Birdhouse Hosting welcomes brookemaury.org, the personal web site of Brooke Maury: “Masters student at the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS) at the University of California, Berkeley. My research and coursework have focused predominantly on multimedia metadata management, the intersection of technology & law and more recently, text-based music information retrieval.”

Walking through the courtyard, a student sits at a laptop, gazing into the screen, rocking softly side to side, eyes half-closed. “It looks like you’re composing,” I said, thinking he looked graceful, peaceful, like a sonata. “I am,” he replied. I glanced at his screen, and he pointed to the grey “Compose” button on the Yahoo! Mail interface.

If I gave a tinker’s cuss about advertising, I’d give an award to Hitachi for best ad in a magazine. Doing the usual dump of blow-in cards from the current issue of Wired, encountered a thick page, which turned out to be a standard beer coaster attached to heavy stock. On the reverse of the page, a gen-yoo-ine U.S. patent application form, ready to fill out, tear out, and send. On the back of the beer coaster, these instructions:

1) Ask your waiter/aspiring actor for a pen.
2) Sketch plans for cool new device utilizing a Hitachi hard drive.
3) Fill out patent form on back of page.
4) Raise a glass in a toast to your brilliance.

OK, it’s corny, but it’s also the closest I’ve seen a print ad come to the kind of engagement/interactivity common online.

What are all these duplicate entries doing in the Admissions Request database? Hmm… there’s a pattern here - when there are duplicates or triplicates for the same person, the first one is always short, the second a bit more detailed, and the third or fourth is a complete entry. Aha! Some people get confused navigating web forms and hit Enter/Return rather than Tab to move to the next field. This should be solvable… Yep, there’s a simple JavaScript fix. Works nicely. In fact, this could be useful all over the place.

Rarely find “aftermarket” stuff I think should be built into the HTML specification, but this is a good example of such a case. It should be possible to put some kind of enter_submit="no" attribute into the form tag to save users from themselves. And developers shouldn’t have to code hacks around (and add byte-weight to pages on account of) common user errors such as this.

Update: Once again bitten by users running that infernal Norton Internet Security, which throws absurd and confusing warnings when it encounters javascript it doesn’t know about. Had to disable the work above — it’s more important that all people have access than that we avoid duplicate/partial entries.

Last night finished watching Martin Scorsese’s two-part documentary on the early part of Bob Dylan’s career, No Direction Home — fascinating and beautiful. The film spent a lot of energy not just on concert footage and interviews, but on context — the musical and social environment from which he shot like a weed into mesmerizing strangeness.

Scorsese put a lot of weight on Dylan’s slippery nature, his refusal to be pinned down or labeled. The establishment media was absolutely fixated on making him “The spokesman of a generation,” “The father of protest music,” though relatively little of his output was actually political or topical except in the most obtuse way, and he consistently confounded reporters’ attempts to get him to make political statements, or to actually speak for his generation. Priceless footage of a Swedish photojournalist asking him to “Suck on the arm of his glasses” — wanted to stage Dylan looking thoughtful or something. Dylan walked up to the photog and held his specs up to the guy’s mouth. “You suck on them.” A student journalist looking ridiculous as he demands to know the symbolism of the barely visible motorcycle on Dylan’s t-shirt on the cover of “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan looking incredulous that people were so desperate to find hidden meaning in his every move. “Umm, I was just wearing that shirt that day, I really don’t remember.”

Much of the footage is chilling in its beauty, Dylan so in the moment, so completely absorbed by the muse. Allen Ginsberg: “He had become identical with his breath.” Lots of interview footage with Joan Baez on their difficult relationship, and her frustration that Dylan wouldn’t throw his weight behind the protest movement, as she had assumed they would do together. “He was the most complex person I’ve ever met.”

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.
- It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

Focus on Dylan’s transition from folk to rock, and how his freewheeling mixture of the genres frustrated folk purists. Crowds booing, hollering “Traitor!” Pete Seeger admits wanting to take an axe to the power cords at one electric performance, Dylan today talking about how painful it was to learn that one of his own heroes was rejecting that music so completely. But truthfully, some of the electric performances are painful to watch in contrast with the solo work, even as they’re tremendous in their own right.

The doc stops abruptly in 1966 with Dylan’s motorcycle accident, and you’re left hungry for another four (or more!) hours covering the years that have gone between.

Just came across this .sig in someone’s email:

A: Yes.
| Q: Are you sure?
| | A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
| | | Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?

Geeky, but reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a while ago - he was the first programmer-type I had encountered who actually advocated top-posting comments in email threads. Why? Because most email conversations are very short, and the information you want should be the most visible. With top-posting, you can usually see the info you need in your mail client’s preview pane, without having to open and scroll through the message. Sort of for the same reason that virtually all weblogs post most recent info at the top, rather than in true chronological order. He was right — top-posting does make most email conversation more fluid. The system backfires when:

A) The two parties don’t agree on a protocol, and the thread wanders up and down the page willy nilly.

B) A brief top-posting thread evolves into a longer thread, with the need to respond to individual bits rather than to the message as a whole. In this case, there is sometimes an awkward transition as the posting order turns itself inside out.

I’m a switch-hitter on this one, and go both ways depending on message content and mood. Anyone out there adamantly top or bottom? (Cue the sub-dom jokes :)

Miles was sick recently, voice went hoarse, started talking like Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront.” In fact, so much so that we couldn’t help ourselves from encouraging him to learn a couple of lines from that famous movie.

This actually made for a nice opportunity to do quality/size comparisons between h.263 and the new h.264 codec in QuickTime 7. With default settings, the h.264 exports definitely looked much better, but also had larger file sizes. But by twitching the quality slider from High to Medium, the file size was chopped dramatically, resulting in simultaneous higher quality and smaller files.

h.264 version (requires QuickTime 7)
h.263 version (everyone else)

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome realdramadocs.com, a site promoting “Nine short documentaries about nine different things” for a public screening event Oct. 8-9 in Berkeley, CA. All documentaries produced by J-School students.

While Birdhouse’s datacenter is in Texas, far from the reach of any West-coast earthquake disaster, it’s now sitting in the direct path of Hurricane Rita. Fortunately, EV1 sounds very well prepared:

As an extra precaution, we have even sourced an additional rental generator. While this unit would not be needed for a brief outage, if we were to experience a loss of power lasting several days, we would need to perform normal maintenance on our generators, and this would give us a generator to run while that maintenance is taking place. All total, we have in excess of 10,000 gallons of fuel on site. We have guaranteed contracts for fuel delivery and two fuel depots are located within 2 miles of our facility.

Of course, all of that fuel won’t help much if the whole facility is ripped from its foundations… Many EV1 employees are heading out to be with families, but core staff is planning to weather the storm in the datacenter. Now that’s dedication.

Mortality meets technology: Caught a few minutes Wed. night of the emergency landing of the JetBlue airliner with twisted landing gear. Discovered this morning that those nifty TV screens in the back of every JetBlue seat came in extra-handy for the passengers, as a means to watch their own imminent deaths on live TV. Glued to the set for the stunning conclusion of TV’s ultimate reality suspense drama. Trying to imagine whether I would have watched if I had been on the plane. It would be hard not to, but like to hope I’d put my mind somewhere more introspective in such a moment. Can only imagine that the spectacle contributed to on-board emotional frenzy.

The cPanel account management system used by Birdhouse Hosting has proved to be very complete (though not without its glitches and surprises), and its tools have saved me a ton of work. It’s been nice to not have to write a script for every new piece of functionality needed. But was shocked recently to discover that cPanel doesn’t send alert messages to POP account holders when mailboxes are nearing quota. Started looking for something to fit the bill, didn’t find anything that did the job neatly, so wrote a shell script for cPanel systems.

checkmailquota loops through the home dirs and, for each home, loops through hosted domains. For each domain, loops through mailboxes, recording byte sizes. Compares these sizes to what’s listed in the quota file for that mailbox. If usage is within xx% of quota, sends a warning message to that mailbox. Also sends a summary of accounts near quota to postmaster.

It seems bizarre to me that a script like this, or equivalent functionality, isn’t built into cPanel (at version 10 no less!)

Analysis at WebProNews on the legality of Google’s Print for Libraries project, in which Google is intending to pick up where Project Gutenberg leaves off - not only reproducing full text of public domain works, but also excerpts of copyrighted material.

The entire text of books considered to be public domain and out of copyright will be scanned and made available online. For copyrighted material, the books will be scanned, and snippets will be made available structured around search terms with links to where the book can be checked out or purchased.

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Very nice piece at A List Apart on techniques for writing a weblog people will actually read. Focuses on things you should do, rather than things you shouldn’t (why are viable suggestions so much more rare than lists of things to avoid?)

Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they’re going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven’t showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. At the same time, you don’t want to over–explain yourself. Understatement can be thunderous, or humorous, or heartbreaking. Or all three.

For the terminally curious, Apple has a knowledgebase article: What’s the difference between a “disc” and a “disk”?

Short story: Discs are optical, disks are magnetic. But you knew that already, right? And:

Although both discs and disks are circular, disks are usually sealed inside a metal or plastic casing (often, a disk and its enclosing mechanism are collectively known as a “hard drive”).

Absent from the article is any mention of how it came to pass that Apple gets to speak so authoritatively on the subject. Granted, this seems to be standard tech lore, but it’s weird to see the KB regarding itself as if a dictionary.

The other morning Miles and I awoke to find cat puke on the floor. He promptly slipped in a pile and landed on his can, seemed absolutely delighted. “Daddy, I used the kitty cat throw-up like skis!”

Last week he popped up from his bed and ran into the bathroom saying something about a badger. I came in to help look for said mammal. “Daddy, we have a badger in our house, I saw it, it was in my room but then it went into the bathroom, but I didn’t think we had a badger, but now we do.”

Today he got a toy steam roller named Rolly (from Bob the Builder). Played with it all day, talked to it in the car on our way to the lake. When I was taking him out of the car, he told me, “Daddy, Rolly is my best friend!” So sweet, I thought. Three minutes later, we arrived at the shore of the lake. Without hesitation, Miles hucked Rolly as hard as he could out into the water, where he promptly sank to the bottom of the briney pond. So much for best friends (Rolly was later successfully rescued).

Warning: geek post.

Just solved one of the more puzzling web mysteries over which I’ve had the pleasure to tear my hair out over the years. This one was a doozy, but also kind of fascinating, if you swing that way.

Over the past 36 hours, have been corresponding with a reader of John Battelle’s SearchBlog who was unable to post comments to that site. Every time he clicked Submit, his browser was referred to a PHP Freaks page describing the REMOTE_ADDR environment variable. WTF? I was not able to duplicate the behavior in any browser, and SearchBlog gets dozens of successful comments per day. The reader’s IP address was not in any block or filter in use, and we simply didn’t have any plugin or configuration in place that would redirect commenters to an external site. What in the world could cause this user to be redirected anywhere, let alone to a site completely unrelated to anything on SearchBlog? And why couldn’t I reproduce the behavior?
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Received the call tonight I’ve been expecting for 15 years: At 103, Grandma Hastings has passed away. My last remaining grandparent, Vada was born in Castena, Iowa more than a century ago, 100 years before my son. A schoolteacher who lived through the Great Depression, the popularization of cars, radio, television, the internet, two world wars, men walking on the moon, and disco, Vada was the mother of seven children, steadfastly unreligious and politically neutral, a good samaritan, a lifelong gardener, a masterful embroiderer, famous for Sunday waffles and the most amazing rhubarb pie you ever tasted (always homegrown and lovingly baked). Wife of a boxer and carpenter, never allowed to get a driver’s license or own a pet, unflinching in the face of adversity, never had a harsh word for anyone. In retrospect, she was a Classic American Grandmother, though I’ve never identified her that way before. She was just plain old Grandma to us.

Vada stayed healthy and alert until her late 90s. Only in recent years did she become bedridden, and begin to lose her eyesight and hearing. Every year for the last two decades, the refrain has been “Better come to Grandma’s birthday - it could be her last.” But it never was. She never seemed to get sick, never suffered any of the ailments common to such advanced age. She just. Slowed. Down. And eventually, inevitably, faded to zero, winked out, as all humans do, in one way or another.

I did a video interview with her in 2000. Now wanting to dig that up, hear her once again reflecting on her amazing century. May we all have such a ride.

Talk about kicking ‘em while they’re down… The administration’s mind-numbing obliviousness in responding to Katrina extends all the way down to its web developers and their managers. Turns out you can’t even apply for FEMA aid online unless running Internet Explorer 6 under Windows.

…people using Macintosh or Linux computers are unable to file a claim online — although they can do so by calling the emergency agency by phone. A statement online says, “If you would like to apply for Federal Disaster Assistance by telephone, you can contact us at 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) or for the hearing/speech impaired at TTY: 1-800-462-7585. The current hours and days of operation are 24 hours per day 7 days per week. Currently the lines are quite congested and the best time to call is 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. EDT.

I suppose it’s not so bad to ask people to call in the middle of the night, since their lives are in chaos anyway. This is right in step with the copyright office’s recent move to limit applicants’ choice of browsers.

The bonus fallout from this approach is that a lot of people will get the false impression that IE must be a better browser, or that it can do important things that other browsers can’t. The reality is that the developers are simply working with blinders on. It’s not hard to build cross-platform web applications — there are millions of them out there, and nothing technologically makes FEMA or copyright applications easier to program for IE. It’s an arrogant, discriminatory — and in this case potentially dangerous — “one ring to rule them all” mentality.

Imagine the outrage if government offices decided only to help Christians, or caucasians, or cell phone users, or SUV drivers.

This has been floating around - an unfortunately worded screen crawler on one of the major news channels. Although I’m sure many viewers found the caption more than accurate.

Setbacks.

The light we selected for the bathroom originally arrived scratched, and had to be sent back. The lighting store promptly lost the order, and it took weeks to get a replacement. Finally got that installed, only to discover it was too dim, even with max wattage fluorescent bulbs. I had had reservations about its brightness when we first saw it near the beginning of summer, but was assured that our senses were being thrown by all the other lights in the store. Nope. Should have trusted first instinct. I also hadn’t had a good feeling about the color temperature of fluorescents. Even with warmest available tube type, the light feels cold. So after everything, the “Forecast” went back to the store and we went back to the drawing board, focused on glass and halogen this time.

Yesterday finally cleared time to install the tub/shower fixture set. Halfway through reading the directions, the “should have been obvious” dawned on me - you can’t install a full shower fixture set without ripping existing tile and backer board off the wall — there’s no way to connect supply pipes to the pressure regulator unless you can get your hands inside the wall. I think I had approached this problem like most plumbing — thought that I could just install new handle, spout, and showerhead over some kind of standard valve. But it doesn’t work that way. If you don’t want to rip up the wall, you can buy just a “trim kit” to change the look of an existing set (thanks baald), but of course the range of trim kits available for your existing valve is much more limited. Now grappling with whether to go for it and rip out some shower wall, or live with a lesser choice. At this point, very eager to just have the job over and done with. But it would also suck to spend all summer on a project like this and have such a visible detail stuck in the 80s.

For the past couple of months, Miles’ standard rejoinder to questions about why he just did something has been “Because I’m curious.” Example: “Miles, it seems like you spilled that orange juice on purpose. Why did you do that?” “Because I’m curious.” Yesterday I finally managed to get an alternate response out of him.

“Miles, what would you like to have for dinner?”

“Daddy, I want to have breakfast for dinner!”

“OK, what would you like to have for breakfast?”

“Fish!”

“Have you had fish before? Do you like fish?”

“No, Daddy.”

“Then how do you know you don’t like it?”

“Because I’m curious.”

“But if you’re curious then it means you like to try new things.”

[pause]

“I mean because I’m NOT curious, Daddy.”

Birdhouse Hosting is pleased to welcome minimediaguy.org, the weblog of SF Chronicle journalist Tom Abate.

I started this blog in January to learn more about the new publishing technologies. I have a strong background in print publishing, and some experience in radio and television. I have owned a business and started a newspaper. I am now a newspaper reporter. In addition to figuring out how all this web stuff works, I am particularly interested in how to make it into a profitable undertaking.

This is the first blog I’ve had the “pleasure” of porting from Blogger to Movable Type. Found a decent recipe for the process (Blogger has no export function!), but wrestled far too long with the fact that its output generated spaces after each “BODY: ” string. Of course I neither saw nor suspected the spaces, nor would have I expected MT’s importer to be so sensitive to them. Hate wasting hours on stupid problems like that. Anyway, using StyleCatcher for minimediaguy’s templating system, and Tom will be experimenting with one-click styles until he finds something he digs. An even more comprehensive Birdhouse project is on deck from Abate — look for that down the road.

Students are taking some time getting used to the new “network homes” thing. In previous years, all J-School Macs had a single sign-on. Private files were stored in remote protected folder shares. This year, a student can walk up to any of our 82 new 20″ iMac G5s and log in as themselves. A few seconds later, they’re looking at their desktop, their documents, their email and bookmarks, etc.

The system is working marvelously, except that some people aren’t quite comprehending that if they walk away from a terminal, anyone can sit down and steal/delete/alter any of their content. Loud lectures from the sysadmin aren’t making a difference, so yesterday I made (a larger version of) this wallpaper. Now when we find a machine left logged in, we copy this file into the user’s home and make it their wallpaper. Could have done a nicer job on the lettering, but it’s not meant to be fine art, and it gets the job done. Reaction so far seems to be one of mixed embarassment and satori.

It’s the “Ah-Hah!” part I’m after.

We’ve all done it — that fatal keystroke that wipes out the wrong partition on the disk, vanishes the critical directory, destroys the mission-critical database. Thank god, this time it wasn’t me :)

Got a call late last night from a contact of a contact (not a Birdhouse customer) who had been running a search/replace operation at a very high-powered Movable Type installation. Apparently watching TV while working (lesson #1), the staffer had left the Find field blank and put the string “sponsor” in the replace field. MT 3.1 puts a weighty warning on the search/replace page, but no further confirmation dialog stops you from sawing off your toes (3.2 throws a confirmation dialog). Result: the string “sponsor” between every letter of every Title field, affecting 11,000 entries. Basically, they were screwed and pulled me in.
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Took some much-needed family time away from the bathroom project last weekend to visit Sonoma’s Cornerstone Gardens, “an ever-changing series of walk-through gardens, showcasing new and innovative designs from the world’s finest landscape architects and designers.” Amazing collection of immersive landscapes and other outdoor installations. Photos by Amy and me.

On the way in, took a call from Birdhouse customer Artefact Design & Salvage. 20 minutes later, entering Cornerstone, discovered that Artefact resides on the very same grounds, so finally got to meet the crew and walk through their jaw-dropping collection as well. World gets smaller.

Afternoon, sipped a root beer and sat in the shade watching a bi-plane pulling loops and barrel rolls, far removed from daily compression. Life is rich.