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This week at Stuck Between Stations: Roger Moore on the lasting influence of Cuban bassist Israel Lopeze - Cachao’s Legacy: Two Nations Under a Groove:
Although Cuban bass virtuoso Israel “Cachao” Lopez took his final breaths this week, it’s hard to imagine this humble giant, who played in more than 250 groups from the 1920s on, as not having a pulse. Cachao would have been legendary even if he had retired around 1940.
60 Minutes, The Science of Sleep — We’re sleeping less than ever:
In 1960, a survey by the American Cancer Society asked one million Americans how much sleep they were getting a night. The median answer was eight hours. Today that number has fallen to 6.7 hours - that’s a decrease of more than 15 percent in less than a lifetime. And from what the scientists 60 Minutes met are finding, we may be putting ourselves in a perilous situation.
.. and we’re paying dearly for it. Test subjects allowed to sleep only four hours per night are able to metabolize sugars at about the same rate as pre-diabetics, and have a voracious appetite. In other words, there may be a connection between cultural sleep deprivation and the obesity epidemic. And of course, memory and mental acuity in general suffer dramatically as well. Not to mention nice-ness (tired people are cranky people).
But what refrain is more commonly heard in the workplace than “I’m exhausted?” We’re compensating for the insane pace of everything by staying up later, perhaps fooling ourselves that we’ll be more productive if we just trim off a few of those hours “wasted” on sleep. But it ain’t natch’l, what we do.
“But you know I find it amazing to see how many people are asleep within five minutes of boarding an airplane at 11 o’clock in the morning. You know, sit down and boom. It shouldn’t happen. A normal adult shouldn’t be falling asleep at 11 o’clock in the morning, minutes after sitting in a small, uncomfortable airplane seat. It just shows that, you know, people are exhausted.”
Ever since Miles was born, I’ve been deep in this pattern, getting by on 5-6 hours/night (7 on a mellow day), day after day, week after week. I used to try and get one full 8-hour night per week, but now even that doesn’t happen regularly. You just get so used to being a zombie, it starts to feel normal. Every now and then you get a full night or something close to it, and the mental clarity is astonishing, this feeling of alertness like you remember from a long-ago life. I swear I’m going to reform, get back on the 8-hour track permanently… but I never do. They say we’d be more productive sleeping more than less - that the increase in sharpness more than compensates for hours lost in sleep. But it’s hard to convince myself of that.
Anyway, it’s well worth the watch (or read).
Free speech is one thing, but come within a mile of religion and people are going to get tweaked. In Orange County, FL, a week before Easter, a billboard suddenly appeared, reading simply: “All religions are fairy tales.” Almost overnight, a nearby restaurant watched business drop by 2/3. People started calling the media. I’m imagining the reports went something like this: “Hello, media? Someone is expressing an opinion and I have to be exposed to it when I drive by!”
I think the business angle is especially interesting - it provides an instant concrete measurement of public opinion. What is it about religion that strikes so deeply? I can hardly imagine another opinion being expressed on a billboard - no matter how controversial - that could impact local businesses on such a broad scale. It’s just weird.
The billboard company claims the signage was not paid for, but put up in the middle of the night by anonymous pranksters.
Update: The article has been removed from WFTV’s site without explanation. Google for coverage elsewhere.
via Sean Graham
Secret: This weblog has been running off the as-yet unreleased WordPress 2.5 for a few weeks now, via subversion checkout. For those not following along at home, WP 2.5 features a radically redesigned back-end that seems almost intentionally designed to piss off people who are resistant to change (but to delight the purists). Funny how we get with our tools - once usage patterns become entrenched, even huge improvements in usability start to seem like blasphemy (cf: people raging about Microsoft’s new “ribbon” interface in recent versions of Office, even though they’re an obvious improvement).
Have to admit, my first experience with 2.5 was disorienting and not altogether favorable. But after a couple of weeks of regular use, I’ve come to appreciate the wisdom of the focus groups; separating out commonly used functions from uncommon in the UI was long overdue. And while the new colors still felt washed out and pallid, a recent Profile page option to re-enable the old colors on top of the new UI compensated.
Birdhouse Hosting keeps all WP installations up to date automatically when new versions are released with a simple script. The system has been fantastic from a maintenance and security perspective, but puts me in an interesting position - when I run the next automated update, I’ll be changing the UI out from under a whole lot of users. Fortunately, my early experience has users reacting positively and not being confused at all - a few minutes of exploration and they’re off to the races. The good news is that there have been almost no API changes in this version that break plugins or themes. In fact, the upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 broke a lot more stuff than this version will. There’s a plugin compatibility list in the codex if you’re interested; out of the 70+ WP-based publications I manage, only two will be affected by anything on that list (we’ll hold those back for a while).
Loving the new media manager - upload multiple files at once, handle image alignment at insert time, insert multiple images into a post simultaneously as a gallery (with automatic thumbnails, intermediate size, and full size versions - and independently commentable sub-posts for intermediate versions). Full-screen editor. Brand new tag manager. Much improved comment management. The visual editor no longer breaks embedded media like YouTube videos. A ton of subtle improvements that make life easier all around.
There are bound to be bumps, but progress is good.
Update 3/29/07: WordPress 2.5 has been released - go get it! Need a WordPress host with lots of experience/expertise? Contact me through Birdhouse Hosting.
The Knight Digital Media Center has been running workshops providing multimedia skills training to journalists for a while now, but this week marks the start of a program expansion, as we offer our first Tech Training for Editors workshop. Rather than Photoshop, Sound Track Pro, and Flash, we’ll be teaching RSS, podcasting, map mashups, and other essential internet technologies to editors looking to expand the web savvy of struggling newspapers.
I’ve been busy setting up WPMU as a mock CMS for the editors to work on, relying heavily on the PodPress, Twitter Tools, and WP-Flickr plugins. I’ve also got the new Prologue theme installed, to demonstrate how publications can provide Twitter-like services of their own (I’ll be demonstrating it in a mini-session on microblogging).
The mid-day and evening sessions will be webcast as usual, but this time we’re adding a new element to the mix — rather than panning the camera to a screen displaying output from the presenter’s laptop, we’ll be using Vara Software’s Desktop Presenter to mix output from the speaker’s laptop with camera output, directly into our webcast software (knock wood). Tune in!
This week at Stuck Between Stations: Rickrolling Yngwie (me) on StSanders’ sublime video overdubs of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.
Already we’re seeing spin-offs. It’s one thing to watch Eric Clapton’s face and fingers scrambling after bad college-level jazz, but what do you do with real jazz? Check the great Oscar Peterson quartet ripped to shreds by an equally talented pianist calling himself Tibenham:
Gizmodo: “Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon.” Video:
Something about the way the bot moves elicits sympathy in the viewer - its motions are so animal-like they throw you. When the researcher kicks BigDog to demonstrate how it can regain its balance, my first reaction was one of sympathy for “the animal” - internally, I had already started to identify it as a living creature (and thus as sentient). But the whine of the two-stroke Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine keeps you reminded. Wonder why it isn’t electric?
More here.
Santa Clara Valley Water District’s fact page on bottled water:
In addition to the misconception about health benefits, there are other, more serious, problems associated with the production and consumption of bottled water. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption required more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. Bottling the water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.
More at the site.
See also: Bottled Water: The Hoax
Quick, what’s the most widely deployed database in the world? MySQL? Oracle? Nope, it’s that puny squirt SQLite - the one you see listed as an option every time you set up a new Rails or Django site. SQLite is not a database server, but a SQL-compatible interface to a single file — perfect for every application that needs a full relational database without the overhead and complexity of a client/server connection. In other words, it’s in your smartphone. It’s on your Mac (driving the indexes in Mail.app, plus the databases behind Aperture and Safari). It’s in Adobe AIR. It’s in FireFox. It’s in Android. It’s in a bunch of giant products and services that will never admit to it.
SQLite is fast. Hella fast. Not great with massive concurrency or transactions, but runs circles around its more popular big brothers in simple SELECT/INSERT statements in moderate-traffic environments. Apparently it can be used to run production web applications if you don’t transactions or permissions (”If your site is small enough to run on a single server, it’ll rock on SQLite.”)
Excellent interview with SQLite’s creator Richard Hipp in this week’s FLOSS. Incredibly humble guy. Talks like his accomplishments ain’t no big thing. But his software changed the world. And instead of making a million bucks off it, he took his name out of the source code and released it into the public domain. Now he makes his living doing customizations for giant corps. Altruism can be good business.
Ooooooo wEEEEE! Made my “annual” pilgrimage at SXSW to Tears of Joy Hot Sauce Shop in Austin (bottom of 6th street, across from Damn Good Tacos). Since I depleted last year’s 8-bottle shipment easily, ramped it up to 10 this time, plus an assortment of mustards (I loves me my mustards) and a bottle of Salt Lick BBQ sauce for good measure. Came home tonight to a big box full of foam peanuts and bubble wrap, which Miles and I dove into just in time for dinner (chicken sandwiches).
First up: Duck Butter. Mmmmm tasty! But too mild. Followed by Bee Sting, a honey-based habanero sauce. Totally different kind of tasty, but still on the mild side (Amy disagreed). I was looking for some real tears of joy, which I finally got with a big dollop of Lottie’s scotch bonnet elixir. Blinding sheet of pain racing up the plane of my face and I’m in heaven.
Wall Street Journal: In the international PISA test, Finnish students rank as among the smartest in the world. Yet they don’t start school until age 7, have no classes for the gifted, no standardized testing, have plenty of “fruittari-hoppari,” and don’t agonize over college (since it’s free).
Finland’s secret? Not much. Basics. Pride. And, oh yeah - small class sizes and teachers with masters’ degrees. Another interesting difference - a much narrower gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students (4% in Finland, 29% in the U.S.) That’s because in Finland, none of the students move on until the slower students have caught up. Rather than pushing advanced students forward, they’re invited to help the slower ones. The thinking is that they can do so without harming their own progress.
“In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs.”
There are good reasons (see article) why it would be hard for the U.S. to emulate Finland’s educational performance, but surely we can learn something by observing? Let’s start with smaller classes, better teachers, and and end to No Child. That seems pretty fundamental.
Woo hoo! Last June, while trying to convert a Movable Type site to WordPress, I struggled to come up with a way to get the site’s existing tags, stored in the MT “keywords” field, converted to native WordPress meta fields during import. Finding no workable recipes in the wild, realized I was going to have to modify WordPress’ MT importer directly. Took a bit of hacking and experimenting, but eventually got it working. Decided to share my mods back with the community by contributing a patch to WP Trac.
Months passed, nothing happened. In WP 2.3, WordPress gained native tagging support and I found myself facing a similar problem, needing to convert MT keywords directly to WP tags. Modified the importer again, re-contributed my patch, and… nothing happened. Then, last night, just a week or two before the release of WordPress 2.5, received notice that my patch has been committed to trunk. Fewer than ten lines of code, but it’s my first tangible contribution to an open source project (beyond helping with documentation and plugins, etc.)
A small deal, but I’m proud.
This video’s projections re: the capabilities of a $1000 personal computer exceeding the capabilities of the human brain by 2023 and that of the entire human race by 2049 remind me of one of the most jaw-dropping books I’ve ever read, Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.
You are a speck, flitting briefly through an inky void…
For those about to adopt Dali’s paranoicritical method, we salute you.
Carmina Burana (Alternate Lyrics)
I’m almost convinced the original Latin is somehow an encrypted version of something much more surreal. The brain is a strange and wonderful place.
Thanks mnep
Just before leaving for Austin last week I caught an article that brazenly wondered “Has SXSWi gone mainstream?,” citing the choice of Mark Zuckerberg for one of the keynotes. What happened to the cutting edge? It’s true nothing really ground-breaking came out of this year’s show, but that had absolutely nothing to do with the conference’s usefulness… or fun quotient.
As usual, I took (and posted) loose notes on most of the sessions I attended. And as usual, there are often two or three sessions you want to see all happening at once. If you realize you’ve stumbled into a clinker, it’s a crapshoot whether it’s going to be worth it to stumble out, walk halfway across the convention center and try for seating in another — but you do your best. The Twitter back-channel helped tremendously… getting bits and pieces of other panels whispered in helped alleviate the feeling that you were missing something big.
Yeah, I fell for the Twitter thing big-time this year (I’m “waxwing,” if you care); remains to be seen whether it will be as fun or as useful outside the context of the show. Twitter was everywhere - at times it seemed like you couldn’t glance at a laptop (must have been 85% Mac, for cripes sake) without seeing someone plotting their tweets. I’m not big into SMS, but between trying to hook up with people and following Twitter feeds, I’ve never done so much texting in my life
Had the inverse privilege of being present at the Mark Zuckerberg train wreck interview … not to be forgotten. Gossip and armchair analysis of the interview dominated conversations for the next 24 hours until we were all just sick of hearing about it.
Got four hours of good geocaching in with mandric on the first day, before badge pick-up. Austin is in love with virtual (no physical box) caches for some reason - I think they just love their history. As a way to discover parts of a new city through serendipity, caching can’t be beat (and I think Milan caught the bug too!) Some pretty creative hides. Thanks Austin!
As for panels… where to begin? The Expression Engine 2.0 demo blew our doors off (coming version fully integrates ORM-based framework CodeIgniter). Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37 Signals totally inspiring for the 2nd year in a row. Henry Jenkins keynote an intellectual rollercoaster — tough competition with Kathy Sierra’s Tools for Enchantment (walked out of that one reeling). So many incredible data visualization techniques unwrapped in Data as Art (big implications and challenges for journalists). Went to two scaling sessions: Scalability Boot Camp and Scaling Web Ventures - of the two, the 2nd had more real-world tips, both both full of useful goodies. Interesting web pre-history in The Web That Wasn’t. Still feeling ho-hum about Adobe Air. Building Portable Social Networks attempted to address the coming tower of Babel between SNs, but left us with “We’re in for a world of pain.” Speaking of pain, I felt for the Microsoft guy defending MS Sharepoint against Drupal at the CMS Roundup. More here.
Getting too old for the relentless party scene that is SXSW, now more interested in finding quiet places to talk with old co-workers and friends, but managed to squeak in a couple of good parties. Really enjoyed myself at Opera’s party at Stubbs, where I spent 20 minutes in the bathroom talking with an Opera engineer who was the spitting image of Neil from The Young Ones. Think Opera is dead/irrelevant? Factoid: Opera currently employs more than 500 people - the mobile browser market is huge, and Opera owns it. Also a great party at the Mexican American Cultural Center (gorgeous architecture, and music by Gruppa Phantasma = Santana + War + 2008; break dancing like you never seen. Managed to get by on 5-6 hours of sleep per night, but couldn’t keep up that pace for much longer (despite official advice to NOT try and pace yourself (the “liver hacks” portion of that session were especially interesting).
Finally made my pilgrimage to the Daniel Johnson “Hi, How Are You?” mural at the top of Guadalupe, en route to lunch at Ruby’s - some of the most amazing brisket and ribs I’ve ever eaten, served up by the pound on butcher paper in a ramshackle wood and corrugated tin building that hasn’t been renovated in 70 years (or something like that). Even beat The Salt Lick (but not by much).
Didn’t take as many photos as in years past, but managed to get a Flickr set up. Once again, it takes something like SXSW to lift us out of the .edu miasma and into the new world. Always worthwhile.
Update: Wow - Check out these SXSW Interactive 2008 Sketchnotes. Gorgeous.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel Scalable Web Ventures, with:
Chris Lea Media Temple
Joe Stump Lead Architect, Digg.com Inc
Cal Henderson Badass MC, Flickr
Matt Mullenweg Founding Dev, Automattic/WordPress
Kevin Rose Founder, Diggnation/Digg Inc
This session was about much more than load balancing - scaling orgs in all directions (personnel, technique, communication), but was focused on technical scaling techniques. Amazing to see how some of the internet’s most popular properties have faced the problem in completely different ways, and how all of them basically learned by doing. You can throw, money, software, hardware, or brains at the problem, in various combinations… and these orgs have tried everything. Juicy stuff.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel Content Management System Roundup, with:
George DeMet Owner, Palantir.net
Jeff Eaton Lullabot
Tiffany Farriss Pres, Palantir.net
Mike Essl Owner Operator, mike.essl.com
Matthew McDermott Principal Consultant, Catapult Systems
The perennial question on every web dev mailing list: What CMS should I choose? Expression Engine made a huge splash at this year’s SXSW, but the Drupalites were out in force as well. This panel basically boiled down to MS Sharepoint (missed this, but not interested), EE, Drupal, and observations on a smattering of other systems. In a software category that offers around 600 choices, it’s impossible ever to represent the whole picture with anything approaching accuracy, but the conversation was still useful.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session Building Portable Social Networks with:
Jeremy Keith Clearleft Ltd
Chris Messina CEO, Citizen Agency
Leslie Chicoine Experience Designer, Get Satisfaction
Joseph Smarr Chief Platform Architect, Plaxo Inc
David Recordon Open Platforms Tech Lead, Six Apart Ltd
This topic has been fresh on our minds at the Berkeley J-School in our work providing guidance to news publications who are trying to focus more on community, and wondering whether to just tap into Facebook, use Ning, or create their own. The public is rapidly approaching SN overload. Are people really willing to create yet another SN profile? Will they able to re-engage their existing networks of friends? What about all of the data they’ve already stored in their existing SNs? Will BuddyPress help? OpenSocial? SocialThing? What are the technical and privacy issues we’re facing here? Is this problem solvable, or are we erecting a tower of babel?
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel on Adobe Air, Taking it to the Desktop.
In October 2006, I attended an Adobe focus group for what was then code-named Apollo, which promised to let us easily create desktop software out of HTML + JavaScript + Flash web apps. Fascinating technology, but I had a hard time wrapping my mind around its potential. With software in general moving towards the web, who out there wants to move things the other direction? I thought the biggest market would be on cell phones. Now, 18 months later, Apollo has become AIR and the software has become more polished. But the strategy is still the same, and I’m still at a loss to come up with a compelling business case for the product.
Anyway, this session helped put a few more of the pieces together mentally. Still not convinced it’s going to become a big hit though.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session
The Web That Wasn’t with Alex Wright Information Architect, The New York Times.
For most of us who work on the Internet, the Web is all we have ever really known. It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without browsers, URLs and HTTP. But in the years leading up to Tim Berners-Lee’s world-changing invention, a few visionary information scientists were exploring alternative hypertext systems that often bore little resemblance to the Web as we know it today. In this presentation, author and information architect Alex Wright will explore the heritage of these almost-forgotten systems in search of promising ideas left by the historical wayside. The presentation will focus on the pioneering work of Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, and Doug Engelbart, forebears of the 1960s and 1970s like Ted Nelson, Andries van Dam, and the Xerox PARC team, and more recent forays like Brown’s Intermedia system. We’ll trace the heritage of these systems and the solutions they suggest to present day Web quandaries, in hopes of finding clues to the future in our recent technological past.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Scalability Boot Camp” with:
Blaine Cook Architect, Twitter Inc
Jakob Heuser Architect, Gaia Interactive
Alan Kasindorf MySQL DBA, SixApart
Sandy Jen Co-founder, Meebo
Kerry Miller Writer, passiveaggressivenotes.com
Good tips from diverse perspectives. Everyone on the panel admitted to having made huge scaling mistakes in the past, and to having learned critical lessons from real-world usage patterns.
Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs” with:
Peter Kirn cdm: Create Digital Media
Joy Mountford VP Design Innovation, joymountford.com
Amazing data visualization demos. This field is going to become increasingly important to journalists looking for new and compelling ways to tell stories online that go way beyond shovelware. The tools need to get easier, but they’re getting there. These notes can’t begin to convey how impressive the interfaces we’re starting to see are becoming.
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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users” with Kathy Sierra, CreatingPassionateUsers.
This has so far been by far the most intellectually stimulating / inspiring session of the show. Sierra has a way of turning on your brain by talking about the brain, and running far afield from the usual web talk while still bringing it all back home to make it relevant. Awesome session.
Neurogenesis - Animals in cages have inhibited brain growth. An enhanced environment allows the brain to flourish. Corrollary: A cubicle environment inhibits brain development.
In studies of people who are really good at something: It’s not about natural talent (for the thing they’re doing) but more about having a talent for practicing. Ability to practice is what makes people good at things (could be anything). This is both encouraging and depressing. But you CAN change your brain in profound ways if you just put in the time.
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Just witnessed the most disastrous keynote event — Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek interviewing Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Wasn’t that interested to begin with, but Lacy was an embarrassment to herself. Flirting with Zuckerberg. Cutting him off left and right, then insulting him when he looked puzzled. Repeatedly turning the conversation back to herself. Bringing up semi-private moments from the past. Getting facts about his life wrong. Teasing him about his age. At one point she compared herself to Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes (”I feel you, Leslie!”)
Zuckerberg has become an artful dodger, dancing around many of her transgressions politely (rendering everything he said pretty banal). Between the two of them, it felt like a high school TV journalism class gone horribly wrong. Except that it happened in front of thousands of people.
I walked out halfway through. Outside, in the halls, everyone was talking about the debacle, re-hashing the worst moments.
Update: The interview was such a disaster that c|net has an article about it. Wired has another. Whoa - Lacy’s video response. She seems oblivious to just how bad she really was, tries to blame the crowd and the “mismatch.” So it’s confirmed - Lacy is on another planet.
Here are the notes I had taken up to the point I walked out anyway (not juicy).
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