Not only is 1964’s Little Golden Book The Good Humor Man a great example of early product placement (masquerading as a treatise on the delights of suburban life in the summertime, there’s hardly a page that doesn’t sing the praises of licking Good Humor brand ice cream), it’s also riddled with vague and not-so-vague homoerotic references (see images). At least they seem that way to us, seen through modern eyes conditioned by media to scan constantly for veiled references. We could be wrong - it could all be completely innocent, the naive voice of an older writer creating a children’s book in the early 60s. Regardless, the book is a gas. Miles, of course, is blissfully unaware of the undertones - he’s more concerned that Bobby left his boats to go get ice cream, and the fact that the bunny rabbits hanging out by the fence didn’t get a lick.

If passed, the Induce Act would make it possible to sue anyone who makes a device that can arguably be used to “induce” a consumer to infringe copyright. That, by many people’s reckoning, would apply to DVD burners, iPods, copy machines, word processors, and even the pencil.

Ernest Miller points to a mock lawsuit (fake Apple complaint) drafted by EFF attorneys to show what a case against the iPod might look like under the Induce Act.

Before the introduction of portable digital music players, the value of the music files derived from infringing sources was limited by the fact that computer users generally had to be sitting at their computers in order to play and enjoy them. Defendant Apple knew this and hence made the calculated decision to intentionally induce and enhance the attractiveness of infringement by providing these infringers with a device to enhance the rewards of their illegal labors – the iPod.

Good discussion following Miller’s post. But Brad Hutchings note that the RIAA has actually endorsed Apple’s FairPlay DRM model is beside the point — open this door and The Man gets an opportunity to block any manner of innovative technology equally capable of respecting or breaking the law (the crowbar and spraypaint also come to mind as examples of technologies that have both legal and illegal applications).

Thanks mneptok.

From CNN:

A German who had his lower jaw cut out because of cancer has enjoyed his first meal in nine years — a bratwurst sandwich — after surgeons grew a new jaw bone in his back muscle and transplanted it to his mouth in what experts call an “ambitious” experiment.

The guy lost a jaw and half his tongue to cancer, didn’t eat a solid meal for nine years, had a new jaw grown in his own back, and can now eat steak! But he complains to his doctor that since he has no teeth, he has to cut the steak into such tiny pieces that it gets cold before he’s finished. Now that’s what I call grateful!

Birdhouse hosting welcomes nonfictionphoto.com — absolutely stunning images by recent J-School graduate Scott Squire. His photographs of street kids in Bucharest, Romanian orphanages, Cairo cafe culture, and portraits of life along the Nile river nail the gap between fine art and hard photojournalism. Amy and I recently purchased a print of one of Scott’s images from the Cairo cafe series - will be hanging in our living room soon. Welcome, Scott.

Update: Scott was at the Republican National Convention, photographing both the protest scene and images from the convention floor. He’s added images from the RNC to the site.

At the J-School, we loan out tons of equipment to students and faculty - still and video cameras, projectors, laptops, minidisc recorders, microphones, etc. We’ve long struggled to find ways to keep track of everything, and to prevent items and rooms from being double-booked. There are a bunch of commercial apps out there (like ye olde Meeting Maker) designed for resource scheduling, but they’re expensive, and we’re dealing with a deep UC budget crunch.

Last week I went looking for open source solutions - just knew there had to be a free equivalent of Meeting Maker out there. Found and tried several, but settled on phpScheduleIt. We’re blown away. This app is of such high quality - cleanly designed, object-oriented, manages unlimited numbers of schedules (so we can have one for multimedia skills students, one for the radio program, one for faculty, one for booking classrooms, etc.), fine-grained permissions system… And because it’s written in PHP, I’ve been able to hack out a few features that didn’t suit our needs. Slowly but surely, I’m going to automate myself out of a job (yeah, right).

Students are back in full force and we’ve hit the ground running — yet another summer passes without touching 95% of my to-do list.

Otherpower.com has cool photo essays on dozens of home-brew alternative energy sources, most of which are actually in use, supplying power to a collective of inventors / fringe-dwellers. Their newest addition (although this one is more of a joke than a viable power source) is the hamster-powered alternator. Also dug the two-way Banki turbine (which turns water energy into power on both the inflow and the outflow), and the Volvo disk brake alternator.

Otherpower.com’s headquarters is located in a remote part of the Northern Colorado mountains, 15 miles past the nearest power pole or phone line. All of our houses and shops run on only solar, wind, water and generator power…not because we are trying to make some sort of political or environmental statement, but because these are the only options available. And we refuse to move to town.

Scientists are pretty convinced at this point that Mars once held water, but other curious features on the surface have turned out to be the mission’s own footprints — strange flower-like patterns in the Martian dust are imprints from seams in the landing airbags, and shiny objects in the distance turn out to be discarded heat shields.

Unfortunately, the operating system on the Rover has taken to rebooting itself every time they download data from the craft. Appears there’s an issue with the FAT-formatted memory card in the craft, which leads to the OS thinking it’s out of memory when it isn’t. Talk about shipping with bugs.

Note: This post has been changed from the original - the cnet article implies that DOS was involved, when the OS is actually by WindRiver — I was taken aback. Nevermind…

A couple of days with Dad at his place in Pioneer, last hurrah before the students return. So much woodland you’d expect to find mostly hippies and Grizzly Adams types, but there are flags flying over every unpaved driveway. Deer and dogs dart in and out of yards. Neighbors stop to visit in the middle of dinner, make themselves comfy. Neighbor nails a sign to a tree: “Parking reserved for world’s best grandpa.” Another neighbor “invents” a mechanized, driveable rake from spare Jeep parts for scooping up pine needles. A rough-hewn, hand-carved bear holding a freshly caught fish… with a flag sticking out of its head. Smell of propane wafts from motor homes. Dad at 70 cutting down trees from his own proppity for firewood, splitting massive slices with a hydraulic log splitter (impressive power!). He had forced air installed but after a few weeks decided it was making him a nancy boy, and returned to the pot-belly stove for warmth. Bees are having a field day this summer, worse than flies. Sirloin injected with teriyaki sauce, hot summer corn, perfect watermelon. Miles collecting pine cones, thrilled to spy deer in the trees. Pictured: Jeep rake and Saddest. Yard ornament. Ever.

News.com on Microsoft’s record of cultural insensitivity - some examples of which have cost the convicted monopolist big time. Examples cited include a game in which the chanting of the Koran was used as a backing track, and another in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques.

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Artist Jeff Johnson created a poster to advertise an upcoming gallery show. The poster was a set of statistics — just words and numbers, artfully presented — cataloguing the toll of war on both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi fighters and civilians. But rather than stopping with the usual body count, Johnson’s poster:

… goes on to deconstruct the carnage in exhaustive physical detail: 3,042 pounds of brain matter, 380,422 teeth, 983 tons of flesh and bone, 131,180 fingers.

The newspaper it was supposed to run in refused to publish the ad, saying it was “in poor taste,” though they refused to divulge their “Standards of Good Taste.”

No profanity. No graphics. Just a set of statistics. How can statistics be in poor taste? I suppose a pro-war poster would be in good taste? Some people have a funny sense of taste. The poster is reproduced here.

Scripting my butt off. On request of a customer, just finished developing mtblogmail, a PHP utility that emails weblog summaries to a mailing list or the MT Notifications list at regular intervals, filling a mysterious void in the MT notifications feature (”Sure,” I said, “cake! A few SQL queries and…” turned out to be a full-blown utility). Released it as free software. Tested it here first, and migrated everyone who was on the birdhouse notifications list into subscribers. To get weekly email updates on recent birdhouse posts, enter your email in the box to the right.

Also just turned in final project for the shell programming class — a menu-driven script that creates / deletes users and groups, generates apache configurations, installs SpamAssassin preference files, configures webalizer or awstats, reports spam and virus traffic for the user and domain, etc. The instructor asked me to be a T.A. in the class next semester, but no have time.

Musicologists are discovering similarities between Islamic holy music and early American blues — similarities that go beyond the likelihood of coincidence. Have a listen. The parallel is pretty striking. What’s the connection?

It’s really there because of all the Muslim slaves from West Africa who were taken by force to the United States for three centuries, from the 1600s to the mid-1800s. Upward of 30 percent of the African slaves in the United States were Muslim, and an untold number of them spoke and wrote Arabic, historians say now.

So if most great American music — all of rock history and all of jazz — ultimately grows out of early blues, then by extension, American musical heritage is tied intimately to the music of Islam.

Overheard from the dining room, wife to baby, after seeing a particularly dense and complex scribble he had done on the Etch-A-Sketch:

“I love you, Miles. I think you’re intense, provocative, and fascinating.”

The fact that Miles is not yet two is immaterial.

The AirPort Express has worked as advertised — when it works. Trouble with our house is that the layout forces WiFi signal to pass through the fridge/stove and through a dense wall. The reception light on the AX has always blinked, indicating that it’s out of range even though it’s less than 50′ from my Mac. It worked, but picking up the cordless phone or using the microwave would cut the tunes. With a tot in the house, we use the microwave a lot. Finally decided to run ethernet cable under the house and hardwire the damn thing.

Drilled a hole between the baseboard and the wall similar to how the phone cord is wired, but hit a joist and didn’t have a long enough bit to go all the way down (hole’s okay, barely noticeable). Plan B: Remove cover plate from the adjacent wall socket, drill just next to the box, and put a hole in the cover plate to match. Pushed 50′ of CAT-5 into the hole, put on old clothes and knee pads, and ventured into the crawlspace. Here’s where it gets fun.

Our office was built after the rest of the house, and has its own foundation. Turns out the main crawlspace doesn’t offer access to the space under the office (hereafter referred to as “the crypt of shacker”). The only access is from a tiny opening under the deck. Shimmying Navy Seal-style on mildewy ground, rocks under belly, dark. A hole in the main foundation opened up to the crypt. Trouble is, we had central heat installed when we moved in, and the opening was mostly filled by a 12″ conduit, leaving a space just about large enough for a cat. I’m somewhat larger than a cat. Exhaled all my air, arms forward, and pushed forward with my toes, praying I wouldn’t get stuck. Came close to backing out, lungs squished, elbows munged, but got through, shimmied forward up to the wall… only to find that the cable wasn’t there waiting for me. Apparently bunched up against the same joist I had hit with the drill. Backed out to startling daylight.

Back in the office, went to pull the cable back out… and it was caught, apparently tangled inside. Tug, cajole, sweet-talk, nothing worked. Finally had to cut it off. Now there’s 50′ of CAT-5 permanently entombed in our office wall. It was then I came up with Plan C: use the heating duct itself! Pushed aside some flashing with a screwdriver, and bingo — I could see dirt. Spooled in more cable, then back into the crypt of shacker. Upside down, threading a tangle of wire wherever I could, no reasonable way to hold or position the flashlight, hair full of damp dust, sweating like a boar, finally through to the main crawlspace and finally up through a pre-existing hole in the floor behind the stereo.

Terminator crimping time — I never get it right the first time. Finally the router registered that it saw something on the other end. Went to reconfigure the AX… only to find that the Setup Assistant wouldn’t run without the now-removed Aiport card installed. The documentation only covers working with wireless networks. Later found the answer to using AX over Ethernet: Use the Aiport Admin utility, not the Express Setup. Go to the Airport tab, click Base Station Options, and check “Airport over Ethernet.” Joy to the world.

Another 30-minute project turned into half a day. All good projects are that way. Gorgeous day, too. Except for the view from the crypt.

This slashdot comment reminded me of a story that used to get tossed around at BeOS gatherings:

lcsaudio used to sell BeBoxes (remounted in a custom rackmount case) as part of our show control system. One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that a 66MHz BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.

kfccruelty.com reports that KFC won’t be opening franchises in Tibet after all. After receiving a letter from the Dalai Lama:

On behalf of my friends at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), I am writing to ask that KFC abandon its plan to open restaurants in Tibet, because your corporation’s support for cruelty and mass slaughter violate Tibetan values …

According to the beeb, KFC’s parent company says they’ve decided not to enter Tibet “because it wouldn’t be profitable.”

I wonder what would happen if The Pope wrote a letter to McDonald’s asking them not to open any more slaughterhouses in Kansas.

Thanks rinchen.

Returning from the UC-CSC conference last week, hitched a ride with a very cool UC Irvine operating systems prof. Had some interesting conversations about databases, filesystems, etc., then the conversation drifted to the topic of people’s insanely busy lives. I made some off-handed comment about time and money, and he responded without hesitation:

NO! Time is not money. You can always get money back. You can never get time back.

This Modern World has scanned evidence that “Bush was an asshole even in college.” Here seen violating major groundrules of rugby - both feet off the ground during a tackle, tackling above the shoulders, and oh, um, slugging a player hard in the face. “I’m sure by next week Karl Rove will have a collection of rugby players claiming that John Kerry was even worse…”

Just watched The Corporation with baald, feeling overwhelmed. Feel like fighting the machine. The movie is complex, huge in scope, tragic, and very entertaining. Hits like a ton of bricks. Dozens of interviews with CEOs, thinkers, economists, corporate spies. Case studies and analysis of the role of the corporation as entity that now fills a role larger than that of any church or government, and that is bound by law to hold the bottom line above all other considerations, and that is treated with the full rights of a person (but without accountability), thanks to a twist of the 14th Amendment.

So many vectors here. Amazed at the story of a city in Bolivia that was rescued from starvation by a corporation, in exchange for the right to privatize all public services, including water. Citizens ended up paying 1/4 of their wages for water, and were barred even from collecting rainwater. Amazed at the turns of events and court decisions that resulted in genes becoming patentable. Amazed at the lies of Monsanto and their pushing of Posilac to farmers (whose cows already produced more than enough milk) at great detriment to the cow and probable detriment to human health, and the legal war they started with the Fox Network, who planned to air an expose’ (two journalists ended up getting fired over it).

Revelatory, shocking, and brilliantly produced. But also depressing.

Got to check another line item from my “things to do before I die” list. Amy and I bought a few packs of ear candles several months ago and finally got around to using them. Punch a hole in a pie tin, insert ear candle with tip sticking 3″ below. Lie down, encircle ear with moist towel, snugly insert business end of hollow candle into ear, have your partner light it on fire, and lie there listening to it crackle softly. Kind of soothing, like having a miniature, non-threatening roaring fire inside your head.

About five minutes in, I heard a gurgling, then a kind of soft “whump” sound. Afterwards, found several globules of ear wax sticking to the inside of the candle, a few inches up the remnants of the tip. Not a huge amount, as I’ve heard some people experience, but enough to impress my date, er, wife.

What’s amazing is that it works at all. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but to see wax dislodge, enter the tip of the candle, wander straight uphill three inches, and re-harden again on the inner wall of the candle, is quite amazing. As if the stuff had legs and a desire to get the hell out.

Beyond the magic of the uphill wax walk and the soothing aspect, we weren’t overly impressed, probably won’t do it again. Can’t honestly say I could hear better afterwards. What I want to know is, who ever thought of doing this to begin with? Clearly this wasn’t one of those “accidental discoveries” - someone had to have really sat down and wondered how to extract deeply lodged ear wax, then thought, “I know - gentle heat and a soft vacuum, plus a jigger of capillary action… a hollow candle lighted in the ear would be just the ticket!” Truth is stranger.

Took the final exam in my shell programming class last night - very weird to do a test like that with pencil and paper rather than into a shell, but the instructor wanted the test to be black screen, closed book. The offline approach was actually very effective, since you can’t experiment until you get it right - you have to know the material cold to be able to write scripts on paper that actually work when plugged in. Still need to write a final project script - will expand some customer provisioning I’ve done for birdhouse hosting, automate a few more housekeeping tasks.

To blow off steam, needed to do something non-shell, non-class related. Piles of misc images floating around that never get used, so decided to write an image rotator in PHP and plop some of them into the sidelines. Fun, but now that it’s there, I’m not sure I like it. We’ll see. Image is rotated once per hour, so save your reload-clicking finger. Also finally canned the calendar module - does anybody ever use those? If you think the image rotator is stupid, let me know.

The hilarious parody of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” at JibJab is a victim of its own success. The copyright holders of Woody Guthrie’s original are suing JibJab for infringement (like, how many parodies of this song did you have memorized in elementary school?) The EFF has leapt to JibJab’s defense by responding with a counter-suit. Woody’s son Arlo “Alice’s Restaurant” Guthrie was interviewed on NPR, and says that his father would have loved the parody. And just how many lost record sales of the original does the copyright holder think it stands to lose, anyway? Ernest Miller has details.

Several good panels today. Berkeley took the Gold in the Sauter Awards for their Minimum Security Standards for Networked Devices (now I have policy to back up my goal of shutting down vanilla FTP for good). Saw a great demo of using video polycom devices in combination with IP-based desktop control software to deal with overcrowded classrooms, letting one instructor teach in two or more classrooms at once. Got to see up-close just how complex the campus WiFi networks really are (holy crap!). But the highlight of the day was the after-lunch tour of UC Riverside’s underground steam tunnels (phonecam image). Berkeley has these too, but I never thought I’d get to voyage through them. A trip to see the antique and the new side by side — steam for heating, briney chilled condensation on the return trip for cooling, and sparkling new harnesses of fiber optic cable snaking alongside.

In balmy Orange County for the next few days, attending the UC-wide Computing Services Conference. Shocked on arrival, expecting to pick up a quick shuttle from the airport to UC Riverside, only to discover the cheapest ride I could find was a $70 shuttle! No trains in the land where automobiles rule, and a series of buses would not have gotten me there in time. Hoping to find people to ride-share on the way back.

Drove miles through a desert pocked with strip malls and auto-body specialists, then suddenly we’re in the middle of an oasis. Downtown Riverside is really sweet, centered around the old mission. The Mission Inn is stunningly beautiful. Opening night at the California Museum of Photography, original pieces by Harold Edgerton, William Wegman, William Eggleston, many more. Largest archive of turn-of-century stereoscopic images in the world, and an immense collection of period cameras and related gear. Watched the sun set upside down from the dark innards of a camera obscura.

Tomorrow, the geekery begins.

I finally got my wish.

Despite being used for nearly two hours per day for the past couple of years, being thrown from my bike in the accident, dropped to concrete on several other occasions, used by Miles as a very small stool to reach the bathroom sink and other ignominious fates, my first-generation iPod simply would not die. The jog-wheel has been popping off lately, revealing dirt in the works, the battery has been charging down quickly, and the face-plate is badly scuffed. Lately I’ve been wishing it would just die, so I could justify a new one, but the damn thing apparently thought it was better to burn out than to fade away.

It finally stopped booting last week. Riding to work in silence was more jarring than expected. At the Apple store this morning, the girl who assisted me announced that her name was “Boots.” That’s a good name. She went into the back room to get a 20GB 4th-gen iPod and returned empty-handed. She stood before me and pronounced, “Umm… peace and love, but we’re out of stock.”

Peace and love? I’m all for it! But, what was behind the Lenon/Ono sentiment? Was she anticipating a violent, non-love reaction when I learned the truth? Did she think I was going to smack her just for being out of stock? Seeking to pre-emptively diffuse my inevitable rage with a prayer for world peace and a global bed-in? Boots! It’s OK! I understand! I dig the sentiment, but I wasn’t going to holler, really.

It all turned out for the best. After another trip to the stock-room, she found one in an opened box, with a 10% discount. I’m in heaven. Coincidentally, the Airport Express arrived yesterday, so the living room is wirelessly wired now as well. AE works perfectly, but sits on the edge of good reception — the status light blinks perennially yellow, but the audio signal is solid — no drop-outs until we run the microwave, at which point the music pauses (I don’t mean the signal drops out; iTunes actually stops moving until the signal is clear again; amazing).

Speaking of peace and love, where was it at the Democratic National Convention? Lots of rousing speeches, but the DNC was militaristic from top to bottom. Must be the price of admission back into the white house, but still found myself wishing we were watching Kucinich instead. Here’s some more peace and love from your friends at Halliburton.