The Mac OS analog to SourceForge: “Mac OS Forge is dedicated to supporting the developer community surrounding open source components specific to Mac OS X.” None of the usual Apple branding there, though it is an Apple production. Cool to see they’ve already released the source to Calendar Server (for supporting iCal workgroups), which will be built into Leopard Server (itself not due for another nine months). And it’s Darwin, which means it’ll be possible to run it on Windows and *nix servers, just like Quicktime Streaming Server.

Unrelated nifty: Looks like there will be an RSS reader built into Mail.app in Leopard (via dsandler.org). Nothing innovative there - Thunderbird and others already do RSS - but it’ll be nice to have. Let’s hope it’s better than the craptastic RSS reader built into Safari.

A subculture about which I knew nothing until today: Infiltration, aka Urban Exploration — a hobby/practice all about getting into places where people aren’t supposed to go (without getting caught). There are beautiful spaces all around us that we never get to see, because we’ve been successfully trained to obey the language of fences and signs. Urban Explorers even have their own ‘zine (though most of the scene has moved online). Abandoned buildings, ferry boat engine rooms, old factories… Some places are totally unguarded, others heavily so (which is half the fun). Urban Explorers take care not to litter, get hurt, or absorb toxins. It’s all about the hunt (and the photos — these are lovely).

Keeping it simple. I like that.

Some of Shrigley’s photos are quite amazing.

Yet another major overhaul of WP-Digest, which sends out summaries of new posts on WordPress blogs to a subscribers list. v2.0 is capable of sending HTML email with plain text fall-back (multipart) or plain-text-only. Now using v2 to send formatted messages to the Birdhouse Updates list. The wonderful PHPMailer class is now included in the distribution, which made the multipart part easy.

What the FAQ on kissthisguy.com says:

Q: Would you send me the lyrics to my favorite song?
A: No. We don’t have any more access to real lyrics than you do, and even if we did, we wouldn’t spend all day doing free research for the general public. There are many sites on the Web that archive real lyrics, and you should look to them, not this one, for that service. Google knows all. In addition, we have a discussion board here on the site, which is a great place to ask other lyrics fans about real lyrics.

The kind of mail I get from users several times a week anyway:

Hello - Please me to send lyrics(texst) from Hungarien group ‘Omega’ from album ‘Gammapolis’ song ‘Lady Of The Summer Night’ original english text version. Thank you too. My best Wishes.

Why bother?

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes thornography.net:

Mr. M. Thorn’s private path, petal-littered, meandersome and pungent, in the World Wide Wonder. Words (with occasional illustration), so many words, mostly pertaining to things shiny, absurd, and new: ideas, events of currentness, technology, culture. Occasional saber-rattling involving Finland.

Woke this morning to a pair of precisely arranged cardboard boxes in Miles’ play area with a note attached (apparently dictated to Amy by Miles), informing me — in no uncertain terms — that not only was I not to disturb the boxes, which were configured in the shape of a race car, but that my only son was headed for New Zealand. It’s going to be lonely around here. Kind of bummed - I had hoped to travel to N.Z. with him when he turns eight, and now he’s apparently decided to go without me.

Late that morning, up to his elbows dolling up the car with purple and red finger (read: hand) paints. Once the car was ready to race to New Zealand, thought he’d be gone like a flash, but nope. Found him on the living room floor paging through a book of Mark Rothko paintings (not kidding), telling me what he liked or didn’t like about each. Guess he’s not leaving after all.

The Caps Lock key takes up valuable keyboard real estate, encourages shouting (accidental or intentional), and results in mis-typed passwords. The CAPSoff blog has become a rallying point for users who want to encourage manufacturers to either ditch it or move it up into no-man’s land alongside Scroll Lock, et al. Wired News:

“The Caps key is an abomination,” Hintjens writes on his blog. “It’s a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers.”

…

“Obviously the keyboard producers have been so indoctrinated that they don’t even inspect their own products any longer,” Hintjens writes. “Listen, dudes: No one wants that crummy Caps key. It’s history.”

File under: Noble effort, but historical momentum is too hard to fight. If you want the keyboard to be logical, may as well throw out the whole thing and start over. Or go Dvorak.

Just back from “Plinkety Pleasures: A Ukelele Revue” at 21 Grand. Singing saws, a washboard with cat food cans and hotel service desk bell attached, ukes of all stripes. First time I’ve seen a banjolele in action. “Just Henry” performed a down-tempo but soaring version of Bowie’s “Suffragette City” that floored me. Stella! had piles of charisma. Tippy Canoe, not so much (though she does possess the absolutely perfect ukulele name). 5 Cent Coffee owned the evening with gritty, soulful, sometimes Tom Waits-ish grit and soul. All of it a total gas.

Technorati Tags: ukulele

Warning: Extreme nerd content.

View source on just about any Google page and you’ll see most of the code jammed together on a single line. With the kind of volume they do, every byte saved adds up to real money, so removing line feeds saves dough. But if they’re being that careful about conserving bandwidth, how does Google Video figure into the equation? Thought it might be fun to do some cocktail napkin math.

If I run a Google search and save the source code to a file, that file is 24032 bytes. If I open it in BB-Edit and run Format | Plain (which adds line breaks at logical places but adds no indentation), the file grows to 26868 bytes*. So Google is saving an impressive 2836 bytes (2.8k) per SERP by removing line feeds.

Now, assume a video stream that runs at around 2MBs/minute and lasts three minutes. At 1048576 bytes per MB, that’s 6,291,456 bytes per video stream. Which gives us a ratio of:

6,291,456 / 26868 = 2218.4 / 1

So the precious bytes Google saves by removing line feeds on 2,218 SERPs is nullified by serving a single three-minute video. Of course, they dish up a hell of a lot more SERPs than videos, but it does raise the question: Is bandwidth precious to Google or not? I can picture the looks on the faces of all the engineers who had spent a decade living under the “Optimize the hell out of it” mantra the day they learned the company would be serving up unlimited gobs of video to the public for free.

Update: Sean observes that some of the videos he’s downloaded from Google average 6 MBs/minute, which would pretty much exactly double my estimate. We would need to download a bunch of videos from Google to get an accurate average, but if they’re averaging 6MBs/min, it makes me think that very little optimization is going on in Goog’s video dept. I train students to compress video at around 3 MBs/minute (320×240, 15fps, MPEG4). Since I was assuming that Google also has a strong interest in video optimization, I originally assumed that their streams would be of a similar size.

* Incidentally, if I run Format | Gentle Hierarchical at this point (which adds common indentation for nested elements), the file swells to 43356 bytes. And if I run Format | Hierarchical (which indents aggressively), the file swells to 64102 bytes — almost 3x its original size. Yow!

Technorati Tags: bandwidth, google, optimization

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes dangillmor.com, a portal page for author and citizen media advocate Dan Gillmor.

Dan Gillmor is director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Gillmor is also the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

Gillmor also runs kralums.com, “A blog for the soon-to-be thousands of former Knight Ridder employees.”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes childboxer.com, representing a coming documentary film by Timothy Wheeler:

Child Boxer is an intimate documentary following a 12-year-old boxer who has spent half his life in boxing gyms slugging it out with other children.

One of the things I loved about Soul Train was the fact that they had actual train tracks running right down the middle of the dance floor and up the wall. Here, grooving with the Isley Brothers.

I was probably about 7 or 8 years old during this era of Soul Train, and the whole thing was just mystifying to me. Made me think grown-ups had a secret, separate world where they went to have strange kinds of fun when they weren’t busy taking care of us.

Follow-up to Eno, Wright, Generative Systems: Eno later described the session as “Two strangers becoming friends in front of 900 people.” Two guys in completely different fields working on exactly the same thing — building generative systems from cellular automata. Numberless:

[Each of them] use the idea of cellular automata as a basis for their creations. Cellular automata … refers to a simple initial rule-set that is capable of generating very complex and disparate results.

Shortly after the session, Wright announced that Eno would be creating the soundtrack to the upcoming game Spore. I’m not a gamer, but I’ve been looking forward to this game (due in 2007) for a long time now.

Wikipedia: Spore is, at first glance, a “teleological evolution” game: the player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal, until the species becomes intelligent. At this point the player begins molding and guiding this species’ society, progressing towards a spacefaring civilization.

Some of the screenshots and video floating around the internet are amazing, but apparently don’t do the actual gameplay justice. The generative link between Eno and Wright could result in some great audio. Most game music is set on endless repeat, but Eno’s audio will be sui generis, and will never repeat. Wright:

“Science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world which will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable…..It’s not engineering and design, so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds.”

It’s up! (See One Last Look). Not perfect, and still a few items on my to-do list, but the new J-School web site is finally live, just in time for the new school year. A very different animal from the old one. All font tags are gone. Layout tables are gone. The major pages all pass XHTML validation (eventually the whole site will validate). We finally have a complete templating system (I ultimately decided to go with Smarty templates rather than adopt or build a CMS). Loads of new features, lots more anti-spam controls. Much less manual work to maintain the homepage (due to better separation of content types). Lots of things that were previously almost invisible are now surfaced via fly-out menus. Decent degradation with CSS and/or JavaScript disabled. Homepage now much more graphical (the main image is on a 15-minute rotation), less text-heavy overall. Lots more interface between back-end / intranet databases and public views (e.g. current and historical course offerings). And so on.

Amazing to look back over my Basecamp entries from the past year — 178 items checked off, 5 to go (mainly small fixes plus some work to do accessibility). Seemed like for months, I was adding three items for every one I checked off. Now, finally, it’s like a permanently attached monkey has been pried from my back.

Feedback welcome.

Many thanks to Andrew Devigal of Devigal Design (who also teaches design in our multimedia skills classes).

Come November, I will have been at the J-School for five years. I remember thinking when I started that setting the school up with a modern site would be one of my first tasks. Things didn’t quite work out that way. Spent a couple of months whittling the site down to essentials (it was over 90% orphans, and contained gigabytes of uncompressed images and video when I inherited it). Then the school needed an intranet, so I built that. Then they needed a jobs database, an alumni database, a multimedia tutorials collection, a spam-proof email contact form system, a brochure request system. An events publishing system. Integration with FileMaker databases. A webcasting system. A system to gather and post links to published student and faculty stories. An integrated mailing list system. A search interface. A courses and class scheduling database. An equipment checkout system. A staff and faculty calendaring system. Discussion boards. Weblogs. Lots and lots of weblogs. An online quiz system. A publishing system for the writing-intensive J-200 courses. And then there were the classes — co-teaching in multimedia skills, schlepping projectors and cameras around, helping out here and there. Doing desktop support for faculty and staff. Helping an unending parade of students with misc tech questions. Last summer was spent helping the entire school convert from Windows to Mac OS X. Spent most of this summer helping build a content management system for News21.

And so it goes. Days turn into weeks turn into months turn into years. After enough time had passed, I entered a state of resignation, accepted the 1997-era web site as a fact of life, and kind of stopped seeing it for what it was. I couldn’t find two-hour blocks to take care of all the small stuff, let alone find the hundreds of hours it would take to completely replace all the plumbing. But over the past year, working in the margins, I was able to secure funding for a new design, doubled up on my quota of interns, and slowly chipped away at it in the background.

A few weeks ago I wrapped up the work on News21 and have been going full-tilt boogie on getting the new site ready for launch. And now we’re on the brink. Take one last look, because tomorrow night this old jalopy goes bye-bye. If you read this after Tuesday night, the screenshot above will be all that remains.

Never thought I’d say it, but I’m going to miss the old dog. Kinda.

All that stands between today’s “strong” encryption and a total breakdown of security on the internet is the fact that brute force methods for cracking keys simply take too long. But quantum computers don’t process problems serially - they “sift” to find immediate solutions to mathematically hard problems. Therefore, the existence of a practical quantum computer could have huge ramifications for virtually all systems that rely on hard encryption for security (your online banking system, for example). Though still largely theoretical, the day of reckoning for traditional encryption is starting to look a little closer.

New Scientist: A new silicon chip capable of manipulating the spin of a single electron could ultimately allow futuristic quantum computers to be built using conventional electronic technology, researchers say. A quantum bit, or “qubit”, is analogous to the bits used in conventional computers. But, instead of simply switching between two states, representing “0″ and “1″, quantum physics permits a qubit to exist in more than one state simultaneously, until its state is measured.

As it stands, human brains are slow, but compute in a massively parallel fasion. Computers are very fast, but pretty much attack problems serially (have to process one instruction at a time). Combine a computer’s inherent speed with publicly-available massively parallel computing (still theoretical, but on the horizon), factor in the infallibility of computer memory compared to human memory, and the world changes in ways we can’t begin to imagine. (cf: Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines).

via Paul Conant

New studies from South Africa call the legendary intelligence of dolphins into question, concluding that whales and dolphins may actually possess no more smarts than goldfish. The fact that they have complex social behaviors may be a red herring, which we mis-identify as intelligence. Chicago Sun-Times:

Yet while dolphins aren’t as smart as people tend to think, they are as happy as they seem. Manger said dolphins have a ”huge amount” of serotonin in their brains, which is what he described as ”the happy drug.”

Not sure I’m buying it. You can’t teach a goldfish basic vocal communications with humans. Goldfish don’t try to save the lives of drowning sailors. Goldfish can’t balance balls on their snouts or plant mines on the sides of ships (granted, goldfish don’t posses the physical attributes to accomplish any of these feats, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison).

The Sun Times article is sourced from the Scripps-Howard News Service, and is short on details. I wasn’t able to turn up corroborating stories easily.

Nifty WordPress plugin lets you view activity on a WP blog in real time: Live. Watch RSS access, comments, misc visitor activity in a little Ajax window as it’s happening.

In a similar vein, discovered Apache Log Tail the other day — integrates with cPanel’s WHM and lets you view tail activity for each domain on a cPanel server in real time - really useful during comment spam attacks, etc. (and way easier / more compact / more visual) than running tail from a shell). Also a big fan of the same developer’s vpsinfo and loadavg scripts.

bush-of-ghosts.com forks to both the official Warner Music site representing the great 1981 collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne and a second site, from which users can download individual source tracks from the original album and re-mix them into their own creations — many of them quite beautiful.

When Bush of Ghosts was first released, the kind of remixology Eno/Byrne were doing was pretty unusual, though now commonplace (but seldom as successful). Their decision to offer the album up for public remix 25 years later (!) is poetry. But Eno has always taken the long view (he talks on the SALT podcast about how he had to tell a gallery owner in which he was doing an installation that the duration of the audio he was using was “approximately 6,410 years.”)

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes hunxue-er.com.

Li Zhaohua is an American journalist based in Oakland, California. He also spends time in Beijing. He finds “I’m genetically predisposed to the crossing of cultural barriers” a useful phrase in fellowship and job applications, but would rather jam an ice-pick repeatedly into his own leg than say something like that in real life.

WordPress blog.

Useful, enviro-friendly use of the Google Maps API: Garbage Scout. See something useful being thrown out? Snap a pic with your cell phone and email it (again from your phone) to garbagescout.com, along with the address. An image of the item appears on a Goog map along with location details so others can come snag it. Currently available in New York, San Francisco, and Philly. Can’t decide whether the site needs design help or is in keeping with the subject matter.

Posted back in 2002 about the Long Now Foundation - created by Stewart Brand to think about the very distant future of humanity. Their flagship project is the construction of a clock to last 10,000 years, which will chime once per century.

The foundation recently hosted a conversation between musician Brian Eno and game designer Will Wright (The Sims, Spore). Haven’t heard the whole thing yet, but the first half hour was fascinating — Eno and Wright mostly discussing generative systems — complexity arising from simple rules. Eno reminisces about the first time he heard Steve Reich perform a pair of tape loops — an inflection point in Eno’s career.

Reich took two identical 1.8-second audio segments and created identical loops out of them, strung them through two decks, and played one slightly slower than the other. Gradually the two segments went out of phase with one another, giving rise to complex and beautiful relationships. The pieces come back into sync 30 minutes later, and the piece ends. Objective correlative: Near the end of the work day, I watched sadly as the J-School hauled its last remaining reel-to-reel tape decks out to the electronic recycling bin, their usefulness behind them.

Wright talks about the Game of Life as a generative system giving rise to complex relationships from a base of a few simple rules, correlates to the Chinese game of Go, which also has very few rules but tremendous complexity. Eno demonstrates a version of “Life” that generates music from the ongoing relationships in the same game.

The conversation is downloadable as MP3 or Ogg/Vorbis, and is accesible through the SALT podcast.

Surfing around the longnow site this morning, arrived back at the homepage to find the face of my boss (Orville Schell) gazing back at me - no escape!

Eno has released a CD, Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now, which I haven’t yet heard. Still listening to Eno almost nightly, putting Miles to bed. It’s almost impossible to burn out on them.

Q: What’s better than reading Dr. Seuss with Daddy?

A: Having a disembodied stranger read Dr. Seuss to you through your Windows-only, proprietary FP3 DRM format Fisher-Price FP3 Player (blue for boys, pink for girls!).

Think of it as training wheels for the children of iPod-toting parents. Oh, wait, I’m one of those. So why isn’t thing appealing? Maybe because I can’t picture a situation where Miles would be walking around with headphones on not talking to anyone — it’s not like he’s got the morning commute to himself. Maybe because we don’t have any Windows machines in our house. Maybe because the world is already drowning in DRM?

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh, too hypocritical. I get to enjoy my socially insulating technology. I cave in and buy DRM’d music from iTMS. Why shouldn’t he? Maybe it’s because this thing smells like My First Sony, the name of which made the whole line seem like a bald-faced attempt to get the Sony brand needle under the skin of pre-schoolers before their impressionable young minds were infected by rival logos. Smelled like it because it was.

Technorati Tags: DRM, kids

New York Times:

In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked to respond … to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.” The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution. In Iceland, 85 percent agreed with the statement. (Graph)

via Slashdot, Science Magazine is pointed about the reasons:

The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.