In response to the banning of Boing-Boing by the not-so-SmartFilter, our own mneptok has created this little badge, designed to get us banned too. If enough legit sites can get themselves banned by these kinds of too-aggressive filters, sysadmins (and parents) who implement the filter may end up having to think twice about the risks of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Boing-Boing has posted the badge, encouraging wide circulation.

Update: mneptok’s badge/campaign was featured on Current TV.

Been a long time since your last quantum physics class? Lost touch with the essential weirdness of the double-slit experiment? Amazingly clear and enjoyable explanatory video, now visible inline thanks to the new “Put on site” feature at Google Video.

Thanks Oliver

Fascinating audio presentation by Marcia McNutt of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, comparing the challenges of undersea and outer space exploration. Making her point about how much incredibly surreal life still awaits discovery here on earth, McNutt described the (relatively) recent discovery of the Frankpressi worm, which has no mouth and no stomach. Found two miles undersea, the worm appears only during “whale falls” - when a whale corpse sinks to the bottom of the sea, delivering a 70-ton feast to the ocean floor. The worm attaches itself to the hull of the whale and grows “roots” which descend into the whale’s bone marrow, where they begin digesting food osmotically.

What really puzzled researchers was the fact that all of the worms appeared to be female — where were the males? Turns out the males live only inside the females. The males are tiny, yolk-like creatures that develop only to the point where they can produce sperm, at which point their growth is permanently stunted. Sounds familiar.

OK, it’s a chain-letter/LiveJournal type thing, but since I got tagged twice in the past couple of months, and since I’m such a sucker, guess it’s my turn to spread the peanut butter. These sorts of things are always a bit corny, but also revealing, so here goes.

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Cavalry is on the way, and it could be you! I’m about to get some much-needed help at the J-School, to tackle some recently added large web projects (I can’t even handle the amount of work I’ve got, let alone take these new projects on). We’re officially looking for a second me!

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is hiring a Web Producer/Webmaster to manage a pair of complex, multimedia web sites that will publish highly innovative reporting projects produced by a consortium of schools and foster the production of top quality online journalism.

Complete job description here; ping me if you have additional questions (but no breaks for friends or insider trading :)

Storm of news over the past couple of weeks about the recent appearance of a pair of meek little proof-of-concept viruses for the Mac. It’s a news item not because the viruses are widespread, or because any noticeable damage is being done — it’s a news item because, until now, viruses for the Mac simply didn’t exist. Mac users have, perhaps foolishly, come to see their platform as a citadel of inherent security, leading to a common mindset that they can sit back and do nothing safely.

For Wired News, Leander Kahney writes Mac Attack a Load of Crap:

The smuggest of smug Mac users is right: the platform is more secure, and these new security threats are no more threatening than a paraplegic kitten. … Last month, there were four “massive” virus attacks on Windows, according to Commtouch, an antispam and antivirus vendor. Indeed, viruses are now so aggressive, they routinely outpace attempts by antivirus companies to distribute protective signatures. … These Mac “threats” are only news because of their novelty, not the threat level they pose.

Maybe, but once there’s a crack in the dyke, a village can flood pretty quick. For now, I’m with Kahney — I’m not installing any A/V software, nor am I suddenly regarding every email attachment or download as suspicious. But that could change.

In a way, this turn of events could become an acid test for the old argument about whether the Mac has been virus-free due to low marketshare or due to inherent security. If virus writers turn their attention to the Mac and go at it aggressively, the “low marketshare” part of the argument is mitigated, and we’ll be able to see whether the Mac really is inherently more secure.

Never build when you can buy snarg for free. Had been contemplating writing a tool to aggregate server load averages over time, so I could really nail our peak resource usage times. Today found and installed Doug Robbins’ loadavg - a PHP-based tool that does exactly that, and shows additional vital stats to boot. Dynamic displays looking back through time, clear visuals, exactly what I was looking for. Nice companion to the excellent vpsinfo.

On the train tonight, a snaggle-toothed, bedraggled crazy dude threw candy at me. Handfuls of hard, multi-colored candies, from about 10 feet away. Sat in a corner seat, grinning at me from behind aviator shades and a hat with dangling earflaps, as if Amelia Earhart had been a drunken, bearded, male bum, and also very generous with her candy. “You like these? Like these little guys? Want some more?” Then he’d stop throwing long enough to pop a few in his mouth. Could hear his teeth cracking on them from across the train. “Little blobs of joy in your mouth!” he said, and he’d reach into a crumpled paper bag and throw another handful. God knows where he got them all. And then he stopped. After an interlude: “Hey, you messed up? I’m messed up.” Well, now that was news. The funny thing was, he was so happy that I just couldn’t be mad. Annoyed, sure, but his ecstasy was kind of contagious.

New link to the right (bottom): Add Birdhouse to Google Toolbar. If you have the toolbar installed, you can now search Birdhouse directly and also get quick access to new posts. Windows-only, until Goog releases versions for other OSes. Toolbar XML thanks to Niall Kennedy.

Thanks for the push on this, Colleen

Update: The toolbar is broken since moving from MT to WordPress recently.  I’ll update this again when I have a fix in place.

This winter has been an ongoing battle against under-house moisture and in-house mildew, in part due to the previous owner allowing gutters at a corner of the house to spill their load next to the foundation for years. We’ve been jamming on the beast, installing vapor barriers under the house, caulking baseboards and floor cracks, repainting closets with mildew-resistant paint, ripping out the strange 1940s built-in shoe racks that had warped and were letting in-wall air into the house… a brutal seek and destroy mission.

Fixed the corner gutter a long time ago, but gutters in general are slip-shod — four mismatched systems assembled over the years, held together with bailing wire and chewing gum. Finally decided it was time for new ones.

Gutter Dude claimed that his gutters were “seamless.” I wondered, since one length of the house is almost 60 ft., could they have a truck long enough to bring in seamless gutters? “We make them on the spot,” he claimed, “With your choice of paint already baked in.” Huh? Today it all made sense — they arrive with a trailer rig bearing a big roll of colored aluminum ribbon, and press it through a creasing machine to exact lengths. Simple and brilliant.

Miles and I built a Lincoln Log cabin, and he decided it would be a good place for some of his people to live. Tough to make them stand up, so he started piling them all in. When the top of the window frame was reached, M peeled the roof off and filled the house the rest of the way up, then replaced the roof. Choc-a-block. Naturally, any sympathy he felt for the overcrowded living conditions was overshadowed by the irresistible temptation to kick the whole thing over in a shower of wood and plastic the next morning.

Imagine you’re taking the SAT and complete the following semaphoric equation:

Rickie Lee Jones is to Tom Waits as Laurie Anderson is to __________.

First correct answer wins an official Birdhouse mouse pad.

mneptok is automatically disqualified

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Edges of Bounty, a site representing an upcoming book collaboration between photographer Scott Squire and writer William Emery, covering California’s Central Valley.

Our project consists of a series of extended roadtrips around the valley, our notebooks and cameras in tow, talking to people, listening to their stories, and photographing their way of life and the products of their labor.

Squire also runs the excellent nonfictionphoto and nonfictionweddings sites, also on Birdhouse.

Breaking new ground on Birdhouse: For the first time in five years I’m going to render… a sports opinion.

Watched dumbfounded with everyone else last night as Lindsey Jacobellis gave up the gold due to a stupid mistake, and then basically lied on camera about it (she first said she had grabbed her board to “stabilize” the jump). Almost immediately, Costas and the pundits pegged her backside method as “showboating” and blamed it all on overconfidence. This morning’s papers, more of the same — Jacobellis was showing off, blah blah blah. There’s another side to this.

First of all, it’s not like a backside method is any big deal of a trick. It’s a simple tail kick in the air - the kind of thing average riders do on the slopes of any mountain every day, and probably something Jacobellis has done 10,000 times in similar conditions. But for freak reasons, she landed it slightly wrong.

Second, remember that Jacobellis is the only woman rider who does both halfpipe and snowboardcross. ‘Cross offers no points for style, so the smart rider won’t attempt any. But halfpipe is all about style, and it’s likely that doing that kind of thing on a jump is just part of her groove thang.

Third, as she said to Costas, she wasn’t really thinking about it - she was just barreling down the run, having a ball. And a little method is just the kind of thing you do when you’re having fun.

Fourth, if she really wasn’t aware of how much of a lead she had, as she claimed to Costas, then she wasn’t in a position to be doing arrogant things, and the showboating argument falls apart. The tail kick could also be used to throw off neighboring riders in mid-air; it might have partially been an instinctive strategic move.

Yeah, it was a stupid thing to do. But the pundits skewering her for “showboating” aren’t seeing the whole picture, and are raking her across, I think, a few too many coals. The impression left is that it was typical American arrogance. I think it was more innocent than that: A freak bad landing of a very simple, albeit unnecessary, trick.

Photo: NBC

Send a question - any question - to q@askforcents.com. Leave the subject blank and type your question in the email body. Minutes later, get an answer. In fact, to hedge your bets against incorrect answers, you’ll get two answers. I’ve only tested it with one question, but both answers were correct.

2:13 am, Scot  Hacker:

Who was the fourth Banana Split, beyond Drooper, Fleegle, and Snorky?

2:16 am, AskForCents: 

Answer 1:
bingo
Source: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0062543/

Answer 2:
Bingo
Source: http://12121.hostinguk.com/splits.htm

Service is currently free; paid version on the way. Looks like they plan to run the service on micropayments — a few cents per question. If it’s good enough, possibly useful for those times when a simple Google search doesn’t turn up what you’re looking for and you just don’t have time to look deeper. The key will be making it totally fluid - no one is going to enter a credit card number for a 3-cent charge.

Watched a video of Dr. Seuss’ environmental parable The Lorax with Miles this evening. Pretty heavy stuff, and a bit complex for a three-year-old. Had forgotten about the awshum 70’s fuzztone wah-wah TV-funk-style soundtrack. Asked him halfway through whether the movie was making sense to him, and he said it was, though I suspected he was just enjoying the visuals more than anything.

Afterwards, as the credits rolled over a landscape of clear-cut Truffula Tree forests and a sky blackened with smog from Thneed manufacturing plants, I asked him what the movie was about. “It’s about cleaning up,” he said. “Cleaning up what?” “Cleaning up the trees.” “And what happened at the end?” (The ending was only hinted at). “The boy got a seed for a tuffuffa twee and he planted it and it gwowed up.”

I’ll be damned, he did get it. And the concreteness of the fact that I will grow old and die while he and his friends deal with a choking planet — hit me so hard. Now here’s where it gets corny and painfully sincere: I almost cried. Looked at him, and gave him one of those big bear hugs, and he gave me one of those big bear hugs back, and I told him we have a big job to do, watching out for those Truffula Trees. But if anyone can do it, Miles can do it. If he wants to.

Analyst Nick Gall, in a podcast at IT Conversations, on precepts that make systems modular and extensible. His basic point is an old one, but well made: In order to have freedom for extensibility, you need a solid, but basic underlying architecture. Too much architecture in the framework, and you’re locked in, without sufficient freedom. Too little, and you have neither interoperability nor room to improvise.

Gall compares the simplicity of the lowly IP packet — source and destination addresses, protocol identifier, a TTL, and a payload — to the similarly internationalized system of modular shipping containers, which move so easily from train to truck to ship, can slide quickly between countries, arriving easily at their destination without ever having been opened. TCP/IP and the meatspace shipping container system form near-perfect mirror images of one another. The shipping container, in essence, is a 20-ton packet.

The balance between simple, formalized, underlying structure with a high degree of overlying freedom, applies to so many things. Thinking now of a thread we had here a while back on the fact that HTML standards are not enforced, while TCP/IP standards are.

And of a Drupal users group meeting I attended today, where developers referred to the balance they try to strike between creating enough structure to let you get things done easily in the CMS, but not so much that the system isn’t infinitely extensible.

And of jazz: Too little structure = inaccessible, chaotic (not necessarily a bad thing, but generally not successful). Too much structure = rigid, soulless, boring.

In a comment the other day, I said:

I’m opposed to the concept of anonymity on the internet in general (the same reason I hate that people on IRC use handles rather than real names, or handles that don’t even resemble their real names). I make exception for political dissidents etc. of course.

Based on a couple of emailed comments, wanted to clarify my position on that: There seems to be an aspect of internet subculture which conflates anonymity with privacy. What I’m talking about here is standing by your name - accountability. I feel that what you write, and the domains (i.e. publications) you own should in most cases be attached to your real name. I feel that it is possible to be non-anonymous while still keeping private information private. I feel that attaching your name to your expressions is connected somehow to integrity.

When I enter an IRC channel or chat and everyone is using a handle rather than a real name, I feel suspicious. Do these same people configure their email clients to use false names as well? The predominance of nicknames in IRC doesn’t automatically mean everyone is “hiding” something, but it does mean people may be inclined to say things they wouldn’t if they were using their real names. It invites the saying of things that might not be said otherwise. Some call that a level of freedom we don’t have in meatspace. I’m not sure that exercising that freedom without good cause is necessarily beneficial.

I don’t begrudge anyone the right to be anonymous if they choose to be - I just don’t think it’s necessary most of the time. I also think that a lot more conversation on the internet would be civil if pseudonyms were removed from the picture. Again, I make exception for some political speech.

A friend pointed out that artists sometimes work under pseudonyms for artistic reasons that have nothing to do either with politics or actual anonymity — just pure art. Fair enough. But we also know — or can easily find — the real names of most artists working under pseudonyms. If an artist (or writer, or domain owner) is taking positive steps to thoroughly hide their real name, we assume they have political or other very good reasons to do so. If not, then we are suspicious of their reasons for seeking anonymity, and credibility is in question.

Then again, maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Got the strangest call today. The number that appeared on my phone’s display was bizarre: 001-416. The voice on the other end launched directly into a polite, quasi-legalistic rant about how “my intellectual property was in danger” regarding one of the domains I manage (for a customer). I kept pressing him for details, but all I got was piles of scripted fluff. But pretty good fluff. Things like “We need to verify your address for the domain notification processor.” But all attempts to get them to explain what a “notification processor” were met with another line of nonsense.

It was pretty clear to me that this was the phone equivalent of those increasingly popular quasi-legalistic letters sent to domain owners attempting to buffalo users into either changing registrars or into registering every possible associated TLD on the base name. The latter is the key to understanding the jive about how your intellectual property may be in danger — the pitch is that if someone else registers yourname.us, you may never have complete control over yourname!

The guy (who was calling from India, BTW) didn’t succeed in getting any information or confirmation out of me, but I was impressed by the fact that he seemed to have a plausible-sounding nonsense answer to every question I threw at him. And though my questions about what company he worked for were answered with things like “We represent all domain registrars,” he was happy to send me to Domain Registry Support — a site which boldly attempts to lend itself phony cred by linking to the IETF and the W3C. Sycophants.

Quick search on their name pulled up dozens of pages like this one, filled with comments from people who had just gotten off the phone with DRS.

Shields up; predators everywhere.

Pingmag interviews Oded Ezer, an Israeli typographer and designer who does absolutely breathtaking things with the Hebrew alephbet. Using nails, Fimo, cut paper, insect wings, and, yes — ink — Ezer does things with type I never dreamed possible.

When I saw an ant on the floor of my studio, I started to imagine what would happen if this was a creature half ant and half letter. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if nature had invented letters? And then maybe different letter-ants could gather, create words and communicate with us!?

Ezer on fontography inspired by the music of the Israeli composer Arye Shapira:

So the music sounds really hard, almost broken… What I then did, was to take the names of the music titles and cut up the individual letters. My intention was: how would the letters behave, if they were this music?

Boing-Boing has a summary post on Songbird — a brand new, open source, universal music player / download / purchasing system designed to provide a common interface onto the dozens (hundreds?) of music download sites and services out there.

A team led by ex-Winamp-er Rob Lord today released a preview edition of Songbird, a desktop media player that offers an open source alternative to services like Apple’s iTunes and the Windows Media Player. Instead of connecting to one locked store full of DRMmed goods, it can connect to any and all available music (and video) on the internet. Code brains behind the project include people who helped build Winamp, Muse, Yahoo’s “Y! Music Engine” media player, and developers from Mozilla Foundation. Initial release is for Windows only, with editions for other OSes to follow in the coming weeks.

The digital music market is becoming increasingly fragmented with a multitude of DRM formats and incompatible media players (both software and hardware). Most people don’t think twice about the fact that when they purchase music from iTMS, they’re permanently buying into Apple’s software and hardware for playback. Or people do think twice about it, but are willing to make the sacrifice in exchange for the excellent discovery and purchasing experience (I’m in the latter category). Songbird can’t fix that problem, but it can — especially assuming a pace of plugin development to match what’s happened for Firefox — at least become a Rosetta stone for locating the music you want.

When I’m looking for a particular artist or album, the order of operations is this: Check emusic.com. If that fails, check iTMS. If I can’t find it in either of those places, I’ll reluctantly launch Acquisition and do the P2P thing. Pandora sits off to the side turning me on to new things, but without letting me grow my library. Songbird could allow all of these paths to converge in one spot — an idea I love.

Thread at DIGG on this. And yes, the Songbird logo bird does indeed appear to be passing gas.

Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth and their ilk are tired of net neutrality - the principle that “packets is packets,” and all should be passed along as equals. Net neutrality is one of the things that makes things “just work.” If these megacorps have their way with Congress, they intend to start double dipping - charging customers for broadband access, and also charging Google, Amazon, eBay etc. for bandwidth by giving preferential treatment to packets from companies that pony up.

Bellsouth’s William L. Smith told reporters that he would like the Internet to be turned into a “pay-for-performance marketplace” where his company would be allowed, for example, to charge Yahoo for the right to have its site load faster than Google.

Similar quotes from clue-free CEOs here. Common Cause is running the Hands Off Our Internet! campaign to let execs know they’re harshing our mellow.

Two days this weekend in the dreaded claustrophobic bowels of our house’s crawlspace, installing a 6 mil vapor barrier (we’re in pitched battle with household moisture problems - gutters, french drains, caulking, mildew-resistant paint, dehumidifier, the works). On belly in mud, no space to work, ribs bruised from pushing through the tiny access point… exhausted and rubbery after today’s session, but just enough time for a quick shower and to hop in the car with [dude] and head for the Berkeley Hills to do some mushroom hunting.

It’s wild Chanterelle and Oyster mushroom season, and the rains have been kind this year. I’d never been, but had always wanted to. No walk in the park! These guys grow on the sides of steep hills, in deep underbrush far from the main paths, under logs, amidst thorn bushes. Two hours of pushing through thickets, puffing up hills, sliding into mud bogs, and we ended up with almost five pounds of forest delicacies (yes, [dude] knows which ones are dangerous).

Actually, it was almost all Chanterelles - I spied the monster Oyster sprouting from a log just as we were heading out at the end of the day. Tomorrow will have a glorious saute’ session and do a pasta. Tonight I’m elastic.

Al Lewis, aka Grandpa Munster, has died. If it were not for a trip to Cuba I made with an old girlfriend in the early 90s to see the International Film Festival, do some music writing, and see the country before the embargo was lifted and it became an American tourist destination, Al Lewis wouldn’t mean much to me. But at the end of that festival, we were invited to Fidel Castro’s palace to sip mojitos and consort with other attendees. And, in one of the more accidental/surreal confluences of my life, I ended up in a circle of people talking to Fidel Castro about the potential for hemp products to boost the Cuban economy, with Al Lewis standing across the circle from me, interjecting crazy talk into the conversation. Never watched much Munsters, but will never forget that moment. Have included here a pre-weblog journal entry from that day. Farewell Grandpa Munster!
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While on a walk on the Berkeley Pier today, Miles took his first picture… this modernist interpretation of his own shadow. He then flat-out refused to take a picture of me. “No, Daddy — picture time has ended!” No further explanation requested or offered, but I’m not taking it personally.

For some reason, he’s been fascinated lately with the wrinkle in my forehead, and today objected that he couldn’t see his own wrinkle. “You don’t have one,” said Amy. “You have to earn your wrinkles over time.” “No!,” answered Miles, “People don’t earn wrinkles, they earn stickers!” (referring to our “eat a good dinner” incentive system).

He’s been living with a doozy of a head cold lately. A week ago, trying to get him to take medicine when sick … you’d think we were trying to yank teeth out of his head. Then, suddenly one evening, he actually asked for his medicine — seemed to have made the causal connection between it and feeling better. And last night, after eagerly gulping down a tablespoon, he boldly informed me: “Daddy, medicine is my favorite food!”