Think Secret reports rumors about the “rebirth of the Mac Mini” as a home entertainment hub, featuring an Intel CPU and including “both Front Row 2.0 and TiVo-like DVR functionality.” True, there are already several Mac-based living room video recorder arrangements available… but not ones that come from Apple, who can now capitalize both on its iPod success and on the lower cost of x86 chips. Allegedly, its DVR functionality will be stellar: “Sources with knowledge of the project have dubbed the latter a “TiVo-killer.”

I’m still flummoxed by the relative lack of success of the Mac Mini as a general desktop computer. Amy’s has been flawless: Cheap, tiny, silent, attractive, and 100% stable. I’d be very inclined to use a home entertainment variant of it in place of the Tivo, especially if it offered a way around paying the monthly subscription, and let me burn DVDs.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Playing the News, a web site supporting a (not yet released) documentary film on the convergence of video games and real war.

In a thought-provoking 20-minutes, Playing the News explores these issues and challenges us to imagine a not-too-distant future when we might read an article about the war on the New York Times’s website, and then link to an interactive game to replay that same event. Sound scary? It’s only a matter of time.

Over Thanksgiving, mom finally asked brother and me to get all of our remaining stuff out of her basement and garage. Felt like a character in a Tom Waits song going through all the things I, for whatever reason, felt sure 25 years ago that I would want to see again one day. Haven’t yet finished wading, but a quick laundry list of dusty relics, circa 1978-1983:

• Bag full of punk rock, new wave, and dada buttons and badges (I actually owned a badge-a-matic badge maker for a while), though only about half the stuff in this bag is homemade.
• Brutally embarassing daily journals from my year in Australia, 1983. Hardly seems like these words came from my own mouth. Am I still me? Equally embarassing box of love notes to and from random girls.
• Boxes and boxes of sealed-but-dusty MAD Magazines, plus comics: Howard the Duck, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Flakey Foont, Mr. Natural…
• Reams of output from a junior high mechanical drawing class, including this worshipful rendering of the Pioneer SX-450 stereo amplifier, mysteriously dated 5/18/20 rather than 5/18/80. Probably an early example of the same kind of inexplicable screw-up I’m famous for today.
• Box of Boy Scouts and Indian Guides merit badges, medallions, belt buckles, headbands, and wood-burning experiments.
• Piles of early 80s Surfer, Surfing, and Thrasher magazines (yesterday hauled these down to the surf shop I used to work at and gave them to the current employees, who were “way stoked”).
• Boxes of class papers from high school with mortifying titles like “Toe jam through the years, or the rise and fall of communism” (Got an A on that one, which says more about my teachers than about me).
• Hand-made ceramic tennis shoe in black & white, with real shoelace. Hand-made ceramic “anarchy A” glazed in bright orange.

The task now is to trim the pile to just a couple of boxes, which guarantees an entire weekend shot. Such a sentimental fool.

Possibly piggy-backing on the success of Wikipedia, and using the collaborative potential of the internet to keep themselves current, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary has opened the doors to user contributions. Submissions go online immediately and unedited. And it’s catching on — re-load the new words page a few times a day and you’ll see an entirely different set.

What’s missing here is any kind of collaborative filtering. You can’t edit the “open” entries, you can’t even vote on them. Which, I assume, will soon leave MW with a “ginormous” pile of mostly garbage entries that they won’t know what to do with. And, I just realized when I tried to link to “ginormous,” they’re providing no interface to permalinks for individual words. So it’s a start, but a weak one. I’m wondering whether MW really gets it, or is just riding a buzzword, trying something - anything - to not look like a crustacean clinging desperately to the back of a giant turtle.

If they do decide to open the dictionary further, it raises all kinds of questions about their status as a lexical authority. And they’ll have lots of fun new infrastructural problems to grapple with (wikipedia consumes massive amounts of technical and human resources that the closed MW doesn’t have to think about).

I wonder what the first word to migrate from the open dictionary to the canonical one will be.

Thanks Paul

If global warming is at least partly a function of global deforestation, we’re left with the problem of how to replace the de-carbonizing power of the billions of trees we’ve collectively disappeared in the blink of an historical eye. Dr Klaus Lackner has an idea: Deploy vast farms of synthetic trees, each with 1,000 times the carbon-sucking power of a real tree. You wouldn’t exactly want to picnic under one (”It looks like a goal post with Venetian blinds,” said the Columbia University physicist…”), but it’s an interesting idea.

While real trees properly dispose of (i.e. utilize) the carbon they trap, the problem with synthetic trees is that we’d have to manually reclaim the carbon they absorb. And what are we going to do with mountains of recycled carbon? “Make pencils!,” Amy suggests.

The infamous exchange between Matt Lauer and Tom Cruise about the efficacy of psychiatry, re-staged by a pair of aliens speaking through text-to-speech synthesizers. Back in June when the interview originally aired, it was widely regarded as an example of a typical Scientologist going off his nut. Which is why this “alien” rendering is so interesting: Take out the star power, take out the vocal intonation and the finger wagging, and you’re left with pure dialog. Without having your anti-celeb, anti-nutjob radar bleeping away in the foreground, you get to focus on the words. And somehow, I expect that most people listening to this exchange, stripped down to its actual words, will find a lot to agree with in what Cruise was trying to express.

We may not share his adamant stance, as pretty much everyone is close to someone whose lives really have been helped by psychiatry, but at the same time, it’s good to see someone famous look out on an over-medicated world and say “This is getting ridiculous.” Scientologist or not, he’s not all wrong.

Oh, and it’s funny too.

SF Chronicle:

In a recent 16-country Pew poll, India had the highest percentage of citizens with a favorable opinion of the United States, 71 percent.

But that favorable perception is starting to fade as Indian employees working in outsourced call centers spend day after day being berated, slurred, and degraded by American callers frustrated both with their computers and the effect of outsourcing on the U.S. job market.

Saurabh Jha, a 22-year-old in blue jeans, says a woman phoned from Texas recently and told him that, thanks to outsourcing, “You are getting money, food, shelter. You should be starving.” She berated him for 12 minutes before she finally allowed him to offer advice that promptly fixed her problem: to unplug her computer and plug it back in. “I was speechless,” he says. “She didn’t even give me a chance.”

Yeah, uh, really makes you proud to be American. Urgh.

Miles: Daddy — Mommy is a robot!

Me: Mmmm hmmm. So if Mommy is a robot, what is Daddy?

Miles: Daddy is a Odd God.

Me: Now we’re getting somewhere. So tell me, what is God?

Miles: Daddy — Mickey Mouse knows God.

Amy: Miles, what does God want?

Miles: God wants milk!

We’ve installed the Magpie RSS parser on Birdhouse Hosting for web developers interested in including other sites’ RSS feeds on their own sites. Usage instructions are in the Magpie FAQ.

We’ve also installed the PHP GD library for developers wanting to generate graphics at the server level, or to install imaging applications that require it for manipulation of existing images. Usage instructions are in the GD FAQ.

PHP itself has been upgraded to version 4.4.1

Haven’t tried this myself, but a reader just pointed out SpotMeta, which extends the Mac OS X filesystem to include fully customizable metadata fields, presumably searchable by Spotlight.

Based on how OS X has progressively integrated some of the coolest features of BeOS, I predict that something similar to this will soon ship natively in the system. So I’m not exactly eager to start tacking on 3rd party extensions to the filesystem — yahweh knows how the two would interact when extensible metadata becomes “official.” But it’s cool to see people thinking in these terms.

Thanks David Richardson

Went last night with Amy (an actual date!) to see NPR’s Ira Glass in conversation with comic artist Chris Ware (”Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth”), hosted by Orville Schell. Started with a 20 minute story drawn by Ware and narrated by Glass, followed by fascinating, funny general banter about life, hermitage, television, architecture, etc. Ware is inward to the point of awkwardness, completely out of place on stage (”Given the choice, I’d never leave my house.”)

Interesting thread on the current “media landscape” — Glass says we’re living in a new golden age of television, because producers have become so desperate to find the next big thing that they’re willing to try anything at all. As TV consumers, we benefit from the sheer range of content types this produces. And it’s true — as much as we lament the death of the sitcom, the variety we have to choose from now is deafening compared to what we had in, say, the 80s. And for shows that are scripted (as opposed to reality-based), the level of complexity just keeps rising (compare The Sopranos to Dragnet, c.f. Everything Bad is Good For You).

Glass also talked about how the fakeness of TV news drives him crazy. Stuffed shirts and talking heads all the way ’round. “Why can’t we just have real people talking about the news? The Daily Show has shown us how badly we crave someone real addressing the news. We need a show like that that isn’t comedy.”

British Petroleum posts a nifty Flash-based carbon footprint calculator, which lets you describe basic facts about your house and household, driving patterns, recycling habits, showers vs. baths, etc. The process is quick and painless, and ends with an estimation of the number of tonnes of carbon your family deposits into the atmosphere yearly. Our family: A “respectable” 12 tonnes (compare to the national average of 19). Our biggest savings came from the fact that we drive so little, but the calculator definitely illuminated a lot of places where we could do better (want to look into the possibility of buying energy from green providers). And I’m sure that if the quiz took other environmental factors into account (such as diaper consumption), we’d earn a few demerits. Interesting to see which factors can make huge differences — check what a heated pool (which we ain’t got) will do to your carbon footprint!

Back in December I said farewell to my oldest friend Rinchen, who was taking off for 3.5 years of total seclusion at a Buddhist monastery. Since his pursuit calls for a more-or-less total disconnection from the outside world, he hasn’t been reading the paper or hearing the news, not to mention corresponding with friends.

But apparently, he did get a short break as the first segment of seclusion ended recently and he prepared for the next, even more intensive segment. Delighted to receive a letter from him recently. Wonder what kind of news seeps through into such an environment? I think he’ll forgive me sharing a couple of snippets. Rinchen writes:

The only other news that filtered thru beyond the sinking of New Orleans + horrible aftermath was discovered in a junk catalogue — a commemorative coin of the new pope - Cardinal Ratzinger! Truly bizarre. Same guy who excommunicated a Sri Lankan theologian for writing that the Virgin Mary is symbolic of Fecundity in the 3rd world. “Nein! She is totally dry and barren. Apostate!”

Wonder how many in the world knew this about Ratzinger (or would care if they did). Wasn’t hard to find confirmation of the story. Rinchen also sold every scrap of his incredible LP/CD collection before heading into seclusion.

You really don’t know what your desert island discs are until you go to such a place. So let’s see: Albert Ayler w/Beaver Harris on drums; Art Ensemble “Fanfare for the Warriors” + “Full Force”; Cecil Taylor “Dark to Themselves” + “For Olim” (side 2); T. Heads “Remain in Light”; Fela Kuti “Colonial Mentality / Sorrow Tears + Blood”; James Browwwwn; “The White Album”; R.L. Burnside’s “Sound Machinegroove” are some of what plays thru my mind.

We miss you Rinchen!

Meandering lunch conversation with my boss and Dave Winer, who paid us an informal visit. Got talking about plummeting newspaper subscription rates, the mainstream-ification of blogging, the question of credibility in a world where traditional journalism is less valued by the readership while the credibility of expert bloggers is rising.

All of this got me thinking about parallels between the music industry and journalism in an age when the internet is slowly but surely interring the old institutions. If the traditional music industry is threatened by the rise of home-recording software + internet distribution models, the industry replies, “Well, you still need us to wade through all the crap for you, to bring the good stuff to the fore.” To which we reply, “You’re the ones who are bringing us the crap!”

Meanwhile, at sites like myspace.com, the public is deciding what’s worth listening to. Artists are made popular by being downloaded — the good stuff (using a loose definition of “good” here) bubbles organically to the top, rather than being force-fed, top-down. So the traditional music industry is needed neither for recording technology, nor for distribution, nor for editorial buffering.

A recent Wired piece about myspace.com blew my mind. The Hit Factory:

… nearly 400,000 of the site’s roughly 30 million user pages belong to bands. [myspace] racked up 9.4 billion pageviews in August - more than Google - and new users are signing up at a stunning rate of 3.5 million a month. … The site hosts 12 percent of all ads on the Web.

One could argue (or predict) that blogging could ultimately do to traditional news what myspace is doing to music.

If 95% of blogs are crap, then so probably are 95% of the bands on myspace. But in both cases, the public decides which 5% are worth listening to / reading. The credibility of the 5% is sui generis — not bestowed by the imprimatur of old media, but earned.

Where the parallel breaks down is that the music industry has been largely evil, while journalism has been largely a force for good (the majority of journalists aren’t doing what they do for money or fame, and the best music comes from artists driven first to create, second to make a living). I find myself secretly rooting for the demise of the music industry while feeling very nervous about the parallel threat to journalism.

Wired recounts History’s Worst Software Bugs, including the “entymology” of the term:

… in 1947 … engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer’s logbook with the words: “first actual case of a bug being found.

Also includes nice Flash visuals demonstrating the principles of buffer overflows and race conditions, plus a Blue Screen of Death summary of history’s worst bugs.

I’ve sometimes wondered what the software industry would look like if admins and consultants were able to charge vendors for time spent fixing or working around the fallout from operating system flaws. The industry would certainly evolve with a more sure foot, albeit much more slowly, and it would be a lot harder for big software houses to get rich off code. Still, I’ve felt guilty more than once taking a client’s money after spending two hours fixing a problem resulting from an OS or software flaw, and wished I could forward the invoice on to Redmond.

Interesting way to wake up #317:

As I lay sleeping, Miles climbs up on the bed, takes a pacifier from his mouth, and puts it in my eye socket, covering the orb completely, like a patch. “Daddy, you’re a pirate!”

To the Masonic Auditorium last night to see the great Ornette Coleman. Playing with his son Denardo on drums (who appeared for the first time on a Coleman record at age 8!), plus two virtuoso bassists. Generally regarded as the originator of free jazz, Ornette is now 75.

He’s never been a powerful player — Ornette’s sensibility is finer, more abstract than that. More of an idea guy. Through the first few songs, worried that he sounded 75 — less vital than he once did, less harmolodic. But then something clicked, the energy came together, the compositions started to fulfill themselves. The (very unusual) two-bass configuration added something wonderfully rich and grounded, a smooth tangle of wood in the marsh, something to stand on. As the evening progressed, Ornette started to sound younger and younger, his inventions fresher, more tangible. The music was happening in so many dimensions at once, but never once sounded chaotic, only becoming more focused as the evening wove its way forward. Afraid to try and put more into words.

The Dancing In Our Heads continued for hours afterwards; it took dry martinis and a belly full of olive bread to come down.

Triplepundit:

People have proposed two scenerios for the growth of China. The first is that it continues to grow at a massive rate, consuming everything in its path, and producing an ecological catastrophe that will be its demise, and possibly ours too. The second is that China wises up and becomes an unprecidented (sic) leader in “green growth” balancing its economic needs with good health for its people and a clean, healthy environment. This article (WBCSD) gives great hope for the second scenerio.

The conventional wisdom in the U.S. is that “green” and “economy” are two forces in opposition. One goal of environmentalists is to prove that green industry can actually be good for business. The question is whether a free market will reach this conclusion without encouragement from government. I’d like to think it can, but have a feeling that, if it puts its mind to it, China’s monolithic government could bring “green” and “economy” together faster than the free market can do in this country. Free market forces are exactly what have led us into this environmental quagmire in the first place.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.4.3, Safari becomes the first publicly shipping browser capable of passing the rigorous Acid 2 web standards compliance test. What’s amazing about this test is that its output looks almost idiotically simple, even though it’s testing a very wide range of CSS features (try viewing source on the test page). Note that Acid 2 does not guarantee 100% CSS compliance, focusing instead on features that designers actually want to use (how it works). Even Firefox (v 1.07) fails miserably.

Meet Harlan McCraney as George Bush’s speech writer (”speechalist”). Hilarious short featuring masterful interleaving of real Bush clips with Andy Dicks coaching from behind the scenes. Allegedly coming from Comedy Central, but can’t find any reference to it on their site.

People who contact the webmaster to offer comment on some page or other rarely (as in never) provide the URL of the page in question (the new site will automate that problem away). “Hi, your site says xyz rather than prq. Duh.” A tedious email exchange generally follows, wherein I try to determine what in hell they’re talking about.

Recently received a request to remove a listing from our Jobs database, without any clue as to which listing they meant, the correspondent seemingly unable to distinguish between the concept of a page and a site, to grok the possibility that I don’t have every word on the site memorized, or to digest the fact that someone else manages the actual content of the jobs database. Then the person went silent, problem unsolved. Today received an envelope — snail mail including a printout of the job description they meant, with the words “Scot, please delete this site” scrawled across the top.

Today has been an endless series of similar incidents, originating both from within the workplace and without. It’s hopeless. I give up. I hate myself and wish I had never been born.