...more recent posts
blogdex redesign. Getting better.
Dan Gilmore interviews Tim Berners-Lee on Microsoft's latest browser tricks:
I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.
My friend B. just got his new iBook. He was asking about a book for someone who doesn't know too much about the Mac. I guess I'll recommend this one.
The New York Times thinks you are stupid. Here's their new offer. And here's an explanation of what it means. The short version is: you get a digital version of the paper that can only be played in a propritary browser (what's wrong with my browser?) can't be linked to or shared with anyone else (including a second computer of your own) and expires after a week. This is getting silly. Only someone who doesn't understand the technology could fall for this. Please join me in never linking to any New York Times pieces. I'm going to stop reading the print edition too. (Yes, I'm sure they're quaking in their boots.)
I guess I should say something about the iPod, Apple's new portable MP3 player. It certainly represents no "breakthrough" as the pre-release hype had everyone wound up to expect. But it is an incremental improvement. Sure, you can get a nomad with 20 gigs of storage, but the nomad is big and heavy. And ugly. The iPod, with 5 gigs of storage (enough for roughly 1,000 songs) is truly portable. Its firewire connection (instead of the USB connection most "portable" devices have) transfers music fast. Downloading 20 gigs into a nomad over USB would take forever. And O.K., at $399 the iPod is expensive, but this is an Apple product so that should come as no surprise.
The real question is about digital rights management. Computing devices that attempt to secure intellectual property are going to be more complex while having less utility than devices which do not. The ethical questions can be debated endlessly, but I think this much is clear: the market will reward general purpose computing devices that don't police their own users over devices that foil simple, legal and fundamental uses of the device merely in an effort to stop the possibility of misuse. Consider the market potential of an automobile equipped with a cut off so that it couldn't go faster than 65. This would assure that drivers do not break the law, but who would buy such a car? Yet the computer industry seems intent on offering us just such crippled products. It's certainly not your "rights" which "digital rights management" schemes are trying to protect.
Steve Jobs was quoted in one New York Times article as mentioning that there was some unspecified technology in place that would prevent users from uploading songs from the iPod to a different computer than the one from which the song was downloaded. But the quote was vague, and nothing in the iPod specs seems to back this up. This HTP thread discusses the issue in some detail. My best guess at this point (no one has an iPod yet) is that there is some tiny bit of friction built into the device to curtail trading of music files, but not much. And maybe none. This is the direction Apple needs to be heading, and perhaps that is what Jobs' means when he says Apple makes devices that "just work." I think most people are under estimating how vulnerable Microsoft is on this point. Of course, I'm not sure Apple won't blow it.
Do I want one? Sure. But I won't be buying one. I don't really listen to music when I'm moving around. I'd rather put the $400 towards an iBook or TiBook which would then give me all the capabilities of the iPod (minus the extreme front pocket portability) plus being a computer in it's own right. I think the iPod is only attractive to people who work out at a gym, or to people who like cool gadgets and to whom $400 is no big deal (I miss on both counts.) But if you're looking to buy me a present I'd sure be happy to get one for free.
Did anybody else feel that? I don't know what time it was, but I was completely asleep last night when I was woken up by a violent shock to our building. Not like something falling on the roof, but the whole building shaking. Very strong. Not really the sort of thing you want to feel these days. I can't find anything in the news though...
Maybe an earthquake?
A sonic boom from a low flying military jet?
Definitely something big. At least on the lower east side.
Here are 10 photos from our trip up to Indian Lake in the Adirondack State Park. Five hours from NYC. We stayed in a small cabin right on the water. We took a couple hikes, a rather long trip in two row boats, and ate pretty much constantly. C beat us all at cards. Beautiful spot we will return to next year.
Gone fishin'.
Be back Thursday.
When I get downstairs to the office later (and the DSL line) I will check out this 15 megabyte photo of the WTC site. Apparently it was made with a large format camera from a airplane.
Cam has a side by side comparison of the new Windows XP default screen and a poster of the teletubbies. Hmmmm....
Tuesday is: XP release; new Apple ("not a Mac") device release; weblogs.com corner turn. Also, I'll be introducing a new upgraded version of myself at a gala press conference. Your invite might have been lost in the mail.
Whump has a link to an article on making custom sidebars for Netscape 6 (Mozilla.) I've got an experiment brewing I'll need this for.
Wow. Great show last night. Well worth the trip. A little bit of mayhem can still happen right in the middle of Times Square. Are they coming to your town? Highly recommended.
Short article by Paul Virilio:
"...I will underline that terrorism has just inaugurated an anti-cities strategy. This means that all towers are today threatened. Instead of being a place of dominion, as the dungeons of the past, the tower has become a place of weakness: vertically, it is henceforth the equivalent of the outer wall which the artillery blew up...."
I have the chance to pay too much money to see the Yankees on Saturday. This would be completely irresponsible of me, but the question is: should I do it? Somebody talk me down.
Few more boring photos of operation infinite basement office construction.
According to CNet, Apple is about to introduce a music device. I have no idea what this will be, or even if it will be, but what I want is a very small portable player, with built in airport (wireless networking a.k.a. wi-fi a.k.a. 802.11b) and the ability to play music files stored locally, or streamed from any other airport connected device. Also, I'd like an open plug-in interface so that it could be easily extended by third parties to recognize any music file format (mp3, ogg vorbis, etc...)
It should run something like iTunes. When I turn it on it should display an index of all music files in the device, plus automatically scan for any open airport connections, initiate those connections, and build an extended index of all music files accessible over the local network.
The player itself should wirelessly connect to other players in the vicinity (you could set yours to private if you wanted) or to other Macs. This interface should also be open so that third parties could connect as well (so, for instance, this device could connect to a suitably configured linux music server as well as a Mac.)
Nice to dream.
Fixed a major problem here that has been plaguing me for some time. All content is stored in a mysql database, and these pages are all assembled on the fly when you request them. So the particular URLs (like /jim/weblg/) don't really exist in the file system on the server. Instead, every request is sent to a central php script that parses the REQUEST_URI, looks up the path in the database and then grabs all the posts associated with that page and spits them out. I had been doing the redirection with an errordocument line in my .htaccess file pointing to the central php script (so it was like every request was 404ing, but then the 404 page was the central script that would then built each page.)
In any case, the problem was that the server was sending a 404 code back to the browser in the head immediately followed by a 200 OK code. Even though that is not correct, most browsers had no problem with this. But a few did. Like some versions of IE on the MacOS and at least one of the Opera betas on the MacOS.
After much struggle to find a way around this I just figured out that my host has mod_rewrite enabled, and that I can access this through my .htaccess file. So now the redirection is done with a rewrite rule instead of an error document and I believe this has solved the problem. Rex Swaine's handy HTTP viewer helped me out a lot in fixing this.
As is befitting a sci-fi writer, Bruce Sterling provides a bunch of different possible outcomes for the present political mess. Nothing earth shattering, but he has a good eye for the future, and it's refreshing to see these scenarios without the usual freight of the authors political views also being layed bare.
Here's 4 photos I took from the F train in Brooklyn coming back into Manhattan. This is the most impressed I've been with the relatively new Canon G1. The train was really shaking. I've always loved this ride, and these are the best shots I've ever gotten of it.
Ars Technica has an in depth look at MacOS X 10.1. Love that "I want to believe" poster on the first page.
This is interesting: "Apple is also reported to have a Cocoa-to-Perl bridge functioning in-house. There is already a petition online asking for the release of this code. If AppleScript can do it, why not Perl too?"
Just in case you have to entertain some kids today, here's a joke from the Janet, the queen of knock-knocks. It's all in the timing:
Knock knock
Who's there?
Interrupting cow
Interrupting c...
moooooo
The fissile flim-flam. Three russian journalists try to buy nuclear material on the black market.
Mozilla 0.9.5 has been released.
O.K., I'm going to try to get off politics and back on track here. I guess never having had much of a track to begin with is slowing up this segue. But soon. Real soon now.
Tonight we're going out for dinner as it is our solemn patriotic duty to spend money in local eating establishments (Rudy said so.) And tonight especially so, it being the arbitrary but nevertheless important one month ago day...
The city still smells. Depends on the day and which way the wind blows, but sometimes I wake up in the morning at it is quite strong. Police activity in the Lower East Side is apparently back to normal, what ever that means. Large ad-hoc monuments of flowers and signs are mostly gone, but American flags remain. Everywhere. And firehouses are absolutely bedecked with red white and blue ornaments.
Large upscale restaurants are hurting. I'm assuming all other businesses that rely as much on tourism are hurting too. More local establishments outside the immediate Wall St. zone, like say a little cafe on Clinton St., aren't feeling too much of an effect. I rode home in a cab the other night and was asking the driver what he thought. He said the worst was over and his shifts were getting better.
I guess we'll see about that.
I'm sure the reason I haven't seen this (Pakistani ISI director linked directly to Mahmud Atta) in the U.S. media is because it's incorrect. I mean, our media would never censor anything that might be unpopular with the government. Right?
Now what about getting all those who aid and abet the terrorists? (If you know who backs the ISI you can guess why this will be impossible for the U.S. to do.)
I should rename this page 'gadgets & war' since that's all I post about any more. Today it's back to gadgets: the nokia 5510. Can't say I want one, but that is an interesting take on things.
Anybody use Outlook 4.x on the Mac for email? Could you tell me how to set it to check for new mail automatically at a set interval? I need to explain this to someone with a very tenuous grasp on computers, and I can't get access to a 4.x version of Outlook.
Counterpunch.org has this short and very interesting 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, titled How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen. (via the chock full of heavy links Ethel the blog)
DEBKAfile is a news source a lot of people have been pointing to recently. Here's a New York Observer piece on the website. They say, in part:
But in this new battleground, it is natural to assume there will be new sources of inside dope. And in the days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and as the U.S. geared up for a military response people have begun passing around a link to Debka.com, a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations. At its best, Debka.com reads like a tip sheet from the desert...Frightening is right. According to debka Putin and Bush have agreed on the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons (in Chechnya and in Afghanistan,) the Chinese (fearful of a new Russian U.S. front) are sending troops to support Bin Laden and the Taliban, a third case of Anthrax in the U.S. is being investigated, Russian and Israeli intelligence both concluded Siberian Airlines 1812 was the vicitim of a terrorist attack and not a stray missle, and that the U.S. is preparing shortly to strike a second country (either Somalia or Iraq.) Scary stories that are moving fast, but are they accurate?
Question and answer with Noam Chomsky.
I'm not scared so much as speechless. If I try to put it into words I get very upset. But if I don't I can go about my day and keep working on my latest web job and not be too paralyzed by what is happening. So I guess that's what I'm going to do.
My hands? What blood?
Still, I won't forget. The bad, but also the good. And I know there are good people out there. New York City is full of them. I saw it. Most people want to help. Yet bad things keep happening. So where I used to suspect we might be under the control of a small cabal bent on evil, I now think it's more likely that we are under the sway of an emergent meta organism which is not exactly human. A sort of human group mind, minus the humanity. I think it emerges through our hierarchical and bureaucratic organizational structures (be they political, military, corporate, religious, or whatever.) It's our worst side and it's fueled by greed and it is devouring lives at this very moment. And the more it feeds the bigger it's appetite grows.
But it is us. And we can turn it. We can make it our best side. I don't know how, but we all do. Keep moving, keep trying, keep being human. Touch someone today. You are love.
A Florida man has died of pulmonary anthrax. Nothing is known yet of how he inhaled the spores. Dr. Sanjay Gupta answered common questions in this CNN interview.
"There have only been 18 confirmed inhalational cases from 1900 to 1976, and not a single case, before yesterday, over the last 25 years. Typically, the way people get it now is through the handling of animals or soil that contain the bacteria and its spores."This is alarming, given the recent talk of possible terrorist antrax attacks, but it's much too early for more rational fear.
Could it be the case that anthrax is really more commonly encountered by humans in nature and merely under or mis-diagnosed? It is reasonable to think that many in the medical community have recently refreshed their knowledge of the symptons and thus the number of reported incidents might rise quickly (if not very far) even without the help of any malevolent human involvement. What if there were suddenly 5 cases in the country? 10? 20? This still might not be any sort of attack. Localization would be the key to deciding how to guess about the terrorist question.
I think it's likely this case has natural causes. But how many will it take before this isn't the gut reaction? Not too many I'll bet, yet we may well get at least one or two more just out of heightened awareness.
MB's grandmother passed away this week. She was 95, and in good health up until the end. I spent most of the last two days on Long Island with the extended family. Lots of great stories remembering the old days in Brooklyn, from the time of the depression up through World War II, and into the early fifties when they moved out to Long Island. That generation lived through some astounding changes. Death, I suppose, is always a sad business, but a long full life lived close with those you love takes most of the heart wrench out of it. Still sad, yes, but an ending that we all think was O.K. with her. She was buried in the last family plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery, which is off Linden Blvd. around 48th street in Brooklyn, not far from where she grew up. Nana - and she was "Nana" to everyone - will be missed. A great woman I am honored to have known.
Sony makes some amazing gadgets, like the DCR-IP7 "Network Handycam IP." I dislike their tendency for proprietary technologies (memorystick especially) but only Apple is in the same design league. They both make really cool stuff that I wish was a lot less expensive and a lot more open to third party additions. (This might be a better picture to show how small this camera is.)
Well, I got a 'success' message back from weblogs.com, and I know they hit my page, and I showed up in changes.xml (you can probably see that if you want by viewing source since it's not an html file - or maybe it will try to download it to your machine and you could open it in a text editor) but then I never showed up in the list at weblogs.com. Possibly this is because I was never on that list in the first place. So either I have to sign up somewhere first, or they confirm changes by comparing your page to the last snapshot of your page, and since that was the first they had heard of me they didn't have a last snapshot to compare it to. If that's the case then I should show up next hour after they get this notification. Let's see.
Test number 3 of the new notification system at weblogs.com
O.K. Seems like that worked. I'm using Edd Dumbill's XMLRPC classes for PHP (see http://phpxmlrpc.sourceforge.net) along with Bill Humphries notifyUserland PHP code. Everything worked great except I had to change the first line of function ping() to actually ping rpc.weblogs.com and not rpc.userland.com.
I'll make the appropriate changes to [editpage] so that anyone here can send update notification to the crawler at weblogs.com. It will only notify for new posts, not edits, or comments.
"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."Can you guess who said this? Click through to the comments for the answer to todays quiz. Brought to you by Ethel.
Daypop and blogdex are both trying to keep track of recent, highly linked stories in the weblog community. Daypop seems more comprehensive at the moment.
Bruce Schneier has a special September 30th issue of Cryptogram covering the Sept. 11 attacks (he had been publishing only once a month on the 15th - thanks to htp for the heads up.) He talks about airport security, intelligence failures, regulating cryptography, and steganography. Some things he said about intelligence failure started me thinking.
He makes the excellent distinction between data and information in the intelligence community. Data is just a bunch of unconnected, unverified bits of what might, with analysis, become information. They have a lot of data. And what we're seeing now is the reexamining of a lot of this data with the advantage of hindsight. The FBI and the CIA and the NSA are pouring over their mountains of old data looking for clues. And guess what? It looks like they should have known something was up. They had the data. But that doesn't necessarily mean there was a "massive intelligence failure" as some are suggesting. This is just a phenomenon that will always happen when your data set far outstrips your ability to analyse it.
Anyway, the interesting thing I thought (although he doesn't really take it this way) is that this should clearly point out that our intelligence community doesn't need more data! They have the data already. Expanding surveillence is not going to make any difference if it just adds to the mountain of data that then sits in a file cabinet or on a computer somewhere until after an attack happens. I don't have an answer (although more human intelligence and less electronic eavesdropping intelligence might be a start) but this might be an interesting line of defense for people in a position to try and put the breaks on police state happy reactionaries. They knew they should be watching Atta, and they still couldn't do it. How reasonable does it seem to add millions of more "potentially suspicious" people to that list? Won't that just make it all the more likely someone will slip through. What is needed is more information - and it might be the case that accumulating more data is counterproductive.
Scripting news thinks Robotwisdom is a a racist blog. Or at least he did on September 27th. I've been unable to come to any conclusion about this. Certainly Jorn Barger (the man behind robotwisdom) is a strong critic of Israel. But is he a racist? I guess I lean towards critic. In any case, he continues to have what I think are good links. Like this great article by Arundhati Roy. For some background on this fascinating woman (and a stunning picture - does that make me a sexist?) check out this Salon article.
This seems like a good change to be making. Dave Winer is updating the weblogs.com recently updated page so that instead of their spiders hitting every site every hour to look for changes, the sites themselves have to send a message requesting the indexing.
To participate a site must be able to send an XML-RPC or SOAP 1.1 message to weblogs.com, and that will schedule a poll event for sometime in the next hour. Our server will only read sites that claim to have updated. This change is necessary in order for Weblogs to scale to support the number of sites that it now works with.I'm not in the index, but dratfink is, and maybe some other people here want to be. I'll add this feature as soon as there are more instructions from Userland. It's expected, but still very cool, that they are making this open so smaller people like us can participate. Thanks!