The stars are projectors. - Modest Mouse
 
July 30th, 2006

RAIDiator: Infrant Home NAS / RAID

When I lost a secondary MP3 drive to disk failure a while back, it was like being hit upside the head with a blunt object – a reminder that I had no good way to back up my main MP3 collection, and I could easily lose all my music at any moment (and not just the music, but five years worth of collection tweaking work). This month, finally filled the 160GB main music drive to capacity. Meanwhile, the drive that hosts backups for Birdhouse, plus Amy’s and my home backups, had been flirting with capacity for a while. Decided I couldn’t put it off any longer – time for a fully redundant, high capacity network-attached RAID.

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Posted in Geek | 20 Comments »

July 28th, 2006

Corn Plastic Not So Green?

Plastics made from corn (PLAs) are advertised as “biodegradable.” And they are. IF your back-yard composting bin is capable of reaching 140 degrees for a stretch of 10 days or more. And that only happens at industrial composters specifically set up for this kind of thing. In the average home composting setup, corn plastics remain unchanged after six months, leading to accusations of false advertising on the part of firms like Wal-Mart, which pushes corn plastics to consumers as part of its new push to green-wash their image.

Smithsonian: So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.

I’m in the middle of reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so my head has been swimming with corn-y thoughts lately. More later.

via Boing-Boing

Music: Bill Frisell :: Anywhere Road

Posted in Environment | 5 Comments »

July 26th, 2006

Mean People Suck

Once upon a time, the nom-de-plume was a rarely used device. Today, it’s practically the norm. Back in February, I posted On Anonymity, clarifying some stuff about my general dislike of handles and nicks, and the general trend toward people writing as other than themselves, not standing personally behind their own words.

Anonymity has its advantages. In some respects, it’s one of the net’s strengths. Anonymity enables people in politically oppressive environments to speak freely. And a 14-year-old girl would probably be foolish to use her real name online. But what about everyone else?

Seems like there’s a lot of talk recently about the declining quality of online conversation. Reasonable people with provocative things to say talk about how every time they try to post something thoughtful, they get torn a new one by readers. I certainly post a lot less controversial stuff here than I used to; finally got tired of the sh*tstorms (though few people comment anonymously here).

And then there’s the GIFT Theory (not safe for work).

Listening to the Gillmor Gang tonight on the way home from work, was struck by something unusual: These guys usually disagree on everything. But for a rare change they were unified — all of them just sick to the gills with a zoo of buffoons out there who can’t express opinions civilly, or whose first priority is to knock a thoughtful writer down. They even talked about wanting to set up systems not just to register commenters, but to enforce verification of real names for anyone who wants to comment.

Later in the evening, a similar thread came up on the O’Reilly Mac Blogger’s internal mailing list – writers fed up with endless snarking and small-minded mean-ness from readers lacking the grapes even to use their real names.

There are several things going on here: The decline of politeness in general, an increasingly fragmented and direct public, and fallout from widespread anonymity. I think anonymity is a bigger factor than is given credit for. Compare: How do you express anger to a stranger when you’re driving your car? Would you express yourself the same way to a stranger standing next to you in the checkout line at the grocery store? If not, why not? The distance, the anonymity, does something to people. And it isn’t a pleasant something.

Music: Agustín Lara :: Piensa en mi

Posted in Culture | 6 Comments »

July 26th, 2006

Spam Plants

Spamplants Romanian-born computer artist Alex Dragulescu turns crap into gold — he’s developed a computational analysis system to transform ordinary spam into renderings of organic-looking plants (though some look more like sea anemones to me). via c|net:


For the Spam Plants, he parsed the data within junk e-mail–including subject lines, headers and footers–to detect relationships between that data. For example, the program draws on the numeric address of an e-mail sender and matches those numbers to a color chart, from 0 to 225. It needs three numbers to define a color, such as teal, so the program breaks down the IP address to three numbers so it can determine the color of the plant. The time a message is sent also plays a role. If it’s sent in the early morning, the plant is smaller, or the time might stunt the plant’s ability to grow.

Dragulescu has also done similar projects with architecture, weblog text, transit, etc.

Music: Lou Reed and John Cale :: Nobody But You

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Posted in Geek, Out there | No Comments »

July 25th, 2006

700 Hobo Names

When listening, please bear in mind: Jonathan Coulton played the music, live, for an hour, one take.

Posted in Music, Out there | No Comments »

July 23rd, 2006

Kissthisguy Archive Feeds

Added two new subscription options to the Archive of Misheard Lyrics this weekend: A Lyric of the Day listserve, which sends out a featured mondegreen to subscribers daily, and a Fresh Lyrics RSS feed.

Posted in Geek, Music | 4 Comments »

July 22nd, 2006

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

Hoo boy. Remember as you’re watching: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) is not just some random doddering boob — he’s the head of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which regulates the internets.

More fun with Stevens at ChezLark.

via SearchBlog

Posted in Geek, Out there | 5 Comments »

July 21st, 2006

Secret Agent Tools

Spent a couple days with a stomach bug while in Minnesota. Miles (3.5 yrs) was concerned, and tended to my spirits one day by bringing me a series of Lego assemblages, which he called “secret agent tools” (he alternately referred to them as “old fashioned”). He’d disappear for five minutes, come trundling back upstairs with a new one, lay some terminology on me, and vanish again. Had a laptop with me in bed, so took notes, which I’ve left unedited here.

secret agent tool – shoots orange juice and pancake syrup and apple juice and clouds. when it shoots out clouds that brings dinosaurs back to the world. And the secret agent tool makes a sound like “Mooooo.”

crab claw – bites a crab and then the farmer fire axes the crab – the farmer shoots the crab with a fire axe and then people can eat the crab for dinner.

“I’m going to make three more toys for you because I’m nervous that my daddy is sick because he’s my special friend, so I’m going to make three more and then that’s all” (he made a total of eight more).

The second toy was called “iceberg tabasky headphones” and it m n nn nb

The third toy was a “Vizerator” or “paper cleaner” and you put paper in a hole and people made new paper

the fourthest toy – shooted out fire and then people could cut down old trees. You can also hold this one.

the fivest toy: shoots out canonballs – “The Sockador” – for cutting down old trees and the swords will come back to life and people can hold them. You can hold this one.

The next one is an evaporator — it cleans up the old garbage and old pieces of paper and the fire dragons come back to life.

this one is “evaporator 2″ and it cleans paper AND keyboards.

a keyboard typer big tragasky panpot aggregator – it spurts some goo from here and it cleans out people from here and then the dinosaurs live in the futures.

then he stuck a tire in my eye and said “you get these rings for being so helpful today.”

Posted in Family | 4 Comments »

July 21st, 2006

TCP/IP Over FireWire

A few years ago I noticed that OS X started offering “FireWire” as one of the tcp/ip connection types, alongside ethernet and modem. Sounded intriguing, but couldn’t imagine a situation where it would be useful.

The brilliance of this arrangement dawned on me over the past couple of weeks, as I found myself in a house with a DSL connection but no router — DSL modem feeding their eMac directly. To get my laptop online without taking their machine off the network, just enabled connection sharing on their Mac, connected a FireWire cable from it to me, and I was online, slickr-n-snot. All of my posts here over the past two weeks were made over FireWire.

Heck, you could even plug a laptop into the back of an external FireWire drive. Effortless.

Posted in Mac | 7 Comments »

July 20th, 2006

Why I Don’t Do Link Exchange

For years, I’ve received email requests to engage in link exchanges with other sites. Because Google and other search engines base a site’s PageRank in large part on the number of incoming links to that site, many webmasters and SEO types see pre-meditated link exchange as an easy way to build rank.

I refuse nearly all link exchange requests, to this or any other site I manage. On occasion, webmasters have taken umbrage at my refusal. Because I’m tired of explaining why I don’t do link exchange, this page exists to explain why I think the practice is wrong.
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Posted in Web Dev | 11 Comments »

July 20th, 2006

(Really) Defending Marriage

Marriage Classique is subject to greater threats than those presented by gays tying the knot — divorce and adultery, to name two. Democratic Rep. Lincoln Davis says a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage won’t go far enough. Salon:

If the sanctity of marriage is to be preserved, Davis deadpanned, Congress should “outlaw divorce” and make adultery “a felony.” In addition, Davis said, “We should prevent those who commit adultery or get a divorce from running an office. Mr. Speaker, this House must lead by example. If we want those watching on C-SPAN to actually believe that we’re serious about protecting marriage, then we should go after the other major threats to the institution.”

At least 29 members of Congress are divorced.

Posted in Culture, Politics | 1 Comment »

July 19th, 2006

YouTube License Fine Print

With more than 100 million videos per day being viewed, YouTube has become an important distribution channel for new musicians. But someone’s got to pay for all those terabytes. If you’ve been wondering what kind of business model was going to keep YouTube afloat, look deeper than AdSense. Try the fine print:

“…by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successor’s) business… in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Wired blog: “Among other things, this means they could strip the audio portion of any track and sell it on a CD. Or, they could sell your video to an ad firm looking to get “edgy”; suddenly your indie reggae tune could be the soundtrack to a new ad for SUVs. The sky’s still the limit, when it comes to the rights you surrender to YouTube when you upload your video.”

Not saying the terms are unfair, necessarily. You get what you pay for. But they are extreme, and musicians looking to break the surface of the water through the service should be paying attention.

Via Mal

Posted in Music | 1 Comment »

July 15th, 2006

Plastination

Plastination Spent the day at St. Paul’s Museum of Science — mostly to see the amazing Body Worlds exhibit currently on display. Dozens of human bodies with liquids and fats replaced by polymers for permanent preservation — through the miracle of modern plastics, these are the mummies of our age. Actual circulatory and nervous systems in exact shape of the bodies they occupied. Brains and brain stems and spinal cords pulled from the skull and spine and draped out behind bodies like capes for maximum visibility of the musculature and skeletal systems that lay behind, as the bodies continued to do the things they had done in life – teach classes, shoot arrows, play basketball, run.

In some examples, bodies had been sliced into perfect longitudinal strips, allowing viewers to compare the organs and organization of healthy and unhealthy bodies. In others, brains sliced and plasticized in place so you could see dendrites descend into cerebellum, out through base of skull, down spinal cord, trace all the way to fingertips. Penises and vaginas in full, un-sexy, functional display (you can imagine the comments left in the guest books). A man’s entire musculature free of bones, standing free, touching its own skeleton as if friends. A man walking with his own skin draped over his shoulder, as though it were a coat. “Winged Man” with all muscle groups splayed outwards, enabling you to see the marvelous intricacy of related muscles. A father with young child riding on his shoulders, mother walking beside, all three of them composed of nothing but their own blood vessels.

A bit of revulsion after first entering, quickly replaced with absolute fascination, both at the marvelous intricacy of the human body (or in awe of God’s work, depending on your leaning), and at the amazing process that makes the examples possible. A few videos online at the Body Worlds meta-site.

Posted in Out there | 13 Comments »

July 13th, 2006

Unpainted Sculpture

Unpainted-Sculpture Last couple trips to Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, I had admired Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture — the depth and total flatness of the gray primer covering every square millimeter of the wrecked vehicle (down to the primer-gray “Jesus is Lord” emblem on the back lip of the trunk) is totally enveloping.

Nothing is as it seems; yesterday realized the wreck isn’t what I thought it was at all. Ray did purchase a wreck from a junk yard. But he didn’t paint it. Instead, he disassembled it bit by bit, cast every last junked part in flat gray fiberglass, then painstakingly re-assembled the car from fiberglass simulacra over the course of two years.

He has said of his past work that he was trying to “make something that was so abstract it became real and so real that it became abstract.”

This photo doesn’t do it justice – you’ve got to get up close to see just how convincing the final product is. So now the concept — and the awareness of the labor — that went into this work deeply affects the way I perceive it. I no longer see a painted wreck, something virtually anyone could have done. I now see a thoughtful representation of a wreck — but one that looks exactly like a painted wreck that anyone could have done.

I want to believe that art speaks and stands for itself, that it needs no back-story to explain itself. But this wreck — or wreck-representation — makes that impossible. The back-story changed my eyes.

Posted in Culture, Out there | 1 Comment »

July 12th, 2006

Sonar Victory

Many congratulations to the National Resources Defense Council for their recent strides in protecting whales and other marine mammals from mid-frequency naval sonar.

Two weeks ago, NRDC attorneys raced to court to block the U.S. Navy from unleashing a barrage of ear-splitting sonar into the waters off Hawaii as part of a massive military training exercise. Whales exposed to mid-frequency sonar have repeatedly stranded and died on beaches around the world — but the Navy refused to adopt even common-sense measures during peacetime exercises to help protect marine life from this deadly threat.

In an infuriating attempt to avoid our lawsuit, the Navy took the unprecedented step — on the eve of the Fourth of July weekend — of declaring itself exempt from the primary U.S. law that requires measures to protect marine mammals. But the court sided with us and found that the Navy’s planned sonar use violated a second key environmental law as well, noting that NRDC had submitted “considerable convincing scientific evidence” of the dangers of sonar to marine life.

The judge blocked the navy’s exercises and ordered them to sit down with NRDC and come up with a set of measures to protect whales and dolphins from the brain-splitting blasts.

Go mammals (us and them)!

Posted in Environment | No Comments »

July 11th, 2006

Grilled Banana Splits

Various recipes found online recommend grilling bananas in the skins (with incisions) or in foil, but that’s totally unnecessary. Yesterday peeled 20 bananas (yes, I was feeding an army), cut them in half lengthwise, and put them flat-side down on a medium-hot grill for about 10 minutes. A few unlucky pieces fell through the grates, where they’ll ultimately smolder into nothingness, but the rest turned a bit soft and came back with lovely diagonal grill marks.

The 2nd key to this sundae is caramelized almonds – toast slivers in a small frying pan, then stir in brown sugar until it melts and coats the almonds.

Assembled grilled bananas, high-test vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, the caramelized almonds, (and other delights) and a slab of drizzled caramel. It was actually somewhat risky, trying this banana grilling business for the first time on 20 guinea pigs, but came out amazing – if you didn’t know better you’d think the whole thing was sitting in a pool of brandy.

Posted in Out there | 4 Comments »

July 10th, 2006

Cambrian House

On the heels of the crowdsourcing meme — Cambrian House is going all-out to leverage the wisdom of crowds to conceive and build new products. How it Works: “You think it, crowds test it, crowds build it, we sell it, you profit.” Though I’m not sure why the testing comes before the building in that diagram, the idea is cool, and the site is building up a nice database of ideas waiting to be worked on. Hmm… looks like this is bigger than I thought: “CambrianHouse.Com was rated by Alexa.Com in the top 100 most searched Canadian websites.”

Why Cambrian?

The term Cambrian Explosion swiped from Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos when describing the initial internet boom, is recycled by Reiss: “[M]idtown Manhattan’s valley of old media dinosaurs is besieged by a Cambrian explosion of digitally empowered life-forms: podcasters, bloggers, burners, P2P buccaneers, mashup artists, phonecam paparazzi. Viewers are vanishing, shareholders are in revolt, advertisers are Googling for the exit.”

Additional evidence that Cambrian House “gets it” — the use of vikings rather than pirates in their iconography (pirates are sooo 2004), and their stealing liberally from the BeOS desktop.

Posted in Culture, Geek | 2 Comments »

July 7th, 2006

Whale Watchers

Whale watchers in Norway got more than they bargained for recently:

While the tourists were admiring one of the great mammals of the sea, a Norwegian whaling boat approached and shot the whale in front of their eyes.

There’s a sort of cultural schizophrenia here, a country profiting both from selling the right to watch whales in all their native grace and also to kill them for profit. Not that much different from our own bizarre contradictions (we eat cows but not horses, chickens but not cats… why?) But weird when two sides of the public mind collide so viscerally.

via Weblogsky

Posted in Environment | 4 Comments »

July 6th, 2006

SMS411, Meg Cox

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes two new domains:

sms411.net: How to use SMS to stay in touch with your friends and family, have fun, save money, get information, and maybe even communicate during an emergency.

megcox.com: Veteran journalist Meg Cox offers fresh insights and resources on the topics of her most recent books: today’s high-tech quilt world and contemporary family traditions.

Posted in Hosting | No Comments »

July 6th, 2006

Bikes Inherently Dangerous?

San Francisco is home to the world’s most aggressive bicycle activists. It’s also home to one of the world’s most aggressive anti-bike activists. Dishwasher and blogger Rob Anderson has succeeded in convincing a judge to put a temporary halt to construction of any new bicycle lanes in the city, on environmental grounds (the lanes allegedly have “not received the level of environmental review required by the California Environmental Quality Act”).

Anderson’s premise is that bicycles are inherently dangerous and will therefore never become a realistic mass transit option. Apparently it’s never occurred to him that bikes are inherently dangerous primarily because of the extreme proliferation of cars?

Only thing worse than an irrational person is a mean irrational person. With power.

Posted in Environment | 5 Comments »

July 5th, 2006

websitegraphs

Websitegraphs-Bhouse websitegraphs lets you visualize a site through a system of dynamically arranged clusters, color coded to describe links, divs, images, line breaks, and other tags. Pictured here is this weblog, but every site graphed looks radically different. More fun than looking at the static images is watching a site being clustered in real-time – the animation is seductively elastic.

via mandric

Posted in Geek, Out there | 2 Comments »

July 4th, 2006

Tabs or Spaces?

Mentioned yesterday that I’ve been enjoying being part of a team programming project for the first time. One of the interesting things that comes up in a cooperative environment are all the conversations about preferred coding style — it’s not just you anymore, Buck-o. We’re all going to have to find a way to make our code flow together nicely. Conditional style, case preferences, and something I never knew was a long-standing religious debate before: tabs vs. spaces. All have been part of the conversation over the past six weeks (and all resolved amicably, FWIW).

Now the WordPress Hackers mailing list is having a protracted debate over the tabs. vs. spaces issue (apparently the first time it’s come up in three years). Jeremy Zawinski has a famous piece in favor of spaces. Lots of good arguments go the other way. I know where I stand. You?

Tabs or Spaces?

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Posted in Pollster, Web Dev | 18 Comments »

July 3rd, 2006

News21

Got pulled off my regular job a couple months ago to work full time on the Carnegie-Knight “Initiative for the Future of Journalism,” an aggregate effort by five of the top journalism schools to revamp and renew approaches to journalism, and ultimately to transform the way journalism is taught.

As part of the planning for the initiative, the five participating deans drafted a vision for change that seeks to renew the mission of schools of journalism much the same way that schools of business, medicine and law have renewed themselves at different junctures in history.

Online now is a starter/brochure site, and currently all of the advance reportage is happening through external blogs. But a compadre and I (yes, we have two webmasters at the jschool now!) have been hard at work building a custom content management system* to meet the project’s fancy multimedia and nested template needs — the largest pure programming job I’ve ever been involved with, and the first time I’ve done any kind of team programming — a very satisfying experience. We’ll be rolling out the “official” site on top of our CMS later this summer. For now, the reporting fellows are scattered all over the globe, gathering material.

The project was recently blogged at Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, at Boing-Boing and also at Utterly Boring, though the interesting stuff is yet to come, once the story packages are completed by the fellows and we wrap up the CMS.

* Will have to post separately sometime on the old build vs. buy CMS question.

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Posted in Media, Work | 4 Comments »

July 2nd, 2006

Tyger

Salon on Guilherme Marcondes’s beautiful Tyger:

“Tyger” is a dazzling animation by Guilherme Marcondes, created for an annual festival thrown by the British Council in Brazil. The only requirement was that it reference English culture in some way, so Marcondes chose William Blake’s “The Tiger” for inspiration. Marcondes writes on his Website that he loves the poem because it “gives us a hint of wonder along with a fear of progress.” We love this short, which had us wondering aloud, What immortal hand or eye/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Posted in Culture, Media, Out there | 1 Comment »

July 1st, 2006

reducer: bad ips –> firewall

At the end of my rope with server loads caused by weblog and email spammers. SpamAssassin and Akismet etc. may keep spam away from users, but all that stuff still needs to be processed (and we’re talking about a huge percentage of all traffic).

Recently switched from the APF firewall to ConfigServer’s excellent CSF, which is integrated into WebHost Manager (the admin back-end for cPanel systems), and got thinking — the most heavily trafficked blogs here are already using spam rating systems that track IPs. The right script could harvest and rank those IPs and load them into the firewall in near real-time. Spent the past few evenings building a shell script to do just that.

reducer: Harvests bad IP addresses from multiple sources and adds them to the CSF firewall for cPanel systems. This version works with WordPress and Movable Type weblogs, and optionally the exim ACL deny system. Future versions will scan other sources for bad IPs as well.

Update, April 2008: Birdhouse Hosting has been running reducer system-wide for almost two years now, with great success. At this point, we wouldn’t even consider running a hosting business without it.

Download reducer here.

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Posted in Geek, Hosting | 5 Comments »