Flutterby™! From 2009-03-01 to 2009-03-31

Asha recently finished a big multi-year project. She put together a salad cookbook. She made up the recipes. Her mother did the photography. I did the book layout. We used Lulu.com (no link-love - read on) to print test copies. Lulu provides an amazing service - one-off bound, full-color books at about 20 cents a page. Amazon CreateSpace has a similar program but it's geared around actually publishing though them (they assign an ISBN and list it on Amazon).

So I ordered a stack of books the other day and failed to check the shipping address. Like so many modern web store front ends, it remembers my last shipping address and automatically fills that in (but I don't remember it asking me if it was OK). The last time I ordered, Asha was doing a series of workshops in the Southeast, so the books were drop-shipped to an address in Alabama. So guess where Lulu is sending this order?

But wait, this is Print-on-Demand. They haven't even printed the books, much less actually shipped them. So changing the ship-to address should be an easy database change. After two tries to get customer service to respond, here's what they said:

I am sorry but we have an automated system that does not allow us to change the shipping address once the order starts fulfilling and is sent to our print partner. We do not have control over the order at this point and are unable to make changes. I am sorry that we will not be able to accomodate your request.

So they have an amazing 21st Century printing system with a circa 1950s fulfillment database. WTF?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Photography Software Engineering Graphic Design Machinery Databases ]

Sometimes you need a human touch. In Huffington Post, we see a story about some prominant football players lost at sea, and how the Coast Guard found the overturned boat with one person clinging to it. Very sad. Then at the bottom, an automated ad for affordable boat charters from Ft. Meyer Florida. Perhaps there is still a need for editors.

[ related topics: Sports Boats ]

Outdoor Love Map - The International Guide to Places to Make Love Outdoors. I'm a bit skeptical about their Bay Area locations so far...

[ related topics: Erotic Nature and environment Bay Area Maps and Mapping ]

The author of "Magic Flute Nudes" has an index of his insightful posts on 2257 issues that photographers, models and artists need to keep in mind.

Here's U.S. Code Title 18 Part I Chapter 110 § 2257

[ related topics: Art & Culture Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

These are AP stories, so they won't be around for long, but I saw 'em flow across the SFGate web site and thought it was an interesting conjunction.

The first was an article about Madoff asking the court to let him keep his penthouse apartment, I've actually seen a couple of articles about how it's either in his wife's name, or was purchased with funds from his legitimate businesses, or other such bullshit.

The second is a little puff piece about how he's relinquishing his theater(re?) tickets to the court.

I don't know which press-releases the AP authors rewrote those few paragraphs from, but I've got a theory, and I think it's a fascinating look at prosecutor leaks a story, Madoff's attorneys and PR folks read the story, and drop a press release from the other side.

Laws, sausages and headlines...

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Marriage Real Estate ]

A while back, I linked to this Reason article on a World Bank report on why a worker from Mexico can come to the United States and be worth so much more. The quote I pulled was:

The rest is the result of "intangible" factors-such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries."

I've gotten to wondering, though, as we see Wall Street exposed as the nest of liars and thieves that it is, how much of that "rule of law" that we thought we had was an illusion? Are we, indeed, going to continue to be more productive because we have well defined cultural rules and restrictions on what we do and don't do to each other, or were we just managing to hide our corruption and sleaze better than the Mexico politicians and business people, and we're now destined to have factories that are as productive per person as they are?

Somewhat relatedly, it also occurred to me that the "get rich quick slowly" people, from Ben Stein to Robert Kiyosaki, have been pushing the "save and reinvest" notion, where the investors who've made lots of money gambling, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, have been quietly espousing the "bet on the odd incident that goes against the popular wisdom" direction.

Wonder what the ratio of Taleb's wealth to Kiyosaki's is. I wonder which one's happier. I have no idea what the take-away from those musings is.

[ related topics: moron Sociology Current Events Work, productivity and environment Civil Liberties Currency Gambling Economics Archival ]

Sometimes you're working on a Linux platform, maybe it's an ARM, maybe it's an Atmel ARM like an AT91SAM9261 or AT91SAM9XE or AT91SAM9RL, and you want to bang some bits but don't want to write a kernel module to do that. Your applications are running as root, and the dog-eared pages of "Linux Device Drivers" seems to suggest that even though the ARM ports are memory mapped, you request access to them via ioperm() or iopl() and then read and write to them with insl() and outsl(), but just requesting access is always failing.

The correct answer is use mmap() on /dev/mem. And all is right with the world.

[ related topics: Free Software Hardware Hackery Open Source Embedded Devices ]

Tom mentioned the Aquapeutics Luxury Steam Shower Model: U6810. Frankly, it rather scares me, but it does look like a cross between the art direction of the second set of Star Wars with vague H.R. Giger undertones.

[ related topics: Art & Culture Real Estate ]

Blessed Christian Salt, if you have a need for Kosher salt, but don't want to be reminded of those pesky food laws... uh... outmoded traditions of an obsolete culture.

They don't say what the refining process is, other than that it's "100% natural sea salt", but frankly, I'm guessing that this is just a product of Judaism repackaged to make it palatable to a wider audience. Cough.

AP article here

[ related topics: Religion Humor Food ]

Apparently Linux installed on machines like the Dell netbooks is making those guys in the black and white vans nervous: Tempers Flare as Recession Creeps into Tech Industry

Also I didn't know, the fewer machines they sell with Windows, the fewer positions in the field they can justify. And he said it so I didn't have to.

"We schedule a technician visit for six months in the future with every home visit. Both they and we know their registries and computers will be messed up again by then."

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Race ]

Michael Lewis goes to Iceland to muse about their financial system's collapse. There were three things about this that caught my attention, two of which revolve around

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.)

First: As the value of home prices falls back to the historical range, how far from 850% are we?

Second: He keeps an "aren't these Icelanders amusing?" stereotyping tone that allows us as readers to keep a bit of distance between their follies and our own. I'm not sure if he's being dense, or subtle.

Third: His comments on what makes fishing profitable got some more gears churning about capitalism.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

Marty Ryall, campaign manager for Elizabeth Dole, talks about why they ran the "Godless" ad against Kay Hagan. Via Rafe.

Giggle: "So, are you a practicing heterosexual, or are you just slightly attracted to the opposite sex?" (YouTube video). Via Living Sexuality, which also linked to Social Signal on "recommendations" services

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Humor Erotic Sexual Culture Movies Video ]

Anybody remember the CueCat, that cute kitty that would have us all reading magazines like Wired or Parade at our workstation and merrily scanning barcodes? Now, while this gadget has no scanner, I feel a strange sense of Deja vu....

[ related topics: Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Bizarre ]

I'm not quite sure how these two things are related, but when I ran across this article on doctors asking patients to sign EULAs that prevent them from reviewing the doctor online (which is pretty fluffy and a press release for RateMDs.com), the side of me that took it seriously thought of several discussions with people in the medical profession I've had about getting good information on doctors. How when you can find a complaint filed against them with the appropriate state agencies that means things are really really really bad, because the "protect our own" attitude is as strong in doctors as it is between police officers.

And then I ran across this article about an Oakland police officer's ties with Yusuf Bey IV, a business man and community leader who's most likely responsible for the murder of journalist Chauncey Baily, and I thought about the issues of that poor cop being friends with anyone, and got a little insight into the "protect your own" attitude.

[ related topics: Health Bay Area Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Community ]

Hacker Spaces - They are trying to assemble one of these in Atlanta, they are looking for space (2500+ sqft). It hits a chord, I really wanted to do this with the upstairs of the Virtual Building. The listing is interesting. Locations in Huntsville, Nashville... Maybe GeekLabs will be resurrected as a HackerSpace someday?

[ related topics: Bay Area Space & Astronomy ]

A couple of giggles and some peeks into a different world: Bruce Haley's Tao of War Photography:

57. (Also: if the soldiers you are accompanying believe that to die a martyr’s death admits them instantly to Paradise, while you believe that to die a war photographer’s death probably just hurts a lot, these irreconcilable differences should give you pause for reflection).......

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography History ]

Overheard on Twitter:

'God is somewhere inside the question: "Is there a god? "'

From Anslem Hook

[ related topics: Religion ]

From FailBlog: Verizon "New Math":

[ related topics: Humor Mathematics ]

I just "discovered" FailBlog and have been constantly cleaning the coffee off my monitor... I uploaded one of my favorite juxtaposition "fails" from Chattanooga:

Then I got on Google to check the street view. Looks like the guys driving the camera van either were very sleepy or they stopped at Starbucks for a coffee... Follow the street view out to Gunbarrel Road and back...

[ related topics: Photography Chattanooga Maps and Mapping ]

Change We Can Believe In: How About the End of Farmers Markets? Say Hello to H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (Via).

[ related topics: Food Economics ]

Change We Can Believe In: How About the End of Farmers Markets? Say Hello to H.R. 875: Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 (Via).

[ related topics: Food Economics ]

Eros Blog: Porn and freedom of thought:

I never want to find myself — whether on Earth or in Hades — beginning a lament that starts like this:

“First they came for the pornographers, and I was silent, because I wasn’t much of a pornographer.”

And on that note, we saw Milk on Friday night. I felt a bit let down, it was not quite documentary and not quite drama, but was still a light peek into a bit of history that it's easy to forget.

[ related topics: Erotic Privacy Sexual Culture Weblogs Heinlein Civil Liberties Woodworking ]

Special shout out to Chris on this one: Zack and friends are updating My Home Your Home - Dropbox, musings on small houses and alternative architecture.

[ related topics: Architecture Real Estate ]

Speaking of pieces of history that are easy to forget, on Saturday Charlene and I went down to the restored Nike missile site down in the Marin Headlands. On the first Saturdays of the month they have volunteer docents who are mostly guys who served on such sites, and the reminder that "we believed that the Russians were coming over the border at any moment" made the whole experience more real and relevant.

Also very cool was looking at some of the mechanical computing systems and talking with the guys about what they knew of the targeting computers. Trig was done with these huge mechanical devices that, alas, I couldn't peek inside, but because the guy showing me that bit referred to them as "pots", I assume that they were basically analog lookup tables. They had another device open that had a set of gears and cams wired to switches and, of course, gobs of vacuum tubes.

Get an approximate bearing and range from the scanning radar, turn the radar which tracked an individual target towards that, get the elevation, bearing and range from that as analog signals, feed that back into the lookup devices with the appropriate offsets from where the launcher was relative to the radar, broadcast that data forward into the missile. They weren't tracking inbound flights to SFO with the individual radar, but they did have the scanning radar spinning 'round, they cycled the launcher, and we rode the lift down into the hangar.

Telstar Logistics has some good pictures and a write-up.

[ related topics: Photography Aviation Bay Area History Pedal Power Archival Furniture ]

\Why I am pro choice: "A senior Vatican cleric has defended the excommunication of the mother and doctors of a nine-year-old girl who had an abortion in Brazil after being raped."

The regional archbishop, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, pronounced excommunication for the mother for authorising the operation and doctors who carried it out for fear that the slim girl would not survive carrying the foetuses to term.

It should also be noted that the man who raped her was not excommunicated. Via, via. Seems to me that the abortion discussion can be reduced to looking at when we have responsibilities to other humans: when do ethics require me to put my life in danger to attempt to save another life? I wish that people like Archibishop Sobrinho were forced by circumstance to answer that question regularly and publicly. I expect the answers would expose some hypocrisy.

[ related topics: Religion Sexual Culture Ethics Current Events ]

Holy crap, can this possibly be right? According to this press release, "BMW Group U.S. Division Reports February Sales",, BMW sold ten 7 series BMWs in the U.S. in February, 33 in January and February, compared with 1,502 and 2,212 last year.

[ related topics: Current Events Automobiles Economics ]

I've used the remark that Perl is "write once", even snickered about Jamie Zawinski's famous line:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

I've cursed coming back to code that looks like @{$self->{-list}} that worked when I wrote it, but now needs enhancement, praised Python for various features, asked why I'm bothering with those slow interpreted languages when C++ with Boost allows most of what I want, and yet, when I need to get something running fast, I find myself returning again to Perl.

So, a bunch of programming links stolen from and inspired by recent new activity over at Genehack.

• Moose is a better object system for Perl. The Moose is Flying (part 1) and part 2 look like decent intros. No notion on performance, but my current diddling about is restructuring Flutterby.net away from MediaWiki, and so that the HTML gets regenerated less often.
• PerlySense is code completion for Perl and Emacs. I was all excited about pycomplete and emacs Python completion, but, once again, when I needed to do something it was Perl that bubbled up, not Python.
• Sepia (Simple Emacs Perl Integration ties PerlySense and debugging and interaction with Emacs into Emacs.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Perl Open Source Invention and Design Software Engineering Python ]

We need a Daily Show takedown of MSNBC advice style look at the histories of the economists who are currently guiding the boondoggle bailout. If an economist in the past decade or so used any phrase suggesting that the economy was strong or based in any sort of reality, they need to be publicly humiliated and driven out of the business.

[ related topics: History Economics ]

Via MJ Rose, comes Roxer, online web page editing. I'm one of those "never give out the password to my website" folks, I also thought that Blogger was going to fail because nobody would ever hand out that sort of access information to a third party, and I haven't dug into this too deeply yet, but it seems like this might be a good answer to the "how do I make a website?" question that we all get asked.

[ related topics: Web development ]

Argh. QuickTime wants me to install a 64 bit version, but I can't find it for download (and I need to be careful to not install the iTunes crap), and the Java update just hornswoggled me into downloading the Yahoo toolbar.

Why can't all operating systems be as easy to use as Ubuntu?

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

Reader's Digest has a "must read" entry on Snopes.com. If they actually print this in the magazine, it could do more to reduce rumor-foward-spam than anything in the history of the web... Of course, there are other theories about Snopes:

[ related topics: Spam Comics ]

Are some contracts more binding than others? Would a contract written in blood carry more weight than one written in ink? Apparently not. (courtesy of The Volokh Conspiracy)

[ related topics: Business Law Bizarre ]

French Gendarmerie migrates to Open Source:

In 2007 the Gendarmerie decided to replace even the desktop operating system. Guimard: "Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority."

Via, via. I know that a few days ago a friend gave me an Epson scanner. There are no drivers for Vista 64, and there are reported issues with the regular Vista drivers. Linux worked out of the box. I expect this trend to continue: Unless Windows 7 changes a lot, the trend is that Linux will easier to use and support more hardware, not just that it'll be more stable and easier to admin.

[ related topics: Free Software Microsoft Open Source Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Atheist group and church battle with dueling bus advertisements:

Madison Metro spokesman Mick Rusch said any ad sales help the bus system.

[ related topics: Religion Public Transportation ]

Building a butterfly leaf style dining room table with two pair of wings. (Thread at TalkFestool, thread at Festool Owner's Group.

[ related topics: Furniture Woodworking Festool ]

Argh. Decaf for me tomorrow, I'm running a boatload of patch wires on surface mount boards. I need to rework my soldering workstation so that I'm not hunched over...

[ related topics: Dan's Life ]

Pfysician pfunded by Pfizer pfaked his data. Anesthesiologist Scott Reuben faked the data in at least 21 papers, and the pain drugs he was pushing in them may have actually slowed healing:

Paul White, another editor at the journal, estimates that Reuben's studies led to the sale of billions of dollars worth of the potentially dangerous drugs known as COX2 inhibitors, Pfizer's Celebrex (celecoxib) and Merck's Vioxx (rofecoxib), for applications whose therapeutic benefits are now in question. Reuben was a member of Pfizer's speaker's bureau and received five independent research grants from the company.

Via.

[ related topics: Drugs Health ]

A week or so ago, I got an e-mail from the "Chattanooga Green Committee" of the mayors office to poke around a new website. ChattanoogaLivesGreen.com. With an evil grin, I set out to test this thing out, and poke a little fun at the "Green" committee by being green, and poking at some sacred cows a little at the same time. I've poked fun at Prius drivers, EPB. Microsoft and my neighborhood without starting a good converation/dialogue, or being kicked off the system. Yet. I must try harder. I must.

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft Spam Invention and Design moron Chattanooga ]

How a marine propeller pattern is made.

[ related topics: Boats Machinery Woodworking ]

Leo looks at why he was unsatisfied with Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers",

Some musings on "Sex and the Singularity" over at ErosBlog does a little bit of musing on the Kurzweil-ian notion of "the singularity", that point when computers and augmented reality will become "powerful" enough that virtual realities and the physical one will become indistinguishable.

Normally such things fly under my radar, but this one gave me a great feeling of 1950s Popular Science, the ones about the future consisting of robot butlers and flying cars with wings: The thing those Utopian prognistications always missed was "why do the robots need us?".

I don't mean "us" as in humanity, we've evolved to be symbiotes with technology and will continue to do so, I mean what will happen that the fundamental struggles of life change to offer up this life of being waited on by the machines? And that's not intended to be some sort of "life is pointless" moan, just a realization that we are, largely, duking it out with limited resources, and though some of these technological advances will give us enough of an edge to offer up a time of relative prosperity, the overall game isn't changing: If you were digging ditches before the backhoe, don't expect to be sipping martinis afterwards.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Robotics Economics ]

When Charles Wilson gave me permission to mirror his PDF on building a butterfly leaf style dining room table with two pair of wings, which I wanted to do for this entry, he said: "As long as you give me a link to your weblog, so I can become one of your readers."

So I figured maybe I should post an update on some of the woodworking I've been doing lately. The first weekend in March I milled a whole boatload of maple down to 3/4" and ripped the rails to 2¼" (resulting bucket o' sawdust) keeping careful track of the longer pieces because I knew I wanted vertical grain continuity. That evening, as I was starting to lay out the grain matching, I realized that I wanted grain continuity in the other dimension. So during the week I milled and ripped a few wider pieces, carefully marking them.

Of course the marking system I initially came up with had problems, so on Saturday I cut the miters on the frame pieces, and laid the whole thing out on the living room floor, re-marked everything, and then cut the mortises (145 of them) and started milling the profile on the inside (the outside gets milled later, when the rest of the frame can provide stability on the table). I figure that's about a thousand passes through the router table.

There are a few bits of tear-out that I hope to patch with... something, either glue and sawdust, or a putty, or somesuch. Yesterday evening we were up in Santa Rosa and stopped at Home Despot on the way back south for some concrete backer-board, and wandered through the kitchen section to look for pulls and handles. I got a chance to look at commercial cabinetry again, which reminded me of how much you can obscure when you go with darker finishes that muddle the grain, and when you don't care about the grain matching.

And I think that the sap/heart interface will actually look quite a bit less rustic than that layout on the living roomo floor once the rounded profiles are milled in and the finish is on, but we are very much playing up the grain in this piece.

Similar entry and additional pictures over at the personal blog.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Furniture Woodworking Home Improvement ]

Giggle: Rat Traders:

This following text and pictures illustrate an experiment I undertook that invovlved training laboratory standard rats in trading in the Foreign Exchange and Commodity Futures markets with the effect that I managed to outperform some of the world' s leading Human Fund managers.

[ related topics: Humor Economics ]

Treatment of peanut allergies by starting out with small doses of peanuts is showing promise (alternate article, alternate article).

I wonder if the recent explosion in food allergies might be related to the harm that obsessive cleanliness seems to be doing on other fronts, like asthma and such. Seems like kids these days need to be eating more dirt.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Health Food Television ]

Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) speaks truth on the AIG situation:

"I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Grassley said. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.

"And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

And confidence in the economy will return when Westport and Greenwich are ghost towns, with dangling feet visible through the windows of the mansions.

[ related topics: Economics ]

Scott Rosenberg: Berkeley J-School’s Chronicle panel: The horse-and-buggy set’s lament. With newspapers falling right and left, there's been a bunch of speculation about the future of news. There's been a kerfluffle over a proposed asphalt plant just south of Petaluma, and among the many laments about the situation is that the EIR and proposal for this seems to have been noticed only after the process was well under way:

How many people that you know actually READ the legal notices in the newspapers? Or go in every couple of weeks and ask the nice person at the library reference desk if they have any interesting new EIRs?

and the answer, of course, is WTF do we have a local paper for if not to do that?

The "journalists" have failed, and their institutions are dying because of that. The question is not "how do we save newspapers?", or even "how do we save news?", the question is "what are we going to build to replace those failures?"

[ related topics: Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media ]

Well worth a read: Interview with an artist: Jock Sturges, on his working style, working with models, and his persecutions by the U.S. Federal Government back in 1990:

When I went back to Europe in the midst of this investigation, I was avoiding a lot of compositional angles that I thought might be problematic, something I had never done before. My wife caught me doing this; she caught me crossing legs and on a few occasions even throwing towels on people. She told me to stop and said that I was effectively instructing my models in shame. Doing this was granting the forces assailing me an immediate victory – something they in no way deserved. She was right. I stopped. I have never sought to alter what I have done since.

Some good observations on life, working with models, and art in general. via Magic Flute Nudes.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Law Art & Culture ]

Philip Greenspun: How Rich Countries Die, in which he looks at The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, by Mancur Olson. The comments are interesting, I've been mulling this one for a few days, but then John Robb linked to it and quoted extensively.

[ related topics: Quotes Economics ]

I just discovered how fast my new Windows machine rips CDs, so I'm feeding it discs occasionally. I wish that the Windows Media Player MP3 compressor was better than it is, but at 384k/sec it sounds okay on the hardware I've got (at the defaults it was atrocious, even on the little 4" high speakers I've got).

What I'm totally amazed at is the lack of data quality on the CD recognition. I mean, it's one thing to miss Kitten on the Keys - Kitty Muffins or The Incredibles wrap party soundtrack CD, but it's quite another to be missing disc one of Woodstock Two altogether, or the track names on the Slatkin / St. Louis Symphony recording of La Mer.

I'm not sure I've got any particular thesis here, it's just weird to find both holes in public data, and places where my tastes are so niche that I'm the first person to go there.

[ related topics: Music Microsoft Invention and Design Journalism and Media Burlesque ]

AVWeb reports, with video, on the flight of the Terrafugia Transition roadable aircraft (Direct YouTube link).

[ related topics: Cool Science Aviation Current Events Video ]

Great graphic of who owns which organic brand (Via)

AIG Chairman spouts idiocies:

"No one knows better than I that AIG has been the recipient of generous amounts of governmental financial aid. We have been the beneficiary of the American people's forbearance and patience," Liddy said. But he also said that "we have to continue managing our business as a business — taking account of the cold realities of competition for customers, for revenues and for employees."

"Continue", Edward Liddy? That's the freakin' point: You could go down to the local Starbucks and get people who'd be making better corporate financial decisions. You need to start managing your business as a business, rather than as a bigger version of a street corner 3 card monte game.

Although, as John S.J. Anderson points out:

is wondering why/who wants me distracted by outrage over !AIG bonuses (it's <0.1% of the total $$$ FFS...) what else is going on? !cynicism

[ related topics: Games Work, productivity and environment ]

The discussion in Frank Simpson's notes about the Dutra asphalt plant proposed for just south of Petaluma has taken an interesting turn, and this morning Frank linked to Leonard Pitts Jr: As newspapers die, expect no mourning from the crooks. I'm also currently listening to the podcast of Monday's Talk of the Nation which is addressing the death of the Rocky Mountain News, albeit without a whole lot of insight. One interesting note was an email from Bruce in Tucson who described his relationship with the Arizona Daily Star, which offers the online version for free. He ditched the paper version to keep down the clutter. He pays $4/month for the PDF version, but he reads the online HTML version because it's more convenient for him.

Back in the early '90s, Mike Harrison and I sat in the office of some exec at either the Chattanooga Times or the Chattanooga News-Free Press. It may not matter which one it was, they were on the inexorable slide towards becoming one paper. We laid out a vision of the future that was remarkably prescient. The poor guy did what newspaper guys are doing today: He said that he didn't see the business model, and we should come back with a revenue generating proposal. Frankly, we didn't see how to figure out how he could make money either, so we went off and built what we knew how to build.

But I think there are two things here: First, in that period when news has been tanking, we've been hearing more and more about how the real money is in the pictures of crying widows and celebrity news. Maybe that crap is finally catching up with the newspaper guys. Or maybe, because they're largely advertiser funded, newspapers have been out chasing that audience because advertisers like stupid people who'll buy crap, and now they're coming whining to the rest of us when we put up our hands and step back.

At any rate, the second issue is the one raised by Bruce in Tucson: We'll pay for news. Gladly! (Yeah, $4/month isn't lots, but it's a start) But we need news, not just crap that drags in eyeballs for advertisers, and we need it in a convenient package. It's not like the hints aren't here...

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Chattanooga Pop Culture ]

Lewis Alexander, Citigroup’s chief economist, leaving to join U.S. Treasury as assistant to Timothy Geithner (Via). I'm speechless.

[ related topics: moron Economics ]

Confessions of a Fireworks Man: Cremora Fireballs. Looks like it might be something to put together come July. It also linked to Making High Powered Black Powder

[ related topics: Weblogs Pyrotechnics ]

Australia is joining China in its crackdown on Internet freedoms, including banning sites like WikiLeaks and fining sites that link to banned sites AU$11,000 a day. Especially chilling is the feeling that it's too dangerous for people to know what they're being protected from:

"No one interested in cyber safety would condone the leaking of this list," Senator Conroy said.

"Can't happen here", you say? Think that the First Amendment keeps us safe because we can read books here that are banned in other nominally civilized countries like Canada? An organization called CP80.com is trying to get ICANN to get into the filtering business (and lest you have any questions about the evil these folks are up to, the leader of this is also the head of the SCO Group). You can submit comments about allowing religious fundamentalists a seat at ICANN specifically so that they can control content on the Internet here. I think it'd be worth your time to make some comment on this.

[ related topics: Religion Business Books Bay Area Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Net Culture ]

QOTD: user "kang" at SE entry about a kindler, gentler Alien vs Predator:

I just now realized how inappropriate a name like Dateline is for a news show about sex predators trying to hook up with kids.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Quotes Sexual Culture Movies Current Events ]

A link from Reason: The San Francisco Bay Guardian is afraid the San Francisco Chronicle will be closed by the Hearst interests. So they propose this:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who is asking the Justice Department to relax anti-competitive rules on newspaper ownership (a bad idea), should instead push legislation barring a daily newspaper in a one-paper town from closing down unless and until the owners offer it for sale at a fair price and give someone else a chance to run it. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer should join her.

So, you should be forced to stay in business, or sell it to the first comer. Interesting idea.

[ related topics: Bay Area Journalism and Media Law Enforcement California Culture ]

Todays Dilbert strikes a chord. We've been comparing a current project of mine to some competitors systems and literally asking random people to perform some basic tasks in each. ie: Find customer, take payment. change services.. As we do this, we realize how obfuscated and abstract the other systems are. Now I understand why. (laughing..) It's also an interesting way to check a users manual, "normal" people ask questions that we don't think of addressing.

[ related topics: Gambling ]

I was in Copperfield's recently and, with the buzz over the movie bringing out all of the fans, I picked up a copy of The Watchmen. I read it last night, and I think I'm disappointed.

A good portion of that is simply that in the two decades since the comic was written the general story line has become somewhat trite. We've put madmen like J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy into their historical roles, and understand the Reagan years in the contexts of those who profess love of an ideal and will destroy the individuals who comprise that ideal in order to maintain the purity of it. We as a larger society may not have learned much from it, but the smaller circle of people who comprise my world the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, for instance, the post-mortems which attempt to compensate for the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands with "at least sectarian strife is better than living under a dictatorship", can be looked at with sort of a detached amusement. We've seen enough exploration of how people do evil under the guise of doing good that when the comic about the "Hell-bound ship" that runs as the back-story to various panels and characters is re-constructed (warning, big spoilers), it all feels rather flat and dry. What at first appears to be depth is just that the stories have been interleaved.

I've seen various essays examining Rorschach up as an example of an Objectivist hero, and while I think that's simplistic and goes too far I do appreciate that he's the one who both apparently thinks the least of humanity, yet also trusts the rightness of humans making their own informed decisions. Even there, however, I think this tale ended up with a caricature rather than a character.

Not a bad tale, but not one that I feel explored the soul nearly to the depths of The Dark Night, let alone Sandman.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Movies Writing Current Events Machinery ]

I was searching for an article on vasectomy rates being up with the economy down:

"We were doing 40 to 45 a week, and then it went to 70 to 75 each week," he said. "Some patients were concerned about losing their insurance, but it seems to me more of it is the idea of 'I can't commit myself to raising another child in uncertain times.' "

But ran across various news that Rep. Karen Camper, D-Memphis, wanted to insert "nothing in this constitution secures or protects a right to vasectomy" into the state constitution, in a bill that meant to add language like that about abortion. Good on yer, Ms. Camper.

And on that note, when are we going to drop gender from our honorifics?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Health Law Current Events Civil Liberties Economics ]

Figures of Grace: More Thoughts on 2257

[ related topics: Sexual Culture - U.S. Code Title 18 Section 2257 ]

Jon Grepstad has a lot of information on photography, including a book on building your own view camera and the building your own view camera FAQ that includes information on sizes and offsets of film holders and ground glass. He also links to Doug Bardell on building your own bellows, and Doug Bardell's pages have other notes of interest to large format photography experimenters.

[ related topics: Books Photography ]

I've got a couple of picture frame clamps on back-order to get to the next stage on the cabinet doors, but I'm also interested in the Cam Clamp Miter Clamps. Apparently they put a bit of a hole in the outer edge of the work piece, but since I'm going to route a profile on afterwards anyway, that may not matter. Via.

[ related topics: Woodworking ]

53 Playboy vintage playboy issues, for viewing with Microsoft Silverlight. The MeFi thread points out that not even naked women, insightful interviews and fantastic literature cannot sell Silverlight to the masses.

[ related topics: Microsoft Nudity ]

How to develop film using coffee and vitamin C powder. Hat tip.

[ related topics: Photography Cool Science ]

Mackenab: Why I Oppose the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)…

[ related topics: Politics Work, productivity and environment ]

On Saturday, a friend took me out around the track a few times at Infineon raceway. We were in a run group with about 60 cars, most of 'em seemed to be Corvette, BMW 5 series, Audi S and RS, MINI Cooper S, with an exotic or two. 60 cars on that track was a little crowded, so apparently we weren't going terribly fast, but I didn't notice the speed for its lack.

I have a new appreciation for the physical side of auto racing: Yeah, 1G lateral may not be too much, but getting slammed back and forth in the S turns can take a toll on a body.We were out for just under 20 minutes, and between the adrenaline and the physical aspects, that was just about right.

[ related topics: Dan's Life Automobiles ]

Various people I know are becoming disillusioned with the education diploma industry. I know that Eric took many issues mentioned in the following to heart when he was choosing his career path, but Should You Go To Grad School looks at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go and extends that out to Computer Science.

[ related topics: Education ]

Miniatur Wonderland, a huge model railroad layout in Germany. Video tour of the layout.

[ related topics: Trains Toys Video ]

command line fu (.com), including best command lines sorted by votes

When I last revamped the Flutterby.com CSS I learned everything about the various glitches and incompatibilities in all the browsers to provide pixel perfect positioning to freakin' everything. I've forgotten all that. Last night I wrote a bunch of Perl to get Flutterby.net off of MediaWiki and into static files, so it'd serve faster. I want some stupid simple CSS to:

1. Give me a side-bar for "what links to this page", and probably some basic high level nav stuff (ie: top page, a few categories).
2. Give me a top bar of "subsections in this page".
3. Give me floating pictures with captions.

And I want this whole process to be quick and dead simple. That last one seems to be the hardest, I can easily steal some floating column code for the first two. I can add additional nested <div> s if I have to, but I'd really rather just do this with a couple of <div> s with class names. Any leads? Do I need to just buy Dori and Tom's new book?

The important bit here is "minimal cognitive load". If I can spend less time tweaking my Perl than I have writing this entry, that'd be good.

[ related topics: Web development Perl ]

Zack just dropped me a line, he's looking for summer work in between semesters. He's got art-type computer skills, including some animation and editing chops, he's been doing some electrical stuff (he specifically mentions "electrician's lackey" as a desired role), and I think he's been diddling with Arduino boards. So I'm keeping an eye out for summer jobs for him, see if we can lure him back to the Bay Area for a few months.

But he's also off to either Holland or Denmark next year. Anyone in either of those vicinities? Sean? If you might be close, drop me a line and I'll offer up some more specifics, see if I can get a meetup going.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Animation Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture California Culture ]

Dear Lazy Web, for a while I was trying to keep up with OpenID, but after a while the absurdity and silliness just got to be too damned much. I know that 1.1 is now deprecated, 2.0 is deployed, 2.something fixes some allegedly heinous issues, and I have no idea what people in the wild are running. In migrating away from MediaWiki on Flutterby.net, I'll also be giving up the OpenID plug-in, and since I've logged into some stuff using it I should probably keep that URL live.

I need two things:

1. What's the simplest way to put together a CGI OpenID login in Perl? Prefer "download this tar package into a directory, edit 'login.cgi' to add your password, point your browser to the login.cgi" style.
2. What's the line I put in the headers of the document at my OpenID address that I point to that with?

[ related topics: Perl Open Source Theater & Plays Sports ]

Over on Petaluma360 I made some comments about both the failure of local news sources, and how cool it would be to be getting information from the local police and fire departments, to answer questions like "why was that helicopter circling the east side the other day?". This led to a few email exchanges, and last night I went to the Petaluma Municipal Technology and Telecommunications Advisory Comittee meeting.

It was interesting, there were really two things on the agenda, the first was a look at the changing state laws on cable television franchising, the second was talking about Sonic.net deploying WiFi over various regions of the town. There were, from comments emailed to the clerk, a few people watching online, but aside from the commission and the city employee making the presentations, it was me and one other guy who came in later to make some comments about the WiFi stuff.

I did learn a few things, and this morning was searching around for info on RSS feeds for public services information when I stumbled across this notice that Indian Police discover RSS Hindu Terror Cell which was pretending to be Muslim‏s. I know there have been some religious wars over this, but I had no idea. I mean, I rather prefer that Atom has a better spec, but I never considered that syndication formats might result in terrorism.

On a different note, anyone know of people pulling data out of Accela? That was one of the potential data sources mentioned. I'm not sure what the details are, but it'd be nice to know when new construction is being proposed for my neighborhood, for instance...

[ related topics: Content Management Technology and Culture Current Events Law Enforcement ]

user "pourmecoffee" on Twitter:

On all these "Ask The President" sites, I would like to see "WTF?" voted as permanent #1. Never not appropriate.

Hat-tip.

Baracks teleprompter's blog has a couple of small snorts in it like:

Pete is loading the answers in me right now, and I have to tell you, they are great answers, because unlike the real town halls, Big Guy doesn't have to make the effort of walking, talking and reading at the same time. So the answers are long, convoluted and filled with arcana that really highlight the depth of Big Boy's knowledge of just about anything.

I think I mentioned that I went to the most recent meeting of the Petaluma Technology and Telecommunications Advisory Committee, just to see what my local government was up to, and to see what additional information I could figure out how to extract and publish from city operations. The advisory committees, so far as I can tell, have one city council member on them, and the purpose is to have people who know of and have an interest in a field to look at information and filter that back up to the council as a whole. There were some unknown number of people as a television audience (more than one, because email comments came in during the meeting), a city employee who was doing most of the presenting, and me and one other guy (who was there to comment) in the audience. It was interesting, the two main topics (aside from the Petaluma Community Access open house this Saturday) were on how the rate structure for cable television right-of-way changes with new state laws, and notes on the free WiFi rollout that Sonic is doing downtown and a few other areas.

I found a bunch of resources online, and I'm trying to figure out how to extract some of that stuff and feed it out into forms that people could use. I thought a first pass would be to extract new building permits into RSS, and then toss them into Yahoo Pipes for geocoding and additional data munging, but the app for tracking building stuff is one of those "Web 2.0" thingies that's mostly JavaScript rather than submit buttons, which is going to make it much harder to suss out how to suck data out.

But some discussions have been started. I'm also looking at DIYCity, a web site devoted to various ways that citizens can be hacking their government and public information services to make everything more useful.

And yesterday, Lyn poitned to Greater Greater Washington looks at Virginia's new rules for subdivision street connectivity which was a look at why cul-de-sacs are out, but there's a lot of other good notes on urban planning and issues there.

[ related topics: Content Management Technology and Culture Television Community Real Estate ]

And, in case you missed it, in the comments to the CSS question, "m" gave a great rundown of his meteorology logging efforts, including a number of cool tools that look to be great ways to do interfacing for people who can use high level scripting languages and don't need to be burdened down with debugging I/O pins and register accesses.

[ related topics: Hardware Hackery Embedded Devices ]

Portraits of a naked Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen have been showing up in various museums. YouTube video of a local news report has this gem about the unflattering picture of a fat Cowen holding his underwear, and another one of him sitting on the toilet:

"... the paintings of Brian Cowen, who's not thought to have posed for the anonymous artist"

And the artist has stepped forward:

A spokesman for the Garda (police) confirmed that the matter was under investigation but did not provide any further details, while local Irish media reported that it was unlikely 35-year-old Conor Casby would be charged.

Charged for what? Littering?

The "naked world leaders" trend seems to be in the air of late: Justine Lai paints pictures of herself having sex with presidents:

In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. ...

(Via) Interesting idea, the paintings themselves don't really live up to the concept.

[ related topics: Politics Sexual Culture Nudity Current Events Art & Culture ]

Pure gold: NY Times, November 5, 1999: Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws, on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall. Particularly amusing are the pull quotes from both the pro and con sides.

[ related topics: Politics Economics ]

Rafe made mention of Mohammad Sephery-Rad, in charge of the Iranian government's computer security, says the reason Iran is switching from Windows to Linux isn't all about money:

"All the software in Iran is copied. There is no copyright law, so everybody uses Microsoft software freely," said the secretary of Iran's High Informatics Council.

"But we cannot continue like this much longer," he said.

And:

"Microsoft is a national security concern. Security in an operating system is an important issue, and when it is on a computer in the government it is of even greater importance," said the official.

[ related topics: Free Software Humor Microsoft Open Source Software Engineering Copyright/Trademark ]

Thomas P. M. Barnett's notes on appearing before the House Armed Services Committee. Worth a read. Via John Robb, who'll be there next Thursday.

[ related topics: Politics ]

Snicker. I figured I should get ahead of the game on some of the electrical rework I've got in play, since we found a little mold this morning which means that I need to get off my butt and put in insulation and crawl space vapor barrier and it'll be easier to put in the insulation if I can tear out and replace the electrical at the same time.

So I went to the "online building permits" page, clicked the "REGISTER" link, filled out my info, was promised an email but that was half an hour ago, so I go back to the page, click "LOGIN", and nothing happens. Then I look down at my status bar and see that the link does:

javascript:function DoNothing(){return false;}

I'm going to be meeting with some folks next week to talk about data openness. The online app lets me search building permits, but since it's all JavaScript reworking the same page it looks like it'll be pretty hard to script (and, yes, a network sniffer gave me some URLs with lots of opaque data, and changing a few things in that gave me errors rather than results). Looks like now I've got two items on the agenda...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Games broadband Space & Astronomy Mathematics ]

Philip Greenspun: Financial collapse shows failure of free markets? Depends on how you define "free" and structure your markets.

[ related topics: Television Economics ]

Doing taxes, just downloaded the official IRS 1040 form as a PDF and printed it. At the bottom of page 2, is says: printed on recycled paper. I think it is, I'm not sure.. but that it said that on the bottom of the original PDF is just hilarious. Probably part of some government-wide green initiative that is costing us millions to have that added to all forms, no matter what the paper it eventually gets printed on actually is.

[ related topics: Politics moron ]

Boston's elite Latin School has felt it necessary to tell parents that an alleged outbreak of Vampirism is only a rumor. They say they have the situation relatively under control.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Education ]

Dear Ubuntu upgrade: How about rather than giving me the "close all of your apps to continue" after half an hour of diddling about with my computer, but before an hour and a half to two hours of downloads that precede the actual drop-dead point, you give it to me at the actual "point of no return"? That way I don't walk away from my computer the night before believing that the update will be done in the morning. Or, better yet, how about a "just go and do it, already" checkbox?

Dear Toro ECXTRA irrigation computer software (that I got with the dongle for $12 at Yardbird's going out of business liquidation): Really, Vista has been out for how long?

Dear Windows Vista: I could see dropping compatibility with Windows 3.11, probably even Windows 95, but why should I have to reboot to clear whatever got set when I tried to run the application previously, turn off the firewall, explore the CD, right click on the setup, go into properties, set up XP SP2 compatibility, close properties, do "Run As Administrator", to make this work?

Also, Vista, "The computer rebooted unexpectedly. Diagnose/Cancel" where "Diagnose", so far as I can tell, does nothing, is not a helpful error message. I realize that you have a tendency to "blue screen" occasionally (despite the fact that this is a few month old computer that came with Vista installed), perhaps you could log that somewhere and offer it up as a "more info" dialog when you come back up?

[ related topics: Music Microsoft Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment ]

Dan has just realized that in fact he does need to understand all 841 pages of the spec sheet. For each chip.

Slate: The Supreme Court Reviews Hillary: The Movie by Dahlia Lithwick, an interesting little rundown on the arguments currently before the Supreme Court highlighting just how badly the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" act tramples all over the First Amendment.

[ related topics: Movies Free Speech Civil Liberties ]

You've all seen it - especially in bars and restaurants showing sporting events on plasma and LCD panels - mismatched aspect ratios between the signal and the display. It bothers the heck out of me... They always say TV makes you look fat, but this is ridiculous. I'd rather watch on an old black and white TV!

Last week I was staying at the Las Vegas Hilton for a conference. My room was equipped with a nice 42" flat screen TV. It did something even more annoying with the display - it progressively stretched the edges of the signal to fill the screen. So the center of the screen displayed the correct aspect ratio. But the display got worse and worse as you moved toward the edge of the screen. At first, I thought something was wrong with my eyes. But no, it was the TV creating the amusement park funny-mirror effect.

This trend seems almost universal. I just pulled up a clip on the CNN web site. The video aspect ratio is screwed up! It gets better when they use the split-screen effect... But come on! Do we really need to live in a world where all signals are stretched to 16:9 even when there is no physical reason not to?

[ related topics: Star Wars Technology and Culture Movies Food Theater & Plays Television Race Video Conferences Gambling ]