|
You can use the feeds in this mix as the basis for a new mix - create a new mix from this mix.
[New Window]
David Merceron the sorry state of search APIs. [New Window]
Seagate Gets No RespectIs the market underpricing Seagate's prospects? [New Window]
PC World:Canon Readies Wi-Fi Camera. The Ixy Digital Wireless is Canon's first camera with built-in Wi-Fi and will offer users the ability to automatically transfer pictures to a personal computer via the wireless link as the pictures are taken. It will also be possible to remotely control the camera from the PC. [New Window]
Technology Review:Digitize This. On October 4, Yahoo and ten partner organizations announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance, which plans to build a free, permanent online repository for a wide range of print and multimedia content, including both copyrighted works and those that have passed into the public domain. [New Window]
What a day!These notes were written on the flight from Cincinnati to Greensboro, early yesterday evening.Today was a travel day, an interesting one for sure, unique in many ways. It was the first time I began a trip in the East Bay, and I learned a ton about getting from Berkeley to SFO for an 11AM weekday flight. From the South Bay, it would be a perfect time, leave home at a leisurely 8AM, arrive at the airport by 9AM with two hours to spare for the usual lines at SFO, and plenty of time for coffee, maybe even breakfast. But the Bay Bridge at rush hour is intense, but smartly designed, and while the travel wasn't quite as easy as it would have been arriving from the south, it wasn't bad. They had TMobile at the gate, so I was able to check in, briefly before getting on the plane.I had plenty of room on the plane, a good book, movie and some crosswords, when the flight arrived at the Cincinnati airport (actually in Kentucky), I had thirty minutes to get from Terminal C to Terminal A to catch the connecting flight to Greensboro. I checked my voicemail as the plane from SF taxied, and I couldn't make out the message, just bits of it. I thought it was Jason Calacanis, giving me a heads up that they were getting ready to announce their deal with Weblogs, Inc being acquired by AOL. When I got into the terminal as I rushed to Terminal A, I listened to the message. It was from Mark McLaughlin at Verisign, saying that they were getting ready to announce the deal they had with Scripting News, Inc, because it was already on some of the blogs. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.I didn't have a way to write down Mark's phone number, so I called Mike Arrington, who was one of two attorneys working with me on the deal (Mike is also the editor ofTechCrunch, and brokered the deal withKeith Teare, his partner in Edgio, a company you'll be hearing great things about shortly, I'm sure). Mike didn't answer, so I triedMike Graves, one of the guys I worked with at Verisign, no luck there iether. Both are at the Web 2.0 conference in SF. As I was approching the gate for my outbound flight, Staci Kramer ofPaidContentcalled, asking if I could confirm that there was a deal. I asked her what she had, and she said she had read something on Kottke, but so far just had rumors. I said I couldn't confirm, she asked if I'd call her back if I could, and I said I would. I've worked with Staci on a few stories in the past, and I will indeed call her back, she'll be the first reporter I talk to about this deal.When I finally got on the nearly empty plane to Greensboro, I listened to the voicemail again, got Mark McG's number, called him, got filled in, asked him to hold off announcing anything until I had a chance to see what had been reported, then I hung up, tried Arrington again, still no answer, then I calledScoble, and he read me Kottke's piece. Not bad! He got the number wrong, but otherwise more or less understood why I wanted to do the deal, and raised a very valid question about BigCo's and Verisign, and so forth. No doubt we'll have an interesting discussion about this in the blogosphere, and I hope a productive one, and that we'll all find a way to work with Verisign. I think there's reason to believe they can and will do a much better job of running the ping center than I have been able to, and this is the perfect example of individual innovators (myself in this case) working with large companies in ways that leverage the strength of both.The bootstrap of weblogs.com is something a bigco should not attempt, it's hard to make it go, and most bootstraps don't, and it requires trust, something an individual is more likely able to inspire than a big company. On the other hand, running a serivce that other bigco's depend on (like Google, and Microsoft, to name two) is not something a person like myself should attempt. I think Verisign is the perfect company to do it. Their name servers, I hear, respond to 250,000 requests per second at peak loads. In comparison, weblogs.com's 1-2 million pings a day seems a drop in the bucket. Further, it will require great resources to tackle the ping-spam issue, and there Verisign's expertise, not just what's visible today, but what's coming down the road, will make all the difference. I was in no posiiton to do this on my own. And belive me, the Technorait's and PubSub's, even Feedster and Bloglines, weren't helping out very much. I belive they'll respect Verisign much more than they respected me. And this dealwill free me up to work on new ideas around blogging, RSS, OPML, web services, podcasting, etc. I'm good at digging holes, I have to pass off to others to make the trains run on time when the service grows as big as weblogs.com has.Anyway, the plane has just entered North Carolina in preparation for landing in Greensboro. Writing this essay has been an excellent way to pass the time. When I get off the plane I'm going to look for a phone, call my friends at Verisign, and encourage them to go ahead and make the announcement. When they have made the announcement, I will upload this document to Scripting News, and we can continue the dialog from the ground in Greensboro.Namaste y'all!Dave Winer10/6/05; 4:38:34 PM Pacific [New Window]
Vatican: Don't Knock ScienceAs part of a project to help end the 'mutual prejudice' between science and religion, the Roman Catholic Church urges the faithful to consider scientific reason.Call It 'Gorilla' MarketingSmashing cars to bits may seem like an odd tactic for promoting a car-sharing service but it's undeniably satisfying, in a primitive sort of way.You Can Be Smart and MarriedDespite suggestions to the contrary, you don't have to be dumb to trap a husband or rich to acquire a wife. Commentary by Regina Lynn. [New Window]
sinecure: Dictionary.com Word of the Daysinecure: an office or position that involves little work or responsibility. [New Window]
umbrage: Dictionary.com Word of the Dayumbrage: offense; resentment. [New Window]
Five years ago:"OK, the Mets didn't win today. That doesn't mean they lost." [New Window]
Grade"A"InvestmentsHere's how to cherry-pick mutual fund winners.In Praise of GougingWho's looking out for you? The free market.Liquid LoungeLearn Something New Every Day [New Window]
One thing I want to say in my BBQ keynote tonight is that one good thing that's happening is that people are trying out new ideas again. That should be a constant in the tech industry, in good timesandin bad. There should always be money for new ideas because you never know which one will turn into the next Visicalc, Wordstar, Mac OS, Excel, Web or whatever. Too many years of drought between the years of wine and roses.BTW, congratulations toEvan Williamsfor finally figuring out that the main significance of podcasting is not that it gives a new channel to commercial broadcasters (which it does), but rather it allows people to create media (see above). My guess is that this epiphany was brought about by a 20-million-ton frieght train called iTunes.Wired News takesa look at Memorandum. Of course I discovered the article on Memorandum, which tempts me not to point to it, unless I have something to say. Now having said it, I can stop, because no doubt Memeorandum will link to this witless and information-less post and at the same time will move the Wired News article up the ladder. Meanwhile, my ultra-wittykeynote, above, which has only been linked toby TechCrunch(calling itThe Flickr of Keynotes), didn't make the grade on Memeorandum at all. I could have sent out emails asking for links and it probably would have shown up, but that seems really tacky. One more thing, people complain the site is too ugly, and there should be a sports version, I have another complaint. The name has too many syllables and it's hard to remember how to spell it, and it's too long, and screws up word-wrap on my posts. [New Window]
Faster MacIn yesterday'sthreadwhere I explored buying a new Mac with a dozen awesome Mac experts.Brian Criscuolofounda way to make my current Mac perform as it was designed to. Here's what I did that made the difference:1. Create a new user with full Administrator priviledges.2. Log off. Log on as the new user.3. Do some stuff.4. Log off. Log on as the old user.Voila. Fast Mac!Zzzzzip.Amazing.I kind of thought this was an easy to use computer?Oh well.1/4/01:"In the centralized model for the Internet, your browser makes requests of a server that could be very far away, or slow for other reasons. Now imagine that the server is very close and you don't have to share it with anyone, it's yours and yours alone. It would be fast!" [New Window]
aberrant: Dictionary.com Word of the Dayaberrant: abnormal. [New Window]
The Call of the OzarksThere are no dueling banjos here, just a solidly run, fast-growing little bank. [New Window]
But... When I click on the link for the movie trailer, I wait a minute and nothing happens. This reminds me of a podcastinterviewI heard withRon Bloom, one of the founders of a podcastingnetwork. He says, emphatically, that technology doesn't matter. That's the kind of thing I'm likely to say myself, except when technologydoesmatter. This is one of those times. Suggest to Ron that he ask his partner Adam to explain this, and listen Ron -- becausetechnology can make the differencebetween a user watching a trailer for a movie, and shutting the window after wasting too much time waiting.Rememberthe Yahoo movie trailers feed that had an XML error, but otherwise was interesting and innovative? Well, yesterday I got an email from its product manager saying they would fix it, and this morning, it'sfixed.Bing!AOL has it's own"mini"blogger, an anonymous employee blogging about his or her employer. [New Window]
R Is for RobotWhat bots can teach tots (and vice versa). By Larry Gallagher of Wired magazine.RIAA Takes Shotgun to TradersThe RIAA's legal campaign against online music trading has misidentified hundreds of traders and relies on bullying to get results, legal experts say. By Bruce Gain.Venice Is Deep in ThoughtIs the city of Venice a backward-looking tourist trap, stuck in the past, or a productive, creative city of the future? Commentary by Momus. [New Window]
Big Car, Big Tax CreditA new federal tax incentive pays you to purchase an environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle. But the formula favors SUV buyers over quiche-eaters who purchase smaller and more fuel-efficient cars. By John Gartner.4-GB Battery Is Pricey PSP Add-OnAt about $250, the storage/battery pack costs about as much as an iPod Nano with the same amount of storage, making the upgrade a tough sell for all but the hardest-core PSP freaks. From the Wired News blog Gadgeteer.South Asia Prone to EarthquakesSeismologists say the area that crosses Pakistan into India and Afghanistan shakes whenever the Indian subcontinent and the Eurasian plate slam into each other -- it's the same activity that formed the Himalayas millions of years ago. [New Window]
immolate: Dictionary.com Word of the Dayimmolate: to kill or destroy, often by fire. [New Window]
Listening to Meet the Press today, it's fairly clear that Karl Rove and others will be indicted. A Republican senator, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, was spinning like this: Innocent until proven guilty. She hopes the charges aren't perjury or obstruction of justice, the kind of charges (she says) that you file when you can't prove your primary case. Those also happen to be the charges that President Clinton was impeached on, funny how standards change, eh. Democrat Art Schumer said he would accept whatever the prosecutor decided to do. Sounds reasonable, if you assume he's not partisan, but of courseeverythinghe says is totally partisan. So he knows the indictments are coming. This week it was exceptionally easy to read the tea-leaves.Dowd vs MillerLike Jeff Jarvis, I read Maureen Dowd's column about NY Times reporter Judith Miller in yesterday's paper. I have a few (blunt) comments.1. This is why the Times needs a blogger columnist on its op-ed page, to catch situations like this long before they melt down at the level the Miller case has melted down. And I don't mean a columnist with a blog, I mean a blogger who is given regular space on the op-ed page.2. If you think this is an unusual situation for the Times, think again. We know that at least some Times reporters aren't actually reporters any more than Miller was, they have the hubris to think they should shape the events they cover, that their point of view is what matters. I tried in so many ways to explain this at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference at Harvard in January of this year, but the Times editorial people, as always, dismiss this criticism with arrogance. This is going to cause more problems in the future. People outside of the Times can see the problem more clearly than your insiders can.3. Bravo to Dowd for seeing that her position can help the Times by getting them to think.4. Please publish her op-ed outside the firewall (try the front page) so we can point to it. [New Window]
British Petroleum Slims DownBP will sell its underperforming Innovene unit for $9 billion. [New Window]
Alex Barnett:7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for OPML. [New Window]
abstemious: Dictionary.com Word of the Dayabstemious: temperate; abstinent; refraining from indulgence. [New Window]
WIRED:Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone. Motorola and other companies have been selling phones that play music in Europe and Asia for a couple of years now - handsets with lots of memory and serious audio capabilities. And with the iPod, Apple showed how to turn an ordinary MP3 player into a great one. Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched? [New Window]
We needa beautiful icon for valid OPML.What if Scooter Libbywere a guest on Law&Order?Norm Augustinushas some good OPML badge material! [New Window]
Josh Ledgard thinksMini-MSFT could be Steve Ballmer. Interesting, but not true. I am Steve Ballmer. Wait, no, I'm Mini. No, I'm confused.";->" [New Window]
Taps for the PBDing dong, the [Power]Book is dead :(Thanks to all who sent me emails with fantastic tips and other offersof help. I was able to save most of my data, bar a few photos and myroute66 install. Currently I'm running the PB off an external 30 gigfirewire drive, not too shabby. I installed using the migration optionfrom another mac. Unbelievably easy and cool. Duplicates everything,right down to your browser cookies and all prefs!Despite the urge to dash off to the store to pick up a new PB, I'mholding off, since I think next week's Apple announcement won't be ofthe video iPod, but of a new range of professional macs...Google Reader ~ Not bad!Plenty of pushback on the new Google RSSReader.At first glance it didn't look like the typical usefulRiver Of Newsthat I enjoy so much, but after a quick and effortless import of my 400 subscription opml file, I kinda got the hang of it.I like the shortcuts, same keyboard commands used in GMail, of whichI'm a big fan. Seeing your feeds sorted by relevance of each story isan interesting experience, sorting by date shows the top level of theriver. Enclosures in audio pop up an embedded player for immediateaudio gratification.Still fooling around with it, very promising for sure.Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesiPod VideoIf you have one of the new iPods,thismay look cool on it. I've added it to the Daily Source Code podcast feed, should work fine in iTunes as well.Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotessafe in sf15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SFdead powerbookRight after I recorded today's DSC my PowerBook gave up. It no longer can boot from the harddrive. Booting from the install disk to use disk utilities gives no joy, as disk utilities can't see the drive at all.On boot up I hear the drive spinning and crunching, but it either stays greyscreen, flashes the'can't find system'icon or defaults eventually to the CD for boot.Since I'm still usingRadio UserLandto update the podcast feed (really must change that -ed) I can't post and thus you can't get the show in iTunes or any other podcatcher software.Any help is ofcourse greatly appreciated. Listen to DSC-255 to hear what steps I took in cleaning up the health of my drive before is hosed out...Update: On one of my many boot attempts, I got the PB to boot from thje install disk, and am able to see the Macintosh HD volume. I decided to cp -R that entire volume to my 100GB Firewire drive before doing anything else. At least the data is now safe :)If I can't get it fixed, I will use the Firewire drive on my other mac to post the DSC feed through Radio Userland...Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The NetherlandsDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260From Curry Cottage, Guildford United KingdomDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The NetherlandsDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesMK Video PromoAvideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1From Curry Condo, San Francisco CaliforniaDirectlinkto the video.I got a video iPod yesterday, subscribed to a multitude of video Podcasts. Quite interestingMy own experimentation with the platform starts with this short'cast of Curry Condo.If you own a video iPod, it should show up automatically under Video Podcasts. Lemme know if it worked![Details of clip]Recorded with an iSight on a G4 Powerbook (the new one!)Edited in iMovie on a G5 iMac (a new one!)Exported as'Quicktime to iPod'Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Wednesday October 20th 2005 #263Daily Source Code for Thursday October 20th 2005 #263From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesAdam Curry ice thinkingAdam Curry ice thinkingOriginally uploaded byadamcurry.Getting ready for christmas as I rebuild my mp3 and photo collectionsfrom various saves on multiple firewire drives. I'm asked for picturesso often that I figured I'd throw this one on the blog sogooglecan pick it up.safe in sf15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SFDaily Source Code for Monday October 24th 2005 #265Daily Source Code for Monday October 24th 2005 #265From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesPodsfae xmas tunesAfter a discussion on the source code, a list ofpodsafe christmas musicappeared in the shownotes. These songs can be recorded or performed by anyone.trippy plantsThisvideoreally tripped me out the first time I saw it. [New Window]
[New Window]
A story on the10th anniversaryof the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10,"it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen,"he said. It never happened.I haven't seen much reality TV sinceMarried by Americaperfected the form, but I'd watch an alleged double murderer being sprung on unsuspecting prank victims. O.J. would be the newAllen Funt, who had to go off-camera towards the end of hisCandid Cameradays because he was scaring the hell out of people.IfJuic'dbecame a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!Hysteria is ContagiousAn article on the 50-year effort by scientists torevive the 1918 Spanish flu virusreads like a Michael Crichton novel:He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza.The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918.Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. At the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.Columnist Charles Krauthammer believes it'smore of a Steven King:We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notesNew Scientistmagazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.Though he citesNew Scientist, Krauthammer omits a few facts from the magazine'sflu coveragethat are worth considering before completely losing your shit, as doRay Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who call this flu's published genome a"recipe for disaster."The laws of probability suggest that if Earth sticks around long enough, scientists will eventually stumble upon a discovery that wipes out humankind and gives the rest of the universe one less thing to worry about. That's why we must colonize other planets as soon as possible. Our genes need places to store backups.But I'm not ready to hit the panic button about the return of the killer of 1918. Most people have been exposed to milder descendants of that flu or vaccinated against them, both of which provide natural protection. Existing antiviral drugs also are likely to offer resistance.The more pressing concern is the next pandemic flu, which hasn't been filtered through survivors and weakened by the collective might of antibodies and evolution. Learning from the publication of the Spanish flu's genome also may enable researchers to devise an effective response to the next killer flu or biological terror attack.Besides, if hiding information from bad, bad people is Earth's best hope, we might as well max out the credit cards and stock up on beer, medicinal marijuana, and fatty foods, because we're screwed. As technologists like Kurzweil and Joy must realize, security through obscurity never works.In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.This is Anna BadkhenThe most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned byAnna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for theSan Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of aMarine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents:The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.The second round landed closer ...Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marinesmake their beds:"It's like digging a grave,"he says."I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets.""Last time we were out,"he continued,"the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."TheChroniclethinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to theaftermath of Hurricane Katrinain New Orleans.Badkhen, who publishes anonline journalfor the paper, described herself asanti-warin a 2003 interview. Before bias monitors make too much of that, it appears to be an apolitical expression of sympathy for civilians caught in a warzone:I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.Another blogger hasdiscovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that"snottier, glitzier reporters don't."The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the nextPulitzer Prize for International Reporting.Throw the Book at GoogleJim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is aclear violation of copyright.I'm not so sure.If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call itMovable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright?Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?There are full-text books on the web under copyright, such asLive Simpleby John December. Google did to this book what it wants to do to library books in the real world -- it grabbed copies of all the pages and will search the text in response to aquery, presenting the relevant excerpts.As an armchair copyright lawyer, I can't figure out how it matters that Google grabbed one book with a bot and grabbed the other with a scanner. Google grabs the full text of copyrighted works all the time --56,000on this server alone. If Google Print is illegal, wouldn't Google be illegal as well?Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLsI've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank.SportsFilterjumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins withwwwand one that doesn't -- for the same site.Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at eithermydd.comorwww.mydd.com.When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of"301 moved permanently,"which indicates a permanent move, rather than"302 found,"which may be temporary.If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links towww.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links tomydd.com, giving it PR 6.The site's hosted with Apache, so ifmod_rewriteis installed, a two-line.htaccessfile in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:RewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it atBuzzwordand am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs onTechnorati, onlyDooceandKottke.Orgaren't giving up some rank.$500,000 for a Flying FishThere may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner."There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.My Reign as the King of PingsI've been runningWeblogs.Comsince June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it.Weblogs.Com ran onFrontierfor six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year.In a frenzied weekend, I recoded the site as an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server, writing all of the code from scratch except forXML-Simple, an XML parsing library I adapted from code byJim Winstead. Hosting was provided byServerMatrix, which charges around $80-$140/month for a dedicated server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 1,200-gigabyte monthly bandwidth limit.On an average day, my application served 34.65 gigabytes of data, took 1.1 million pings and sent 11,000 downloads of changes.xml, a file larger than 1 megabyte. TheLAMP platformis ideal for running a high-demand web application for as little money as possible.When Dave rerouted Weblogs.Com to my new server and it instantly deluged the box with more than a dozen pings per second, I felt like Lucy Ricardo pulling chocolates off the conveyer belt.The server ran well, crashing only a few times over four months because of a spammer sending thousands of junk pings per minute. Every few days, I used theiptablesfirewall to block requests from the IP addresses of the worst abusers.Business reporterTom Foremskiand others have suggested that the Weblogs.Com sale might reveal a lack of faith in blogging as a business.I think the sale was motivated by the realization that the demands of running Weblogs.Com had become much too large for Dave's one-man company. He could either hire people and start pursuing revenue opportunities or sell the service.VeriSign got a good deal acquiring it for a reported $2 million. The company's now at the center of the blogosphere, a giant web application and information network with more than 15 million users, and ought to be able to leverage those pings into new services built on XML, XML-RPC and RSS.One thing I'd like to see is a real-time search engine built only on the last several hours of pings, which could be a terrific current news service if compiled intelligently. While I was running Weblogs.Com, I wanted to use my brief moment as the king of pings to extend the API, which VeriSign appears to beconsidering, but Dave didn't want to mess with things while companies were loading a truck with money and asking for directions to his house.I want to pursue these ideas, either independently or in concert with VeriSign andYahoo Blo.gs. No knock intended, but big companies tend to sit on purchases like this rather than implementing new features.Bloggerstill lacks category support two years after being purchased by Google, an omission so basic you have to wonder whether it's serious about fending off competition fromSix Apart,UserLand, andWordPress.Everyone Who Uses Must ConvergeLast March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible andThe Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully.Wall Street Journalpundit Peggy Noonan wasdeeply movedby the incident:Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours.Thisis Nichols's mug shot.Thisis Nichols's face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.Something changed.Something happened. ...It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.Something did happen. Smith revealed a secret in hernew memoirthat she kept from police, the press, and Peggy -- during the ordeal, she gave Nichols some of hercrystal meth:... as the night wore on -- after Nichols had snorted some of Smith's meth -- she tried to win Nichols' trust by talking about her faith in God and relating to him her personal stories. ...She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying,"Let go and let God."In the short term,crystal methbrings reduced fatigue and adeep feelingof well-being, intelligence and power. (In the long term,not so much).Noonan found in Nichols' transformation a redemptive Easter miracle:This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.Oops.Update: Lee Siegel, a critic for theNew Republic, questioned Smith's story from the beginning, faulting the broadcast media for spinning a fable that omitted her criminal record, the circumstances of her husband's murder and the reason she lost custody of her child.Don't Fall for Scamazon.ComConsidering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:Dear Amazon member,Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.Please follow the link below:[link removed]and update your account information.We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.Regards,Amazon Safety DepartmentNOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am adomain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager wasnot so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a freeInternet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbarthat warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database,alerting menot to visit before I loaded the page.The toolbar displaysdetailed informationabout each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links opendetailed reportson each site. [New Window]
Blackberry Users Learning Painful Lesson (AP)AP - Chris Claypool was addicted to his BlackBerry wireless handheld. Like many users, he never thought twice about pecking away at lightning speed, replying to a wave of e-mails from clients around the globe. Last year, the 37-year-old agricultural sales director from Post Falls, Idaho, noticed a throbbing sensation in this thumbs whenever he typed. [New Window]
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Friday October 7th 2005 #256Daily Source Code for Friday October 7th 2005 #256From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
[New Window]
Lawmakers back U.S. control of Internet (Reuters)Reuters - Three lawmakers in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives called on Friday for the Internet's coreinfrastructure to remain under U.S. control, echoing similarlanguage introduced in the Senate earlier this week.Ericsson quarterly profits slightly ahead of forecasts (AFP)AFP - Ericsson, the world's biggest supplier of mobile telecommunication systems, reported on Friday third-quarter earnings slightly ahead of forecasts, but warned that the world systems market would show only moderate growth this year and next.RIM ruling risks US Blackberry shutdown (Reuters)Reuters - A U.S. appeals court on Friday denied amotion to stay a patent case against Research In Motion Ltd.,bringing RIM closer to an injunction that could shut down itspopular BlackBerry email service in the United States.Firefox Downloads Top 100 Million (PC World)PC World - Mozilla browser continues to make headway on IE, despite some glitches.Man Accused of Stealing Corning Secrets (AP)AP - A former employee of a Corning Inc. glassmaking plant is charged with stealing trade secrets and selling them to a Taiwanese company.Bertelsmann to Launch File-Sharing Service (AP)AP - Bertelsmann AG said Friday it will launch a new service that uses the technology made popular by file-swapping businesses for legal downloads of music and movies. [New Window]
Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotessafe in sf15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SFDaily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Monday October 3d 2005 #252Daily Source Code for Monday October 3d 2005 #252From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownoteschanges.xml?Cngratulations to Dave Winer on hisdealwith Verisign. Sounds like he sold weblogs.com for all the right reasons. One question I have: will thechanges.xmlfile remain available to the rest of the ping-infrastructure? [New Window]
A story on the10th anniversaryof the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10,"it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen,"he said. It never happened.I haven't seen much reality TV sinceMarried by Americaperfected the form, but I'd watch an alleged double murderer being sprung on unsuspecting prank victims. O.J. would be the newAllen Funt, who had to go off-camera towards the end of hisCandid Cameradays because he was scaring the hell out of people.IfJuic'dbecame a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!This post onThe Corner, the weblog of contributors to the conservative magazineNational Review, sums up how the Harriet Miers pick is going over with the right wing:I am actually hoping there are no more vacancies during this presidency.ConfirmThemappears to be considering a name change.$500,000 for a Flying FishThere may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner."There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.This is Anna BadkhenThe most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned byAnna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for theSan Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of aMarine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents:The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.The second round landed closer ...Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marinesmake their beds:"It's like digging a grave,"he says."I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets.""Last time we were out,"he continued,"the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."TheChroniclethinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to theaftermath of Hurricane Katrinain New Orleans.Badkhen, who publishes anonline journalfor the paper, described herself asanti-warin a 2003 interview. Before bias monitors make too much of that, it appears to be an apolitical expression of sympathy for civilians caught in a warzone:I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.Another blogger hasdiscovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that"snottier, glitzier reporters don't."The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the nextPulitzer Prize for International Reporting.While deleting some comment spam in theDrudge Retortdatabase, I just had to use the following MySQL query:delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%';Bill Bennett Races to JudgmentThe crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during hisnationally syndicated radio showyesterday:... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.The belief that a particular race is more prone to criminality is often based on rates of incarceration, such as aBureau of Justice Statisticsreport that blacks have an 18.6 percent lifetime chance of being incarcerated, compared to 10 percent for Hispanics and 3.4 percent for whites.Judging this solely on the basis of current incarceration is both extremely ugly and misleading. Other contributory factors are ignored, such as a2004 poverty ratefor blacks that's 24.7 percent, three times as high as that for whites, and the fact that minorities aresignificantly more likelyto be arrested and convicted than whites who commit the same offenses.There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.By choosing to make this about race and single out blacks, Bennett engaged in one of the uglier examples of race baiting I've heard from a national radio host, even though he tried to qualify his thoughts by admitting they were"morally reprehensible."I hope he has the decency to offer a full apology.Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award,defends Bennetton TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for hissuspension.Throw the Book at GoogleJim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is aclear violation of copyright.I'm not so sure.If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call itMovable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright?Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?There are full-text books on the web under copyright, such asLive Simpleby John December. Google did to this book what it wants to do to library books in the real world -- it grabbed copies of all the pages and will search the text in response to aquery, presenting the relevant excerpts.As an armchair copyright lawyer, I can't figure out how it matters that Google grabbed one book with a bot and grabbed the other with a scanner. Google grabs the full text of copyrighted works all the time --56,000on this server alone. If Google Print is illegal, wouldn't Google be illegal as well?Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.Bill Bennett's Reproducible ErrorEugene Robinson of theWashington Postresponds to Bill Bennett'son-air musingabout blacks and abortion:He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett's remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite discourse.Bennettquit his jobas chairman of the board of the educational curriculum company K12 this weekend, claiming to be the victim of a"coordinated campaign willfully distorting my views, my record, and my statements."I spoke to a producer of theEd Schultzradio show yesterday who told me exactly how this vast left-wing conspiracy began. Schultz heard Bennett's show while driving, couldn't believe his ears, and asked his producer to see if Media Matters had the audio.Media Mattersran the audio, dozens of bloggerspicked it up, and the media followed the story.Bennett probably could have aborted this controversy with an apology, but humilitymust be missingfrom his book of virtues:A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment.Why do people always wrap themselves in the First Amendment when their words get them into trouble? I'm not clear on how criticizing Bennett is any less an expression of free speech than his expressed belief that blacks are more prone to criminality.Don't Fall for Scamazon.ComConsidering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:Dear Amazon member,Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.Please follow the link below:[link removed]and update your account information.We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.Regards,Amazon Safety DepartmentNOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am adomain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager wasnot so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a freeInternet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbarthat warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database,alerting menot to visit before I loaded the page.The toolbar displaysdetailed informationabout each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links opendetailed reportson each site. [New Window]
safe in sf15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SFMK Video PromoAvideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"trippy plantsThisvideoreally tripped me out the first time I saw it.Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The NetherlandsDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Wednesday October 20th 2005 #263Daily Source Code for Thursday October 20th 2005 #263From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
Nude Dancer Denudes WalletToday'sNew York Timeshas an op-ed defending the right of strip clubs torip off their clientele:With many customers, fawning is key. What a stripper sells is not her ability to dance or take off her clothes, but her ability to suspend the customer's disbelief.If she is doing her job right, his bald spot and his mortgage cease to exist, and he enters an adolescent fantasy of sexual prowess, temporarily transformed into James Bond, Han Solo and Hugh Hefner all rolled into one. The dancers keep cooing and flattering until the money runs out. It's not duplicitous; it's what the patron signs up for.The author of the essay is Elizabeth Eaves, a former stripper who has turned the experience into a work of scholarship:Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power.There's something poetic about a stripper who hates her customers so much she believes her job is to bankrupt them, since there isn't a lot of respect coming in the other direction of the"shake your moneymakers"business.Eaves has anextremely low opinionof the men whose wallets she used to lay bare:I don't have a lot of respect for these men. I don't think they're evil people, but I think that they're weak. I see visiting strip clubs as a form of cheating; I'm bothered by the idea that women are for sale, and I see this in many aspects of our society.$500,000 for a Flying FishThere may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner."There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.Everyone Who Uses Must ConvergeLast March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible andThe Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully.Wall Street Journalpundit Peggy Noonan wasdeeply movedby the incident:Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours.Thisis Nichols's mug shot.Thisis Nichols's face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.Something changed.Something happened. ...It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.Something did happen. Smith revealed a secret in hernew memoirthat she kept from police, the press, and Peggy -- during the ordeal, she gave Nichols some of hercrystal meth:... as the night wore on -- after Nichols had snorted some of Smith's meth -- she tried to win Nichols' trust by talking about her faith in God and relating to him her personal stories. ...She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying,"Let go and let God."In the short term,crystal methbrings reduced fatigue and adeep feelingof well-being, intelligence and power. (In the long term,not so much).Noonan found in Nichols' transformation a redemptive Easter miracle:This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.Oops.Update: Lee Siegel, a critic for theNew Republic, questioned Smith's story from the beginning, faulting the broadcast media for spinning a fable that omitted her criminal record, the circumstances of her husband's murder and the reason she lost custody of her child.Brownie Backs Brown-NoserThe White House has enlisted a new ally in the effort to seat Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court:Conservative activist Michael D. Brown said internal GOP polling being cited by party and administration emissaries purports to show that"70 percent of self-identified conservative voters have a favorable impression of Harriet Miers."The emissaries are warning that ordinary Republicans beyond the Washington Beltway continue to support the nomination because they trust President Bush, even after several weeks of conservative opposition to her, according to several conservative Miers critics who have been courted by the White House.The administration is"disappointed that conservatives inside the Beltway are fighting among ourselves over this nomination, and it fuels the fires for our enemies, for Democrats,"said Mr. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director.Brown also gave Miers 500 bottles of water and $200,000 in federal relief to replace a tree outside her Dallas home that was toppled by Hurricane Rita.Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLsI've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank.SportsFilterjumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins withwwwand one that doesn't -- for the same site.Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at eithermydd.comorwww.mydd.com.When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of"301 moved permanently,"which indicates a permanent move, rather than"302 found,"which may be temporary.If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links towww.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links tomydd.com, giving it PR 6.The site's hosted with Apache, so ifmod_rewriteis installed, a two-line.htaccessfile in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:RewriteEngine onRewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it atBuzzwordand am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs onTechnorati, onlyDooceandKottke.Orgaren't giving up some rank.And the Booker Goes To ...There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of theBooker Prize for Fictionis one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows uponSurvivorfinales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.The Booker's such a big deal there's atell-all bookcoming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.This year's Booker, announced live last night on British TV, went to Irish novelist John Banville forThe Sea, a novel of a grieving man returning to a vacation spot where something very bad happened in his youth. (The titleThe Prince of Tideswas already taken.)Banville put some work into this victory. He shredded a critically acclaimed book,Saturdayby former Booker winner Ian McEwan, and may have contributed to the"dismayingly bad book"being left off the list of finalists for 2005.The review's on afor-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidsonbloggedthe good parts:It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.Something of the kind seems to have happened here.Saturdayis a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however,Saturdayhas the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth BombA letter toNational ReviewcolumnistDavid Frum:I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system.I'm considering abandoning them after watching how such advocacy often turns into a negative blotch on an attorney's resume and a disqualifier for any high level judiciary or executive service ...Since the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the most fascinating political site on the web has beenConfirm Them, a weblog created by Republican activists to support the confirmation of President Bush's judicial appointments.Miers has made a mockery of the site's name, splitting conservative contributors into angry pro- and anti-Miers camps. They were gearing up for a fight to get an openly conservative jurist with an established track record past the Senate, but instead have been handed another stealth nominee whose judicial philosophy must be taken on faith.No conservative had the White House counsel on their short list of prospective choices, according toGeorge Willin one of the greatest insults in the history of punditry:... there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.Snap! You go, George!Stealth nominees have a strategic short-term advantage that makes it difficult to keep them off the court, so it's likely that Miers will be confirmed unless President Bush withdraws the nomination, which ranks in probability somewhere between"no chance in hell"and"never in a million years."The president's so stubborn that were he captain of the Titanic, he would have run the ship into a second iceberg to prove he meant to hit the first one.There's a long-term price for filling the Supreme Court in secrecy, as this clerk's letter illustrates. Conservatives have built an intellectual foundation for their interpretation of constitutional law over a quarter century, as embodied by theFederalist Societyand the embrace oforiginalism.Neither Bush appointment has publicly nurtured this movement during their careers. In some instances, they've even distanced themselves from it. When asked her most admired Supreme Court justice, Miersdid not chooseJustices Scalia or Thomas. When John Roberts showed up in a Federalist Society membership directory, the White House issued aquick denial, stating that he"has no recollection of being a member."Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute vice president and society member, was stunned to see Robertsrun away from the associationas if Joseph McCarthy was after him."Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?"If you're a 25-year-old conservative who graduated Harvard Law first in your class and clerks for Chief Justice Roberts, do you spend the next 20 years contributing to law journals, actively participating in the Federalist Society and seeking a judgeship from which you can foster conservative jurisprudence?Clearly, if you have supreme ambitions, the answer is no. By choosing Roberts and Miers, Bush has publicly affirmed the notion that judicial conservatives believe in an ideology that dare not speak its name. Friends of Clarence are the new Friends of Dorothy, forced to develop furtive code phrases to seek each other out -- just like how President Bush namedropsDred Scottas a double-secret shout out toanti-abortion activists."I couldn't help but overhear what you said aboutGriswold v. Connecticutat the bar, friend. Want to take this someplace more private so we can disrespectstare decisisaway from all of these living constitutionalists?"Harriet Miers is the best thing to happen to liberals since the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. I hope she has a sister.In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride. [New Window]
Chief Justice Denies Stay in BlackBerry CaseThe maker of BlackBerry e-mail devices lost an emergency Supreme Court appeal that sought to suspend a long-running patent suit against the company.THE ASSOCIATED PRESSEngineers Make Leap in Optical NetworksA team of engineers has discovered how to switch a beam of laser light on and off up to 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.JOHN MARKOFFQ.&A.: Fax Software for Windows XPIs it possible to get the fax software added to Windows XP like the built-in fax ability that was included in previous versions of Windows?J.D. BIERSDORFERSprint Nextel Beats Estimates in First Report Since MergerThe Sprint Nextel Corporation posted sales and pro forma income that narrowly beat Wall Street estimates.MATT RICHTEL [New Window]
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesAttention TechSteve Gillmor's dailyAttention Techis now available as a podcastDaily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1From Curry Condo, San Francisco CaliforniaDirectlinkto the video.I got a video iPod yesterday, subscribed to a multitude of video Podcasts. Quite interestingMy own experimentation with the platform starts with this short'cast of Curry Condo.If you own a video iPod, it should show up automatically under Video Podcasts. Lemme know if it worked![Details of clip]Recorded with an iSight on a G4 Powerbook (the new one!)Edited in iMovie on a G5 iMac (a new one!)Exported as'Quicktime to iPod'iPod VideoIf you have one of the new iPods,thismay look cool on it. I've added it to the Daily Source Code podcast feed, should work fine in iTunes as well.Daily Source Code for Thursday October 27th 2005 #268Daily Source Code for Thursday October 27th 2005 #268From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
Promo UploadsI’m still getting used to all the functions of Wordpress and haven’t enabled file upload yet, but you should be able topost a promoand point the URL for the enclosure to a file on any server.XJ Super V8XJ Super V8Originally uploaded byadamcurry.Presenting the new Curry Cruiser!Details in Today's Source CodeDaily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes#273 Daily Source Code for Thursday November 3d 2005#273Daily Source Code for Thursday November 3d 2005From Curry Cottage, Guildford, United KingdomDirectLinkto the showSubscribe to thefeedSubscribe withiTunesOn the talking tip today!Time-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Friday October 28th 2005 #269Daily Source Code for Friday October 28th 2005 #269From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
David Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and HandyThe new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.DAVID POGUE [New Window]
Basics: Deleted but Not GoneMaintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.THOMAS J. FITZGERALDMicrosoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and YahooMicrosoft is offering two new advertising-supported Web services, Windows Live and Office Live, as a direct response to competitors'challenges.JOHN MARKOFFAdvertising: CBS to Acquire CSTV for$325 Million in StockViacom announced that the new CBS Corporation would acquire CSTV Networks, a cable channel and confederation of Web sites that focus entirely on college sports.RICHARD SANDOMIRDavid Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and HandyThe new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.DAVID POGUEBuying: Stores Look for a Niche as Gadgets Grow UpIf the prices for high-tech gadgets are slightly out of reach for the average Wal-Mart shopper, that is fine by the company. In fact, it is by design.MICHAEL BARBAROVideo Games Are Facing Soft DemandElectronic Arts became the second major video game maker this week to warn that it was seeing soft demand from retailers as it heads into the holiday season.MATT RICHTELDavid Pogue: 10 Ways to Please Us, the CustomersDear electronics makers, you should worship at the altar of good design and make customer satisfaction your religion. These should be your commandments. [New Window]
Funds could move on C&W, says chief (FT.com)FT.com - Richard Lapthorne, chairman of Cable and Wireless, on Tuesday signalled the UK's second-largest fixed-line telecoms network operator could become a takeover target for private equity funds following a recent profits warning.U.S. wireless carriers take aim at adult content (Reuters)Reuters - With Internet and video more readilyavailable on wireless phones, the major U.S. carriers onTuesday unveiled guidelines aimed at limiting children's accessto adult content and services.Samsung Denies Plans for Music Service (PC World)PC World - Online store isn't in development, just a new interface, company says now.Microsoft sees up to 3 mln early Xbox 360 sales (Reuters)Reuters - Microsoft Corp. onTuesday said it expects to sell as many as 3 million Xbox 360sin the first three months after its launch -- a strong start inits battle to dominate the market for next-generation gamingconsoles.Worm Targets Linux Systems (NewsFactor)NewsFactor - A new worm that attacks Linux systems and exploits several vulnerabilities in the operating system has been reported, and security firms are urging caution among users.Analyst: Security Will Drive Windows-to-Mac Switch (NewsFactor)NewsFactor - A financial analyst predicts that the ubiquity of computer viruses, and Apple's success in its music ventures, will drive more and more Windows users to switch to Macs.Quest Software Shares Rise on 3Q Results (AP)AP - Shares of Quest Software Inc. rose sharply, a day after the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations.Verizon Reduces Prices for Phone Service (AP)AP - Verizon Communications Inc. sharply cut its prices for unlimited telephone service across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic on Tuesday, including markets where Cablevision Inc. has just boosted broadband Internet speeds.FCC Clarifies VoIP Disconnection Deadline (AP)AP - The Federal Communications Commission won't require Internet phone service providers to cut off customers who don't have reliable 911 emergency call service. [New Window]
MSN expects China to be top five market by 2010 (Reuters)Reuters - Microsoft Corp.'s Internet unit, MSN,expects China to become one of its top five markets by 2010,fueled by growing demand for its popular email and searchengine software, executives said.Study finds TiVo losing ground among DVR users (Reuters)Reuters - TiVo Inc. has created adigital video recorder with a name that has worked its way intothe American lexicon, but its reputation among users andwould-be users is beginning to erode amid generic competitors,according to a new study that relies on Internet buzz to studyconsumers'opinion. [New Window]
Microsoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and YahooMicrosoft is offering two new advertising-supported Web services, Windows Live and Office Live, as a direct response to competitors'challenges.JOHN MARKOFFBasics: Deleted but Not GoneMaintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.THOMAS J. FITZGERALDJumpy Enough to Chew a Chair? Try DogCatRadioA new Internet radio station for pets aims to keep the loneliness at bay while owners are out.DINITIA SMITHDesign: Style Meets Function, and Technology Gets a Human TouchLike many new technologies, dongles - the tiny sticks that attach to computer ports and transport files from one computer to another, have been designed in many guises.PHIL PATTONDell Says New Focus Will Cut Into ProfitDell Inc. warned that its shift in strategy to focus on higher profit margins would result in lower-than-expected revenue and earnings in the third quarter.DAMON DARLINQwest Loss Narrows in QuarterQwest Communications reported a smaller loss for the third quarter and announced a tentative$400 million settlement of shareholder lawsuits.THE ASSOCIATED PRESSE.D.S. Shifts to a ProfitThe Electronic Data Systems Corporation reported a third-quarter profit after it worked out differences with the federal government on a huge Naval contract.REUTERSInterActive Profit OffIAC/InterActiveCorp, the television and Internet-services company, said that third-quarter profit fell 25 percent on costs of spinning off the Expedia travel business.BLOOMBERG NEWSDavid Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and HandyThe new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.DAVID POGUE [New Window]
Viva BBC AmericaI caught the first episode ofViva Blackpoollast night on BBC America, a six-episode mini-series that features the most wonderfully vile lead character sinceThe Sopranos.The show's a funny drama about Ripley Holden, an Elvis-loving Brit trying to bring Vegas-style excess to Blackpool, England, in the form of the Yankee Dollar Casino. When a dead body turns up one morning, a Scottish detective shows up poking around Ripley's business (and his wife).The comparisons to Tony Soprano are unmistakeable -- Ripley's a larger-than-life oaf ruling the lives of his wife, son and daughter, and he mixes bullying and charm in a way that makes me think the U.S. will steal actorDavid Morrisseythe way we've absconded with Ricky Gervais.The strangest and most amazing thing about the show was the occasional use of musical numbers a laCop Rock. The first episode ends with a"These Boots are Made for Walkin'"dance between Holden and the detective, and though it sounds excruciatingly bad, it was so great I scrambled for the TiVo to record the show for my wife.I try to avoid watching television aside fromLaw&Orderand football, because it robs me of time I could be wasting on the web. But I'm in for the next five hours ofBlackpool, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. and has one last repeat airing of the first episode at 7 p.m. tonight.In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.Harriet's Homework HelpersA postscript on Harriet Miers, buried in aWashington Poststory on the burial of her Supreme Court aspirations:White House aides finished Miers's second response to the Senate questionnaire and delivered it at 11:40 p.m., more than three hours after she decided to abandon her nomination. The 59-page document makes it clear that the struggle to learn about her advice to Bush would have continued had she stayed in the fray. Asked for details about her work, she submitted 135 boilerplate, publicly available fact sheets on White House policies and 67 policy statements the administration has sent Congress on legislation.Miers wasn't even working on her own questionnaire! I know that Supreme Court justices often lean heavily on their clerks in drafting opinions, but you'd think a person described as"detail-oriented"in four billion media stories might have given her homework a look-see before aides turned it in.I'm beginning to wonder if she's even agood bowler.My Reign as the King of PingsI've been runningWeblogs.Comsince June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it.Weblogs.Com ran onFrontierfor six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year.In a frenzied weekend, I recoded the site as an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server, writing all of the code from scratch except forXML-Simple, an XML parsing library I adapted from code byJim Winstead. Hosting was provided byServerMatrix, which charges around $80-$140/month for a dedicated server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 1,200-gigabyte monthly bandwidth limit.On an average day, my application served 34.65 gigabytes of data, took 1.1 million pings and sent 11,000 downloads of changes.xml, a file larger than 1 megabyte. TheLAMP platformis ideal for running a high-demand web application for as little money as possible.When Dave rerouted Weblogs.Com to my new server and it instantly deluged the box with more than a dozen pings per second, I felt like Lucy Ricardo pulling chocolates off the conveyer belt.The server ran well, crashing only a few times over four months because of a spammer sending thousands of junk pings per minute. Every few days, I used theiptablesfirewall to block requests from the IP addresses of the worst abusers.Business reporterTom Foremskiand others have suggested that the Weblogs.Com sale might reveal a lack of faith in blogging as a business.I think the sale was motivated by the realization that the demands of running Weblogs.Com had become much too large for Dave's one-man company. He could either hire people and start pursuing revenue opportunities or sell the service.VeriSign got a good deal acquiring it for a reported $2 million. The company's now at the center of the blogosphere, a giant web application and information network with more than 15 million users, and ought to be able to leverage those pings into new services built on XML, XML-RPC and RSS.One thing I'd like to see is a real-time search engine built only on the last several hours of pings, which could be a terrific current news service if compiled intelligently. While I was running Weblogs.Com, I wanted to use my brief moment as the king of pings to extend the API, which VeriSign appears to beconsidering, but Dave didn't want to mess with things while companies were loading a truck with money and asking for directions to his house.I want to pursue these ideas, either independently or in concert with VeriSign andYahoo Blo.gs. No knock intended, but big companies tend to sit on purchases like this rather than implementing new features.Bloggerstill lacks category support two years after being purchased by Google, an omission so basic you have to wonder whether it's serious about fending off competition fromSix Apart,UserLand, andWordPress.Samuelo Alito and a Catholic MajorityAny legislator who is publicly supporting laws which favor abortion or euthanasia may not present himself or herself for Holy Communion. --Raymond Burke, Catholic Archbishop of St. LouisIf Judge Samuel Alito is approved by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have five Catholic justices, a religious majority that is nearly without precedent in U.S. history. He would join Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.The only time thisappearsto have happened was 1792-1793, when four of the six justices belonged to the Episcopal church: Chief Justice John Jay and Justices James Iredell, Thomas Johnson and James Wilson.The Constitution expressly forbids religious tests in consideration for public office, so there's a strong inclination against scrutiny of a nominee's religious beliefs, whether in support or opposition. With Catholics, this comes into conflict with agrowing movementwithin the church to deny sacraments to lawmakers who oppose its views on subjects like abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia.In 2002, the Vatican issued adoctrinal notestating that Catholic lawmakers must act in accordance with its teachings:John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.The Catholic Church comes into conflict with different political factions over the Vatican's voluminously documented views. John Kerry, a practicing Catholic who regularly attends mass, was publicly denied the right to communion by Archbishop Burke during the 2004 presidential campaign, an action with theapprovalof Pope Benedict XVI while he served as cardinal. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey was denied by another bishop for remarrying without getting an annulment.Up to this point, American bishops have played the communion card solely against socially liberal Democrats. There has been no comparable effort to deny Justice Scalia for his support of capital punishment, nor a rejection of Catholic politicians who favor the Iraq war.Though I'm undoubtedly going to be accused of anti-Catholic bigotry, one of my concerns with Alito's selection is the historic majority that it establishes. When the church began actively politicizing the Eucharist, it called into question how life-tenured justices will reconcile conflicts between their Constitution and their church.And the Booker Goes To ...There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of theBooker Prize for Fictionis one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows uponSurvivorfinales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.The Booker's such a big deal there's atell-all bookcoming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.This year's Booker, announced live last night on British TV, went to Irish novelist John Banville forThe Sea, a novel of a grieving man returning to a vacation spot where something very bad happened in his youth. (The titleThe Prince of Tideswas already taken.)Banville put some work into this victory. He shredded a critically acclaimed book,Saturdayby former Booker winner Ian McEwan, and may have contributed to the"dismayingly bad book"being left off the list of finalists for 2005.The review's on afor-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidsonbloggedthe good parts:It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.Something of the kind seems to have happened here.Saturdayis a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however,Saturdayhas the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth BombA letter toNational ReviewcolumnistDavid Frum:I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system.I'm considering abandoning them after watching how such advocacy often turns into a negative blotch on an attorney's resume and a disqualifier for any high level judiciary or executive service ...Since the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the most fascinating political site on the web has beenConfirm Them, a weblog created by Republican activists to support the confirmation of President Bush's judicial appointments.Miers has made a mockery of the site's name, splitting conservative contributors into angry pro- and anti-Miers camps. They were gearing up for a fight to get an openly conservative jurist with an established track record past the Senate, but instead have been handed another stealth nominee whose judicial philosophy must be taken on faith.No conservative had the White House counsel on their short list of prospective choices, according toGeorge Willin one of the greatest insults in the history of punditry:... there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.Snap! You go, George!Stealth nominees have a strategic short-term advantage that makes it difficult to keep them off the court, so it's likely that Miers will be confirmed unless President Bush withdraws the nomination, which ranks in probability somewhere between"no chance in hell"and"never in a million years."The president's so stubborn that were he captain of the Titanic, he would have run the ship into a second iceberg to prove he meant to hit the first one.There's a long-term price for filling the Supreme Court in secrecy, as this clerk's letter illustrates. Conservatives have built an intellectual foundation for their interpretation of constitutional law over a quarter century, as embodied by theFederalist Societyand the embrace oforiginalism.Neither Bush appointment has publicly nurtured this movement during their careers. In some instances, they've even distanced themselves from it. When asked her most admired Supreme Court justice, Miersdid not chooseJustices Scalia or Thomas. When John Roberts showed up in a Federalist Society membership directory, the White House issued aquick denial, stating that he"has no recollection of being a member."Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute vice president and society member, was stunned to see Robertsrun away from the associationas if Joseph McCarthy was after him."Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?"If you're a 25-year-old conservative who graduated Harvard Law first in your class and clerks for Chief Justice Roberts, do you spend the next 20 years contributing to law journals, actively participating in the Federalist Society and seeking a judgeship from which you can foster conservative jurisprudence?Clearly, if you have supreme ambitions, the answer is no. By choosing Roberts and Miers, Bush has publicly affirmed the notion that judicial conservatives believe in an ideology that dare not speak its name. Friends of Clarence are the new Friends of Dorothy, forced to develop furtive code phrases to seek each other out -- just like how President Bush namedropsDred Scottas a double-secret shout out toanti-abortion activists."I couldn't help but overhear what you said aboutGriswold v. Connecticutat the bar, friend. Want to take this someplace more private so we can disrespectstare decisisaway from all of these living constitutionalists?"Harriet Miers is the best thing to happen to liberals since the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. I hope she has a sister.Stuart Smalley: Bush Needs TherapyStuart Smalley made his first appearance onAl Franken's radio showFriday, venturing into politics to discuss tabloid rumors that the president has returned to the bottle (attached podcast).I'm surprised it took so long to hear from the caring nurturer, who believes the president should get into an anonymous recovery group, regardless of whether or not he's drinking:Right away. Imagine the stress. There but for the grace of God go I. If I were president, I'd be a complete wreck. I'd be doing a worse job than him, I really believe that. If that's possible. [New Window]
safe in sf15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SFPodsfae xmas tunesAfter a discussion on the source code, a list ofpodsafe christmas musicappeared in the shownotes. These songs can be recorded or performed by anyone.Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260From Curry Cottage, Guildford United KingdomDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesMK Video PromoAvideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"Daily Source Code for Friday October 21st 2005 #264Daily Source Code for Friday October 21st 2005 #264From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261From Curry Condo, San Francisco, CaliforniaDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
Its alive22:08 Powerbook booted from the drive. iTunes opened by itself and started downloading podcasts. The entire system is responding slow, took quite a while for the CD to eject after I dragged it to the trash. I have not done anything else yet. Suggestions?PodShow JobcastA short PodShowJobCast. We're hiring!Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The NetherlandsDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260From Curry Cottage, Guildford United KingdomDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotes [New Window]
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Wednesday October 5th 2005 #254Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 5th 2005 #254From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesdead powerbookRight after I recorded today's DSC my PowerBook gave up. It no longer can boot from the harddrive. Booting from the install disk to use disk utilities gives no joy, as disk utilities can't see the drive at all.On boot up I hear the drive spinning and crunching, but it either stays greyscreen, flashes the'can't find system'icon or defaults eventually to the CD for boot.Since I'm still usingRadio UserLandto update the podcast feed (really must change that -ed) I can't post and thus you can't get the show in iTunes or any other podcatcher software.Any help is ofcourse greatly appreciated. Listen to DSC-255 to hear what steps I took in cleaning up the health of my drive before is hosed out...Update: On one of my many boot attempts, I got the PB to boot from thje install disk, and am able to see the Macintosh HD volume. I decided to cp -R that entire volume to my 100GB Firewire drive before doing anything else. At least the data is now safe :)If I can't get it fixed, I will use the Firewire drive on my other mac to post the DSC feed through Radio Userland...Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UKDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownotesDaily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The NetherlandsDirectLinkto the showTime-code basedShownoteschanges.xml?Cngratulations to Dave Winer on hisdealwith Verisign. Sounds like he sold weblogs.com for all the right reasons. One question I have: will thechanges.xmlfile remain available to the rest of the ping-infrastructure?one more thingHeh, I waswrong!lovin'the community shownotesNow these are greatcommunity shownotes, with pictures and links galore!Google Reader ~ Not bad!Plenty of pushback on the new Google RSSReader.At first glance it didn't look like the typical usefulRiver Of Newsthat I enjoy so much, but after a quick and effortless import of my 400 subscription opml file, I kinda got the hang of it.I like the shortcuts, same keyboard commands used in GMail, of whichI'm a big fan. Seeing your feeds sorted by relevance of each story isan interesting experience, sorting by date shows the top level of theriver. Enclosures in audio pop up an embedded player for immediateaudio gratification.Still fooling around with it, very promising for sure. [New Window]
I.T. Firms Push Next-Generation Internet (NewsFactor)NewsFactor - Rollout of the next generation of Internet Protocol technology is moving ahead with Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) and Global Crossing announcing that the companies are starting to deploy IP version 6 (IPv6) systems.In Brief: Zend Core for Oracle available (InfoWorld)InfoWorld - Oracle and Zend Technologies have announced that Zend Core for Oracle for IBM AIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris, and the beta version of Zend Core for Oracle for the Windows platform are now available. [New Window]
Court Nixes Full Appeal in Blackberry SuitA federal court on Friday denied Research In Motion Ltd.'s request for the full court to rehear its appeal of a long-running patent suit in which the maker of BlackBerry e-mail devices has been found guilty of infringement.BRUCE MEYERSONRobotic Hummer Gets Pole in Robot RaceFONTANA, Calif. -- A driverless red Hummer snagged the pole position Wednesday in a government-sponsored sequel race across the Mojave Desert that will pit 23 robots against one another.ALICIA CHANGWorldSpace StumblesJudging from what happened before WorldSpace Inc. went public in August, the Silver Spring-based satellite radio service should have pulled off Washington's hottest initial public offering since the Roaring '90s.Jerry KnightYahoo CEO Belittles Google's ExpansionSAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo Inc. Chairman Terry Semel belittled rival Google Inc.'s recent efforts to expand beyond its leading Internet search engine, describing the diversification as a haphazard attempt to catch up with his company.MICHAEL LIEDTKEMCI Investors Approve Sale To VerizonMCI Inc. shareholders yesterday approved the Ashburn company's $8.5 billion acquisition by Verizon Communications Inc., bringing the deal a step closer to completion.Arshad MohammedChina to Develop Its Own DVD FormatSHANGHAI, China -- For the second time in two years, China has announced plans to develop its own next-generation DVD standard to break the monopoly of foreign companies and avoid paying heavy licensing fees.CHRISTOPHER BODEEN [New Window]
Arcadia nets Philip Green 1.2bnEntrepreneur Philip Green's firms get a dividend of 1.2bn from Arcadia, a sum he says is"conservative".Deal offer on religious hate lawRowan Atkinson is among campaigners proposing a compromise on religious hate laws to protect free speech. [New Window]
[New Window]
Resentment Flares Over Fees for Internet Access at HotelsThe backlash against being charged for Internet access at four-star hotels has been building for years, especially among younger business travelers.JOE SHARKEYAt Dartmouth, a Remote-Controlled RobotResearchers at Dartmouth College have built what they say is the world's smallest untethered, controllable robot.KENNETH CHANGGoogle Earmarks$265 Million for Charity and Social CausesGoogle gave the first details of how it would carry out its commitment to devote a share of its lucrative public stock offering to charity and social causes.SAUL HANSELLTucked in Katrina Relief, a Boon for Online CollegesA Senate bill proposing assistance for pupils and educators affected by Hurricane Katrina might offer a potential bonanza for profit-making online colleges.SAMUEL G. FREEDMANCellular-Free Enclaves Fight to Save Pay PhonesResidents of towns that get no cellphone reception are determined to keep pay phones from disappearing entirely.KATIE ZEZIMAAdvanced Micro Earnings Climb 73%Advanced Micro Devices said that its third-quarter profit rose 73 percent on sales of chips used in laptop and server computers.BLOOMBERG NEWS [New Window]
Shutdown on safety row Tube lineServices on one of London's busiest tube lines are suspended amid safety concerns.MoD 'letting down armed forces'The Armed Forces may go without vital equipment because of Ministry of Defence failings, MPs say.Diary: S Asia quake aid workerShaista Aziz, a UK-based Oxfam aid worker, keeps a diary for the BBC News website after flying to Pakistan's quake-hit capital.Are you affected by the Asia quake?Aid is now pouring into regions hit by the earthquake, after relief efforts were held up by heavy rain.Two guilty of killing Danielle BeccanTwo men are jailed for life for killing schoolgirl Danielle Beccan in a random drive-by shooting in Nottingham.Police stations 'used as jails'A massive rise in the prison population leads to prisoners being held in police station cells.Syrian minister 'commits suicide'Syria's Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan has committed suicide, the official news agency in Damascus says.Football: Ireland crash outThe Republic of Ireland are out of the World Cup as Switzerland clinch a place in the play-offs. [New Window]
Temptation Near for Military's Problem GamblersMilitary gambling is a big business, with about$2 billion flowing through military-owned slot machines on overseas bases each year.DIANA B. HENRIQUESHoliday Shopping Before the First Heating BillAdvertisers and retailers, worried that fuel prices will crimp spending on holiday shopping later this fall, are moving up their Christmas pitches.STUART ELLIOTTDecision Is Delayed on Diabetes Drug That Lowers CholesterolBristol-Myers Squibb and Merck had a setback in their plans to market a diabetes medication that aims to control blood sugar while also lowering cholesterol.STEPHANIE SAULHow a Big Investor Fell Into the Refco DealRefco's bankruptcy filing paves the way for J. Christopher Flowers to pursue his purchase of the company's futures trading and derivatives clearing unit.ERIC DASH and JENNY ANDERSONUlcer Drug ChallengeAstraZeneca said that Ranbaxy Laboratories of India had applied to U.S. regulators to make a version of AstraZeneca's ulcer drug Nexium.BLOOMBERG NEWS [New Window]
DeLay in first court appearanceLeading US Republican Tom DeLay seeks a new judge in his first appearance in court since his indictment.Is bird flu a serious threat?UK scientists are carrying out tests to see if a parrot that died from bird flu in quarantine had the H5N1 strain. Send us your comments. [New Window]
Samsung to Pay $300M Fine for Price FixingWASHINGTON -- Samsung, the world's largest maker of memory chips for computers and other gadgets, will pay a $300 million fine to settle accusations it secretly conspired with industry rivals to fix prices and cheat customers, federal officials said Thursday.TED BRIDISPanel Sounds Alarm On Science EducationA rising competitive threat from abroad could undermine the nation's standard of living and its position in the world -- and the United States must take dramatic steps to ensure its economic future, a panel of prominent scientists and business leaders declared yesterday.Justin Gillis [New Window]
|
