of radio buttons. the first "write-in" field was for the candidate and the second "write-in" field was for which party you were affiliated with - i.e. if you don't want to select a candidate or party-affiliation from the selected radio buttons, then you get to fill in a custom answer in the "write-in" field with each text field having a corresponding radio button. i discovered, that if you clicked on the radio button associated with the second "write-in" and then tried to select the text field, the form would deselect your selection for the candidate, making it appear that you didn't select a candidate. after much cussing at the computer screen, kris informed me that it would work if you didn't select the second radio button and simply clicked on the test field.

maybe it was a firebird glitch and the website did ask you to verify the selections after you submitted the form, but nonetheless i'm sure grandma would be confused.

i know. i know.

i'm working on overhauling the rss script to deal with the 'bulleted' items. so maybe stripping all html tags wasn't such a good idea.

bulleted

• mozilla and firebird web developer extensions
• the stovepipe [ documents the effects of bush administration and intelligence community conflicts]
• social circles [ mailing list social visualization ]
• khtml2png [ create PNGs of webpages. dont' ask. ]
• a new kind of science [ wolfram's opus online ]
• howard's end [ wherein neel shouts, ""I want to blog!""
• dell linux blog [ hello? is anyone at the mothership listening? ]
• getting cellular with linux [ kannel and/or SMS Server Tools to be heard from later ]

AIM Video Debuts, Links to iChat

hey, wasn't i just talking about apple screwing third party audio developers to protect their interests in ichat? in completely unrelated news, aim and ichat are getting cozier.

bulleted

• gush [ rss+jabber ]
• swipe toolkit [ decode your barcode ]
• Tinkering with modified WRT54G firmware
• Atom API Update
• An Introduction to FOAF
• Having some copyright fun with GarageBand
• jimmy carter's blog
• address-o-sync [ share/sync your Apple Address Book on your Rendezvous network ]

another day, another halliburton scandal

halliburton is in the news again; this time they are being investigated for paying a $180-million bribe in nigeria while vice-president dick cheney was running the show.

curiously, the u.s. press is silent , at least according to news.google.

apple screws 3rd party audio developers

i like apple for the most part. i work in a heterogeneous world, but by-and-large, i enjoy my ibook and tend to stick with it through the good times and the bad. but i'm not a zealot and there are times when apple needs to get its head out of its corporate ass. take, for instance, its practice of screwing 3rd party audio application developers . presumably it's in some incomprehensible way meant to protect apple's interests in ichat [ i know i'm simplifying the situation, but bear with me ], but it really, really rubs me the wrong way. xten has developed a great cross-platform sip-client , which happens to suck on a mac because the sound quality issues.

of course, your average mac user wil probably blame xten because ichat works just fine. sigh

bulleted

• BlueFOAF: discover nearby friends with Bluetooth
• SmartBook 1.0.1 [ "Smart Groups are to the Address Book what Smart Playlists are to iTunes" ]
• FoF + MT = reBlog
• iChat Knows Where I Am

bulleted

• inkscape: open source svg for the masses
• mac tips and tricks
• tim bray on term sheets
• how to manage smart people

wow. there's a first time for everything - updated

up until yesterday, i couldn't have told you who was in the superbowl, since i didn't seem to inherit the gene that compels one to get excited about football. however, there wasn't anything on teevee so i decided to check out the superbowl ads [ lame ]. much to my surprise, i actually found myself engaged by the game. kris is looking at me suspicously.

02.02.2004 update: well, apparently i wasn't as engaged as i thought, since i apparently missed all the good stuff.