Just installed Brad Choate’s SpamLookup for John Battelle’s MT installation, ditching MT-Blacklist for the time being. Looks simple on the surface, but dig into the options and you start to realize this is the next generation comment/trackback-fighting tool. Actually, it’s a whole toolbelt, including realtime distributed blacklists (which probably accomplish 95% of the dirty work alone), moderation levels and exceptions for various types of commenters, bannable wordlists, and a built-in “Passphrase” feature you can use as a human detector. This last being similar in concept to a captcha, but text-based rather than graphical. The commenter is required to answer a dirt-simple question such as “What is John’s name?,” which a bot would be hard-pressed to do. If I wasn’t having such great success with MT-Keystrokes on birdhouse, I’d install it here as well…

I want one.

The most difficult part of building the frame was to find quality bamboo rods. It took me much more time than the building itself. I visited several dealers in near surroundings and I tried to find appropriate rods of the necessary diameters from huge amount of bamboo. Finally I found a few rods I wanted, but frankly said, next time I build such a frame, I’ll rather grow my own bamboo or fly to Asia for it.

Michael Alderete recommended IT Conversations over lunch a few weeks ago, and I’ve finally started digging in. The site hosts hundreds of archived speeches in MP3 format by thinkers and players in the computer industry, all free. It’s not what you might think - these aren’t boring whiteboard transcripts of talks on XML or rising disk capacity - this is big-picture stuff, history and sociology and commentary on the whole IT sphere.

Have only listened to two so far: George Dyson on Von Neumann’s Universe, about the fabrication and evolution of the first tube-based computers at Princeton in the middle of the last century, and Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated, with a deep look at the power of “folksonomies” and the rise of organic cataloguing systems. Both were provocative start to finish, totally stimulating.

It’s like those too-rare times when you stumble on some great radio program on the way home and get so involved that you sit in the car in the driveway until it’s over so you don’t miss a word… but time-shifted, so you don’t have to sit in the car in the driveway.

Podcasting downside: No easy way to copy/paste excerpts, which makes it harder for me to convey why I find these talks so compelling.

This is the scene in front of the neighbor’s house right now — a man being extracted from a pickup truck by the jaws of life. He’ll probably live — I saw him moving his arms and legs a bit, and heard his heavy, labored breathing before the EMTs arrived (though he was not able to answer questions). Not clear exactly how it happened, probably a rolling stop gone wrong. A lot of close calls on our corner, but this is the first really serious accident since we moved in. The guy who hit him walked away unscathed, engine compartment of his Subaru collapsed like an accordion as it was designed to do.

Feel like I’ve witnessed way too much crumpled steel and broken bodies in the past two years. Please everyone: Slow the hell down, and pay attention. Just. Pay. Attention.

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to announce the launch of its brand-new, completely redesigned hosting site, along with all-new pricing and features for hosting customers. All Birdhouse users will be automatically upgraded to the new hosting packages as their accounts are migrated to the new server. We’ve also added a new business-level “Plan D” super package for gonzo users. All accounts now come with full-featured cPanel account management access, plus a big bump in the number of email addresses, lists, databases, etc. per plan. It’s like Christmas in April.

Long after Miles is supposed to be asleep last night, hear him making noises in his room. Walk in to find him with one foot up on either rail of his crib, hands on the headboard, head held high on an outstretched neck. He’s making weird smacking noises, opening his jaw wide and moshing it shut. He stops to look at me and says “This is how a giraffe eats, Daddy.” Great. While he’s supposed to be asleep, he’s in there doing giraffe impressions for an audience of one.

——

Amy takes Miles to Petco to look at hamsters and frogs. In an aquarium, one of the fish is dead, lying on the gravel. On the way home, Amy asks if he would like to have a pet. “I want a fish!” “What kind of fish?,” she asks.

“I want a died fish!”

Back in March, I ranted (and learned a lot about) the proprietary nature of the RAW image format stored in digital cameras, and the headaches caused by this non-opennness for people who simply want to shoot RAW and be able to get those images into their photo cataloguing software of choice.

Now it turns out that not only are RAW formats proprietary, they’re also sometimes encrypted, which means they can’t be read by any software other than that provided by the camera manufacturer. Photoshop is often considered the most capable software available when it comes to reading RAW images, but Adobe was so afraid of being sued under the DMCA if they reverse-engineered the formats that they decided not to support them at all.

Does a camera vendor have a legal right to tie their hardware’s output to a particular piece of software? I suppose they do, technically speaking. But they do so at the expense of the consumer, roping users into a counterproductive closed loop. There is no technical reason why white balance information should be encrypted; the reasons are all economic/political. My hope is that this move will backfire on Nikon and that consumers will revolt (hackers have already broken the encryption, by the way). What bothers me is that the camera industry is apparently taking cues from the DVD industry, which has convinced most consumers that it’s OK to build encryption standards directly into hardware. Not a healthy trend.

A few days ago I was standing in the courtyard at work when a guy walked in and started to set up a tripod. This reminded me that I had been meaning to shoot a panorama of the courtyard stitch it together into a QTVR movie. Started talking about this with my boss, and the tripod guy piped up. Turns out it was Don Bain, one of the world’s premiere QTVR experts, and that he was there to do just that. “It’s a strange and beautiful world.”

Spent a couple of hours this morning with Bain in his labs at the Geography dept, where he is director of the Geography Computing Facility. Could not have asked for a more thorough or careful introduction to the technology than one-on-one with the man himself. He’s been doing these for many years, and had mountains of QTVRs to show (full-screen on an immense Apple monitor, no less). Also got a very detailed introduction to QTVR Authoring Studio, which, strangely enough, Apple has never ported to OS X (but which works fine in Classic). The difference between watching a master at work and an ordinary Joe is that Joe will pump something like this out in 15 minutes, while the master will spend days doing and re-doing until it’s exactly right.

Bain is also the progenitor of the World Wide Panorama, in which participants from around the world all shoot a similar object (like a local bridge) in their region on the same day, and upload finished QTVRs to the site. You can waste hours surfing the panoramas at the site, for which he won a “Best Find” award from Yahoo UK last year.

Heh - just clicking around his Virtual Guidebooks site and was surprised to see a panorama of Morro Bay on the Help page. I spent many hours paddling across, diving under, rowing over, and daydreaming in that bay. Funny to have it pop out of nowhere at me like this.

O’Reilly was kind enough to send me a copy of the premiere issue of Make — a magazine more about atoms than bits (though there’s software stuff there too), written by and for extreme makers — people compelled to hack anything and everything they can get their hands on.

First issue: Great article on Kite Aerial Photography (which I’ve posted about here before), building a miniature linear accelerator in your basement, fabbing a functional video camera stabilizer on the cheap from galvanized pipe and barbell weights (crude, but effective - apparently performs almost as well as rigs costing thousands)… tons of fascinating stuff. A version of Popular Mechanics not destined for the barber shop, but for the workshop benches and nightstands of modern geeks. And almost no ads (though I’m sure that won’t be true by the second issue).

Includes a wonderful piece by Tim Anderson on Heirloom Technology — how inventors and researchers can work smarter and faster by spending more time in the library researching historical and organic solutions than in the lab reinventing the wheel. Beautifully written. Back when I lived in Boston, used to go to Tim’s MIT inventor/storyteller parties, and never left without jaw on floor. It was in Tim’s lab that I saw my first 3-D photocopier in action.

O’Reilly has hit one out of the park with this one. Will also check out the Make podcast tomorrow.

For the most part, I’ve taken a pretty laissez-faire attitude toward all the recent podcasting fervor. Spewing opinions over the internet is nothing new, and neither is the concept of an internet radio station. But as has been the case with weblogs compared to traditional web sites, half of what makes podcasting a powerful meme is the fact that publishing and distribution mechanisms are simplified and streamlined, standardized into easily consumable information streams.

If 99% of everything is crap, the same is true of weblogs and podcasts. Unfortunately, because you can’t time-condense podcasts the way you can skim an online publication via RSS, podcasting presents more of a temporal demand than does blog skimming, not to mention the technical hurdle of teaching non-geeks to subscribe to them, sync to audio players, etc. Still, if you can find a bit of time to listen, and are able to sift out the good feeds…

I don’t see the radio industry shaking in their boots exactly, but this is day one for the technology, after all. The newspaper industry didn’t think much of blogging at first, either. I’ll be working with J-School radio classes next semester to set up their first podcast distribution system.

After Jamie Wilkinson pointed out that NetNewsWire 2.0 has really slick RSS/MP3 enclosure handling abilities (it’ll even transfer downloads right into an iTunes playlist of your choice, ready for sync’ing), I decided to try listening to Slashdot Review and IT Conversations on my run today, rather than to The Slits and Plastic Bertrand. Made me feel old and dusty at first — continued erosion of my dwindling opportunites to rock out, but really enjoyed it and finished the run feeling like I had gained something.

Podcast Alley is teeming with options. Help me winnow the field here — any personal fave casts you’d like to recommend?

Update: Check out Darren Barefoot’s Why I’m Not Smoking the Podcasting Dope.

Experimented a bit last night with this Photoshop tutorial — how to turn photographs into comic book art panels (click for larger versions). Fairly involved - nine pages and nine layers, but took less than 15 minutes. Could probably trim that to five minutes with a bit of practice. Actually, some of the built-in posterization options in later versions of Photoshop get you fairly close to this effect, but without the halftone screen and cross-cut hatching that “sell” it as comic art. Pictured (before and after): My father-in-law Ben picking grapefruit in Palm Springs last winter.

Chris Jordan photographs the overflow of consumer culture as panoramic portraits of steel drums, piles of crushed cars, sawdust, mountains of cell phone chargers, shipping containers, gas cylinders… production and its waste are not without beauty.

We’ve received the first replacement server in our coming move to an all-Mac campus: The QuickTime Streaming Server we use to webcast events and event archives is no longer running on Windows, but on Panther Server from a dual 2.5 GHz XServe with 2GB of memory. Any future bottlenecks will be at the NIC or switch, not due to I/O. The machine is dreamy, and the XServes really do look great in a stack. :)

Was looking forward to using the QTSS Publisher utility you get with OS X Server for batch/automated hinting of files, generation of .qtl files, etc., but was sorely disappointed — Publisher is really geared for environments that don’t already have a workflow system in place. Assumes too much, and isn’t very configurable. But soon discovered I now have access to the qtmedia and qtref command-line tools (not available for Linux or Windows), so spent most of the day writing a shell script to batch re-write metadata, generate .qtl reference files, add hint tracks (our broadcast software doesn’t hint the files at run-time), and relocate movies to a final resting place on the streamer. In with Flynn.

The script is available for download here.

Family portraits, taken in a similar orientation once per year since 1976, presented as photo essay. A family floating through time, children evolving to become echoes of the parents and yet not. A beautiful record.

On June 17th, every year, the family goes through a private ritual: we photograph ourselves to stop a fleeting moment, the arrow of time passing by.

Try keeping your eye on a single column, then scrolling the page vertically - like a filmstrip animation of a person’s biological life.

Thanks Susanna

Studying email headers of a spam turdlet that slipped through the net, found this in the headers, trying to pass as header lines added by SpamAssassin:

X-IMAPbase: 1113505409 1 NonJunk
Status: O
X-Status:
X-Keywords: NonJunk

The cat-n-mouse game is never-ending.

Miles grabs a book at random from the shelf, runs toward Amy, holding it high. “Do you like THIS book, Mommy?”

It’s a copy of The Communist Manifesto.

Amazing screensaver for the Mac called Freefall — tracks data, motion, and areas of coverage of 850 sattellites in real-time over spinning, zooming, panning 3-D renderings of the earth and continents. The quick video preview on the web site doesn’t come anywhere close to doing it justice — the experience is immersive and somewhat psychedelic. Wild to be able to visualize just how many satellites are orbiting at all times, and how scarily close their path vectors come. Satellite data updated over the internet as needed.

The satellites are spinning,
a better day is breaking.
The galaxies are waiting
For planet Earth’s awakening.
(Sun Ra)

A student with a borked PC-formatted FireWire drive called - the drive had failed and all of his thesis work was on it — 8.5GB worth of video, ProTools audio projects, images, documents. We have a variety of Mac-based rescue tools, but didn’t have anything but Norton on-hand for PCs. Google turned up ProSoft DataRescue. 40MB download, burned to a CD, which booted… a custom version of Gnoppix(!). Went straight to its own interface, no Linux desktop. DataRescue’s philosophy is that trying to fix drives can cause more damage, so it only scans, builds databases, and offers recovery (but you gotta pay for the recovery part!). Three hours to scan, and it turned up about 95% of the lost data, which it then copied to another drive we plugged into the system. A thing of beauty.

The hardest part was creating a valid destination drive. We only have FireWire drives here, and DataRescue wanted one that was FAT-formatted, not NTFS. But… surprise! WinXP no longer knows how to format drives FAT or FAT32 — NTFS only. That meant we needed a PC with a FireWire port that wasn’t yet on WinXP. We turned up exactly one in the whole school, which saved the day and let us create a valid destination.

Boring yeah, but somehow you end up with this feeling like you’ve just pulled a body from the river, gotten it breathing again.

The concept of “stewardship” as described in the Bible: “We are not owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to ‘watch over and care for it’ (Gen. 2:15).”

Position on the environment of some of the most extreme anti-environmentalists of the religious right: “The truth is,” writes Carter [author of a widely circulated paper warning against the lure of creation care], “the whole of nature has been delivered over to man for him to use as he sees fit. Man is not simply the head of the natural order, rather, that order was made for him.”

The Bible supports environmentally sound thinking, so the first step in encouraging pro-environment Christianity is dismantling the James Watt-derived notion that Jesus would actually want us to milk dry the earth (”After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back”). [Update: A commenter points out that this widely-circulated quote was not actually made by James Watt, but attributed to him by Grist.] There are still many Christians who believe that Rapture is imminent, and that there is therefore no need to take care of the earth.

Nice piece at AlterNet on the greening of the Christian Right.

Conservative evangelical Christians are getting worried about the fate of God’s creation. Can the greening of the GOP base happen fast enough to derail the party’s scorched-earth plans for Bush II?

Despite the efforts of old-guard religious conservatives like Carter to squash the growing Christian environmental movement, many national Christian groups, such as the National Association of Evangelicals, are working to teach churches that you don’t have to sleep with hippies to care about your world. The memes are slowly changing.

Roosevelt had it right:

Today’s GOP likes to toss around the name Teddy Roosevelt, but it has no use for the party philosophy expressed by T.R. when he declared, “[S]hort of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendents than it is for us.”

Baby steps.

In general, I like to think of the old birdhouse as a sort of time capsule — an immutable web-based record of interesting things artists were doing online when the web was catching fire in the mid-90s. But every now and then, an artist contacts me to say that they’ve moved on, are doing more interesting things these days, and would prefer not to have the dusty old content online anymore. Just got a request like that from surrealist William Carr, who is now doing most of his utterly wiggy visual arts in video and Flash rather than the static graphics he was doing back then. His new site is called DreamHive, and is a trip. Bye William!

The untold story of how NASA excluded black Americans… and how the Negro American Space Society of Astronauts got to the moon a full three years before whites took all the credit. The Old Negro Space Program (55 MB, worth it).

Just started experimenting with the beta of NetNewsWire 2.0. Leaps and bounds, it’s come. In-line HTML renderer so you can see full web pages inside the reader rather than launching an external browser; select text and click Post to Weblog to pre-fill an Ecto (or other posting client) entry; a bunch of built-in skins through which you can view RSS entries (I’m reading through the BeBox skin now… memories!), subscriptions to de.liciou.us and Flickr tags, tabbed views, etc. Every now and then you find a piece of software that just sparkles with excellence. NNW’s got that sparkle.

Update: I just pulled down “Show Sites Drawer” in NNW2 and was surprised to see that birdhouse.org is among the list of blogs built into the application itself. Way to go, me!

Ticket scalping is legal in California, I learned from an East Bay Express piece. When you think about it, why shouldn’t anyone be able to buy any item from a store and sell it on the open market at a higher price? And why should tickets be regarded differently from any other meatspace item in this regard?

But traditional scalpers are being trumped by digital scalpers, as computer software evolves with the ability to defeat human detection software. If software can crack a captcha image and buy tickets online on behalf of its master, a stadium can be sold out in minutes. That’s exactly what happened when U2 tickets went on sale recently and Ticketmaster servers were hammered with two million hits per second.

Trying to figure out why anyone would go to see U2 on purpose, let alone pay money to do so, is beside the point. The question is, is asking computers to go get a bunch of tickets for you qualitatively different from asking a bunch of friends to go stand in line hours before Ticketmaster’s doors open? It’s kind of like comparing MP3 trading to the old days of taping. The principle is the same, but the difference in quantity is so immense that you effectively have a qualitative difference.

Laws will change.

It’s time to talk about Thomas the Tank Engine.

If you don’t have a young child, quick introduction: Thomas is based on a series of children’s books started in 1942 by the Rev. W. Awdry to entertain a sick young boy. Today, Thomas is a multi-million-dollar empire of books, wooden trains, and TV shows / videos. The Thomas universe consists of a group of engines and coaches living together on “The Island of Sodor” where they get into trouble, help one another, take pride in being “Really Useful,” learn important lessons about cooperation, bravery, friendship, and self esteem. What makes the Thomas railroad different from a “typical” children’s railroad is the fact that all of the engines and coaches have faces, personalities, strengths and weaknesses, modes of interaction that mimic (the better aspects of) society at large.
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Rewinding a bit on the new comment registration required policy, have decided to experiment with MT-Keystrokes, a Movable Type plugin that inserts JavaScript into pages which looks for actual keystroke input into form fields. All the captcha goodness, without the accessibility problems raised by image captchas.

So… the comment form is back in plain view for now. Will run this way for a while; if successful, could end up sticking with it and backing off on the registration policy for customers. Will have to wait and see whether spambots end up at the doorstep.

Thanks Nick