Jarrett House North: Internet

Google opens the Cloud

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:18:57 GMT

Google App Engine appears to be Google’s answer to Amazon’s web services—a simple, highly scalable development and deployment platform for web apps that need to scale. It’s an interesting offering that takes a slightly different tack from Amazon, with the requirement to build an app as a fully integrated stack (not to mention, the application needs to be in Python, at least for the first iteration). But I like it nonetheless, especially at the entry pricing: as Dave Winer pointed out in a prescient piece last week, web services should be free at the low-bandwidth end of things; it’s a great way to build an ecosystem. Having one player in the cloud business is an experiment. Two makes it competitive, and that means that the offerings for developers will only get better and better.

It begs the question, of course, of when Redmond will wake up and realize that the last remnants of its Old Republic are being swept away.

Congrats to Google product manager and Sloanie Tom Stocky, who seems to be at the center of a lot of good things from Google these days.

People come in waves

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:57:15 GMT

I’m starting to think that people on social networks, like everything else, follow predictable principles of organization. You can be in an equilibrium for months, adding very few friends to your local aggregation of people, when all of a sudden someone new shows up, and you make dozens of connections in the next few days. Punctuated equilibrium, I think, is the phenomenon that I’m describing. Or just plain old statistical mechanics.

Yeah, it’s that weird kind of night.

April First roundup

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:54:14 GMT

Man. You can tell the Internet is getting boring when no one bothers to do April Fool’s day pranks. Except for the following:

Google: Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes. Answer a questionnaire and upload a YouTube video and you could be on your way to Mars!
Zero in a Bit: New Attack Class: XSNADOR. Because we need more acronyms to describe the process of hacking things, this one will rise alongside XSS and XBI to fill a needed void: how to describe trivial hacks against social networking sites. In fact, I would propose a new meta-name for this type of acronym: YAVA (Yet Another Vulnerability Acronym).
Gmail: Custom Time. Send an email to the past!
YouTube: Every featured link on the home page is a RickRoll!
Google Calendar: Free wakeup kit!

Geez, other than Google (and, um, my company), is anyone else out there celebrating the foolishness?

Update: Okay, spoke too soon. While the placement of Ima Hogg as the featured article at Wikipedia might itself be an April Fools joke, surely the rewritten lead for the article definitely qualifies: “Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to Hawaii to visit the Queen. Raised in government housing, young Ima frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums and a bear...”

And then there’s ever-reliable TidBITS: iPhone Goes International With Iridium, Take Control of (Backdating Stock Options, Swearing in Esperanto, Spouse Sharing in Leopard...), new Twitter feed, US Court Declares Email Bankruptcy Illegal, Mac Users Affected by New Virus, Merriam-Webster Accepts Sponsorship to Redefine Unlimited, and Time Machine Support Added to iPhone and iPod Touch. Nice job, guys. That’s more like it.

Laws of the Internet, continued

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:17:25 GMT

It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this it’s either on or off, not somewhere in the middle.”

I responded without thinking, “Yeah, every now and then we need to be reminded that we live in a very shallow digital layer on an analog world.”

That just might be my first law of the Internet.

Spafford's axioms of Usenet, generalized

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:56:42 GMT

In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely understandable to any Internet veteran of a certain age:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

The comment, posted prior to Spafford’s withdrawal from recreational Usenet use, sits alongside his three axioms of Usenet (Usenet is not the real world, and usually does not resemble it; ability to type on a computer keyboard is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense; and Sturgeon’s Law applies to Usenet). I think the quote above, and Spafford’s axioms, deserve elevating to a higher consideration. They are certainly directly applicable to blogs, MySpace, Facebook, and just about every other online expression of individuality. They may be applicable to Wikipedia, and are certainly applicable if the deletions and random vandalism all too visible from the Recent Changes page are taken into account. They may even generally apply to humanity itself, as formulated below:

Humanity is not (all of) the real world, and human models of the real world usually do not resemble it.
Humanity is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense.
Sturgeon’s Law applies to humanity.
Humanity is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea: massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it.

To which I can only say: True. True.

Mofuse: Instant iPhone-savvy web sites?

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:13:44 GMT

The tagline for Mofuse is a little overhyped. As far as I can tell, they provide a nifty self-provisioning capability to take an RSS feed and turn it into a mobile device optimized page—kind of a turnkey version of Dave Winer’s NYTimesRiver. Of course I’m oversimplifying and it’s more than that, like the ability to put in custom entries. But to say, as TechCrunch does, that MoFuse “instantly converts sites for the iPhone” is overstating things a bit. But is what it does (as opposed to what is claimed) useful?

I set up my own MoFuse site to check it out. If you point your mobile device to http://jarrett.mofuse.mobi/, you’ll see a mobile-optimized version of my site. My one criticism so far: the stylesheet they are using on the iPhone seems to strip way too much out of the source text. Taking a look at one of the articles (my What makes a good product manager post, for instance), you’ll see that there are neither indents nor vertical separation between paragraphs, and that the bullets are stripped out of unordered lists. So for lengthy posts it’s not a pleasant reading experience.

Considering that the mobile-savvy version of Bloglines already allows you to get updates from an arbitrary number of RSS feeds, it would seem that the main value-add of MoFuse is the ability to insert mobile-only content, and the ability to present a custom look and feel to mobile users. If more and more people only have a mobile user experience, that’s probably worth something.

Bad corporate-public relations

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:11:53 GMT

Here’s a hypothetical. You are one of two firms in a duopoly for a critical service. You are accused of abusing your position to give your firm a competitive advantage by making it selectively harder for competing products to work across the Internet. You are given an opportunity to explain yourself in a public forum. Do you:

Show up and explain your case, and let the chips fall where they may.
Pack the deck by putting butts in the seats who are paid to cheer for your position. And keep people out who might question it.

Guess which one Comcast did? If you guessed #2, you’re right. I was getting ready to give Comcast credit for even showing up in this forum, and starting to shed a little light into the black box that is Comcast’s network management. But this admission of their astroturfing practices have completely erased that benefit.

LinkedIn goes mobile

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 17:06:40 GMT

Yes, LinkedIn has released an iPhone optimized UI, about six months after Facebook did. Anyone else think that LinkedIn could have used those six months to come up with an iPhone UI that looked more innovative and less like a direct clone of what Facebook did in a weekend?

Still, it’s nice to be that much closer to someone’s profile wherever you go.

Feeling delicious

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:49:16 GMT

I’m probably the last person in the world to hop onto del.icio.us, and now I’m wondering how I avoided it all this time. Especially now that my time is too scarce to blog every interesting link I find—it’s much faster just to post it to del.icio.us, then come back later and skim the cream of the links for a more in-depth post. (A cursory glance at my bookmarks will reveal that I’ve been doing just that for the past few weeks.)

You can subscribe to my bookmark feed, if you’re so inclined, or to one of the topic feeds. I particularly recommend the productmanagement feed if you’ve found the things I’ve written on that topic interesting, though I can’t guarantee frequent updates. I’ll be taking advantage of some of the platform features to do a little more integration with my site, so beware: a little breakage may be ahead.

Roundup: the Tin Man speaks; JP Makes, Dave nails it

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:01:08 GMT

The Tin Man’s voice is in the New York Times. I mean, they have an actual sound clip of him being interviewed about the Democratic presidential candidates. How cool is that? It gives “voice of the blogger” a whole new meaning.

And I’ve been meaning to post about JP’s other career for a bit as well. He’s the only animator, and UVA alum, and friend, I have who writes for MAKE Magazine. I really dig the Lego Recharging Station.

Finally, I suppose I would be remiss to not point out Dave’s extended post on philosophy in sports, which says a lot of the things that I wanted to say yesterday. Particularly this paragraph:

Losing teaches you that there's more to life than winning, and that's the best lesson possible and it's the one lesson you keep needing to learn over and over until you lose everything, which like it or not is what we all do in the end.

Sonian: Outsourcing scalability to Amazon

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:17:26 GMT

A former co-worker of mine, Jeff Richards, has surfaced at Sonian Networks, which is offering a new on-demand email archiving service. What’s unique about Sonian Archive SA2 is its architecture. It’s built almost entirely using Amazon Web Services, and is architected in such a way that each customer gets their own “virtual stack.” As additional customers are added, the service scales transparently, according to the Amazon Web Services Blog.

It’s a pretty cool play, and the price sounds right, at $3 per mailbox per month.

Wonderfulness

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:41:01 GMT

There were two spectacularly wonderful things that I found online yesterday:

Guardian: Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock. This isn’t a new story, but the acquittal of the members of the Untergunther on trespassing charges is. And the concept of people breaking in to fix broken things is one of those delightful moments that makes you glad that the Internet exists. It actually out-xkcds xkcd.
And then there’s this spectacular Mac vs. Vista ad on Cnet’s Vista page, which may be the reason that Internet ads were created. (YouTube cache of the ad; New York Times article on the ad).

NBC "download" "service" "launches"

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:25:46 GMT

Thanks to Pete Cashmore from Mashable, who alerts me to the “launch” of NBC’s “download” “service.” The “service” will “allow” “you” to “download” and “watch” NBC’s “content.”

Okay, enough sarcasm. Let’s expand a few of the quotes:

Launch: Don’t call it a launch if you only serve customers with an out of date browser (Internet Explorer), require the download of the .NET Framework, won’t run on Firefox, and can’t operate with a Mac.
Download: Why bother calling it a download? Once I’ve gone through all the hoops, I can’t copy the file to a portable player, including (especially) an iPod.
Service: A big BROWSER NOT COMPATIBLE banner is not service-oriented.
Allow: How very gracious of NBC to put up download content with so much barbed wire around it. How can they possibly imagine that this will draw a larger audience than iTunes did?
You: Who is the target customer for this? Even if my mother-in-law used a PC (she’s on a Mac), I don’t think she’d be cool with downloading a 170+ MB OS component to watch content that she can see in reruns later anyway.
Watch: Watch while you can. The downloads are timebombed and can only be viewed for seven days.
Content: Where is the killer show that will compel me to put up with all this nonsense? And why if you’re going to timebomb the content do you bother embedding unskippable ads?

Wake me up when NBC decides to stop hating on its customers.

FriendCSV: Your data doesn't stay in FaceBook

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:00:01 GMT

That didn’t take long. TechCrunch is reporting about a FaceBook application called FriendCSV, which allows dumping selected pieces of data about your contacts to a comma-separated format. TechCrunch has the right angle about this; it’s fundamentally about getting your data back out of FaceBook and not being locked in their trunk.

Some of the folks in the comment thread are getting a little spun up about this. I think they miss the point. As one user says, there is nothing in the data set that cannot be viewed by going to the person’s profile page, and you aren’t pulling any data from anyone who isn’t your friend.

Ig Nobel 2007: Cow dung ice cream, anyone?

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 21:24:32 GMT

At the end of last week, I missed the announcement about the 2007 Ig Nobel prizes. Particular favorites for me include the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Glenda Browne for her study “The Definite Article: Acknowledging 'The' in Index Entries”; the Linguistics prize for a study showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the difference between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards; and the Chemistry prize, which went to Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan for pioneering work on the extraction of vanillin (vanilla flavoring) from cow dung.

As Dave Barry used to say, I am not making this up.

Best part: a special public tasting of a new Toscanini’s ice cream flavor, “Yum-a-moto Vanilla Twist.” Asking what the twist is is probably like asking what the “surprise” is in Whizzo’s Spring Surprise.

Lemur CATTA--commonsensical comment system

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 05:17:41 GMT

Mike Lee, toughest programmer alive, came up with an insanely competent idea for a comments system: Lemur CATTA, which uses reading comprehension to quiz you on the contents of a blog post before you are allowed to comment on it.

Yeah, I know. Seems like some gradeschool teacher—or Kaplan temp—would have come up with this idea before now, doesn’t it?

BTW, careful with Mike’s blog—his content is SFW, but the site title isn’t.

Amazon MP3 launches: Apple has competition, finally

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:07:53 GMT

Coming on the heels of the shuttering of Michael Robertson’s CD Anywhere and the collapse of Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital, now would not seem an auspicious time to launch an online music download store. But that’s what Amazon is doing today. The big difference is that they aren’t trying a subscription play, and they aren’t using DRM; they’re selling MP3s.

This factor proves that Amazon has been paying attention. Customers don’t want to be shackled to DRM? We’ll sell music without DRM.

That doesn’t mean that Amazon’s service, named Amazon MP3, will be a hit right out of the park. A music store is more than just listing inventory and collecting money; it’s providing the ability to find the music. On that score, you need content, user interactivity (playlists, etc.), and inventory. Amazon has content on their physical-CD store, but bizarrely, none of it carries over to the digital download side—no reviews, nothing. Site navigation is lacking, too: you can bring up a list of all 194 songs in inventory by Radiohead (or on tribute albums), but there’s no ability to sort the resulting list by album or artist.

That leaves inventory, and here Amazon would seem to have some advantages over iTunes, such as participation by Universal and inclusion of some hard-to-get artists like Radiohead. However, this is no knock-out blow against iTunes. For one thing, Radiohead were in the iTunes store at launch until the band and their agents found out, and iTunes was forced to pull their music when their label realized that they didn’t have digital distribution rights. Will the same thing happen again?

And it’s rude to bring it up, but I wonder about capacity. In the past, Amazon had problems keeping up with traffic volumes around holidays, and that was just with HTML pages. I wonder what they’ve done to scale up to serving 100 MB worth of download for each album purchased?

At this point, I think the party with the most to lose here is eMusic. Amazon made a point in their press release of calling out indie labels (Righteous Babe, Rounder, and Trojan among them) who are selling DRM-free MP3s for the first time; normally these would be eMusic’s bread and butter. I don’t think satisfied customers of eMusic like myself will cancel their subscriptions, but this might impair their ability to grow.

But Amazon, finally, represents real competition to the iTunes store, which is actually kind of exciting. Maybe they’ll turn up the pressure to sign hold-out artists and labels.

NBC are assclowns.

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:29:29 GMT

In their haste to try to break Apple’s well-earned stronghold on the content download market, NBC is starting its own download service. Rather than charge for the downloads, the downloads will contain unskippable commercials, and according to the Times the downloads will “degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable.” Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Television Group, calls this “kind of like Mission Impossible.”

I agree, but not with the equating of destruction of downloaded content with MI. The real “mission impossible” will be to get customers to accept a download that doesn’t allow skipping commercials and won’t play on a Mac or an iPod. Oh yes: the article says that “the programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.” Like: as soon as they convince their erstwhile business partners in Redmond to add Mac and iPod compatibility to the appropriate version of Windows Media, I would guess.

I think NBC will also have an impossible mission convincing advertisers that they ought to pay for their ad exposure in this way. The informed advertiser should ask who the target audience for the show is, ask how many of the users who download the file will be able to take it on a mobile device, nod at the answer, then discount NBC’s estimate of the audience size by about 90%.

Put a fork in NBC, folks. They are failing to understand even the basic advertising model on which they thrive, which is: go where the eyeballs are. The fifteen people around the country who enjoy downloading crippled content onto their PCs and not being able to skip commercials and watch on their iPods are not a sufficient audience to build a successful download service on (and if you don’t believe me, ask Amazon). And by putting all their eggs in this basket, they are opening back up the enormous gray market of Bittorrent, which would lose much of its attractiveness for normal users if the content were available for purchase on their own terms.

Don’t trust these guys. They speak out of both sides of their mouths, claiming that music piracy is “facilitated by iTunes”—an iTunes that includes significant DRM features for purchased music. And they claim to understand that “the customer is going to be in control” without understanding that the customer will take control here as well.

Update: See Fake Steve Jobs’s take on the service.

The best and worst of random surfing

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:10:37 GMT

Today’s quick random surf turned up some really horrifying things and some really funny ones, so here’s the best of each:

Horrifying: The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time at the Museum of Hoaxes (via). While it starts out whimsically enough with elephants on acid, the whimsy is cut short when you find out that the elephant DIED. About a third to two-thirds of the subsequent experiments are pretty sick, though the one about gender attitudes toward casual sex is pretty good.

Funny: Fight For Kisses, the new ad campaign from shaving equipment maker Wilkinson. The ad is subtitled in English and French, but the actual promotional site is all French. Nevertheless, the concept of babies going all Neo when they find out that their daddies are going to take Mommy’s precious attention away is kind of ... disturbing. But funny. (via)

XSLT Linkdump

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:09:12 GMT

For a project I’m working on, a list of XSLT resources:

Microsoft’s XML Downloads page, including a pointer to msxsl.exe, the command line transformation utility
NXSLT - open source .NET based XSLT command line utility
XML.com’s What Is XSLT - beginner tutorial
XML and XSLT Resource List from the National Library of Medicine
Skew.org’s XML and XSLT links page
An old links page at Berkeley lists some resources for debugging and tracing XSLT
Mark McLaren’s XSLT resources for beginners
And of course the W3C pages on XSL

An interesting point is that all of these pages are old, some dating back to 2001—yet they are in the top of the Google results. Is XSLT a dead technology?

Shcool

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 03:19:39 GMT

This is a wonderful find, and a fabulous metaphor, on the first week of school. Er, shcool.

It’s also a good argument for a serious focus on improving public literacy.

First amendment victory: Blogs are media

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 23:05:11 GMT

At least, according to the Federal Election Commission. Which is good news, because it means that FEC rules limiting campaign speech do not apply to blogs. Let’s hear it for some rare good news from the FEC.

Driving friendships between creators and critics

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:33:53 GMT

So: the Comics Curmudgeon rips regularly on Sunday newspaper feature Slylock Fox (“Kids! Find the 6 differences between these two panels! Help Slylock figure out how Cassandra Cat murdered those girl scouts and turned them into cookies!”)—probably incidentally driving up readership of the strip. Slylock Fox creator Bob Weber returns the favor with a custom-designed t-shirt of Cassandra Cat playing Ursula Andress, to be sold through the Comics Curmudgeon. Very cool.

Catching up

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 20:31:30 GMT

A ton of links that have stayed open in various browser windows for a few days as I dug out of work in the next few posts:

Let’s start with an oldie but goodie: Lawyer and administration critic Daniel J. Solove investigates the Playmobil Airport Security Screening playset, which is now even further behind because it lacks a 50-gallon trash can for mixing passengers' potentially hazardous bottles of liquid together.

Question: Who made AT&T the Internet speech cop?

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 02:54:29 GMT

Bad timing as AT&T tries to convince Congress that net neutrality legislation isn’t necessary: it blocks some lyrics critical of the President during a Pearl Jam webcast from Lollapalooza on Saturday. When pressed to explain, it aid it was the fault of an overzealous “content monitor.”

A what? Folks, I believe that’s called a censor. Call a spade a spade.

As the band says, and the commentator echoes, this is about something much bigger than censoring a band.

Manila minus one

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:53:02 GMT

A blogging great, Doc Searls, is off the Manila platform, on which this blog is based, and onto WordPress. I have been wanting to make a similar move for a long time, ever since I used WordPress for the Sony Boycott Blog.

One of my readers last year offered to migrate my Manila content to a WordPress blog, and I am definitely thinking that it’s time to take advantage of the offer. If only there were enough hours in the day.

Living in the wiki

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:45:10 GMT

Just to show you that you never know when you’ll follow a reference down the rabbit hole: I was struck by a greeting that one of my German coworkers gave another. Looking it up, I was quickly sucked into a maze of Frisian and Jutish dialects and German comic book characters.

The greeting used is moin, which (Wikipedia says) comes from the Frisian and is commonly used in the eastern Netherlands and Schleswig-Holstein. As with all central European languages, there are cognate greetings in closely related languages, including Old Saxon and Jutish.

The rabbit hole part is the way the greeting likely spread to my coworkers, through the German comic book character Werner, who consistently uses the greeting (apparently when not consuming large amounts of beer). And yes, it all comes back to beer as well: the official website for Werner feature promotes a special sixpack of Werner’s favorite beer, Bölkstoff, including judicial actions by the Guild Brewery of Hanover and corporate takeovers by Inbev.

Links for June 27, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:33:45 GMT

I’ve been working on a review that is taking longer than expected, hence the quiet (plus of course work). But in the meantime:

Use an Apple //c (and, one assumes, ][e) as a terminal for Mac OS X.
Use a mobile phone service to find a restroom. Yes, seriously. It’s called Mizpee. Apparently a hoax, but it’s generating a lot of back and forth on TechCrunch, including allegations that this means “Web 2.0 has jumped the shark.” What’s Web 2.0 about this idea, anyway?

Links for June 15, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:08:45 GMT

I’d love to do a joke about how Microsoft is striking back at Apple’s Safari by releasing a Mac version of their weak iPhoto clone, but (a) they released it back in April and (b) Expression Media actually looks to have some pro-grade features that might be worth checking out. Maybe.

Speaking of Microsoft, the secret to good WPF applications is design, design, design; and Vertigo Labs is pretty damned good at that. Check out their new Family.Show application. I just wish they would publish their tip list and notes about WPF and Expression Blend in a web-friendly format. I can’t read XAML docs and XPS on my Mac.

On a completely different topic, an interesting article on obsolete instruments in Salon talks about some I’m familiar with (the sackbut and the shawm) and others I’m not (the Stroh violin, which is amplified with a tin horn; the Birotron, which uses 8-track loops; and others).

And when I’m done going back to Tom Waits’s Alice and Blood Money to listen for the Stroh violin, I can apply this hint to stop iTunes from nagging me to sign into the store every time I start the application. Yay!

Speaking of things that make me happy, check out these tips for living life shown subway-sign style.

And speaking of iTunes: I’m walking a line, I’m dreaming of houses in motion. Houses that used to host the Berkman Center. Houses that will block Mass Ave for three days.

And speaking of blocking things: I think that the TSA may have lost sight of the rationale behind the war on moisture.

Links for June 7, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:54:11 GMT

Salon: The CIA's favorite form of torture. Sensory deprivation for fun and questionable intelligence. Remember, kids, true love leaves no traces.

CNET: An electric Porsche at MIT. Going for the full electric with a little appreciated consumer grade sports car. Could the Porsche 914 be the next Delorean?

Since the soundtrack it comes from isn’t on iTunes or eMusic yet, I’m keen to hear this tribute to Zidane from Mogwai.

WSJ: Pen Pals: Letters Laud Scooter Libby, Fail to Spare Him. My favorite excerpt is the one from Deborah Tannen, a neighbor of Libby’s, who “described how Mr. Libby once offered to lend her family a tool to fix the problem with a septic drain field and then fixed it himself.” Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Scooter Libby is from the septic field!

NY Times: In Tennessee, Goats Eat the ‘Vine That Ate the South’. Now who’s going to eat the goats, I’d like to know.

Links for June 5, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:51:36 GMT

MacOSXHints has a hint on how to create a hidden administrative login in Mac OS X, so that you can have a separate account with root privileges and have it hidden from the user selection list when you log in.

The ITIL blog at Evergreen Systems has its take on ITIL version 3: it has been written in such a way that it may now be easier to make a business case for adopting best practices in IT Service Management.

Great article in New York magazine discussing the profit margins for different industries and businesses in New York, from a meth dealer to Goldman Sachs. My favorites: Samuel Pekoh the Yellow-Cab Driver and Random House, for the insights the article brings on the unique challenges of the businesses each is in.

The Wall Street Journal gets online presence right

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 04:32:12 GMT

For once, a major publication says something profoundly right about the relationship between one’s online identity and one’s future prospects. In Real Time in the Wall Street Journal, Jason Fry points out the following:

The Net has left regular people grappling with issues of privacy and public lives that only celebrities used to deal with
Kids are much more savvy than their parents about the ways in which identity shifts depending on context
The older generation—the “series of tubes” folks—will not be around to dictate the ways in which personal information on the web is interpreted and used, at least not forever
In the end, it’s about making choices about how you want yourself to appear on the Web, rather than letting other people make those choices for you.

Fry is also right to point out that it’s broader than just Facebook or MySpace; it’s also blogs, Flickr, Twitter, and on and on. And the article presents a nifty example of the culture clash in action: while Fry’s article is sensitive to the finer nuances of online identity, his editors appear less so, since the caption under the embedded video trumpets “Jason Fry shows us some online examples of how personal videos could ruin your chances of landing your next job.” OMG! Better stick your head under a rock now! Teh Internets are going to get you.

Full disclosure: the scattered threads of my online identity are pretty widespread, as my FAQ page shows on its right hand side.

Watch out, he just rubber banded that guy into bricks

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 21:18:47 GMT

There is one kind of Lego play, the kind I indulged in as a kid (and intermittently since), that consists of making models of things—for me it’s spaceships, but it could be houses, cars, boats, Hogwarts castles, whatever. There is a whole other kind of Lego play, the art of making models that do things. Cars that drive. Robots. Cranes that lift.

None of them are as cool as the Ultimate Lego Chain Gun. Built by master modeler Sebastian Dick, this thing humbles me down to my 1x1s. 64-shot capacity with 11-shot-per-second fire rate, the gun can “carpet a room in rubber” in less than six seconds. You have to see the video to get just how cool this thing is.

And the scary thing is, Sebastian isn’t the only brick munitions maker out there. Check out the Lego Minestorms Aegis missile launcher, which uses a camera for visual targeting of its missiles.

Links for May 31, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 31 May 2007 14:03:20 GMT

NY Times: Summer Breezes In, Sipping Barbera. Two of my favorite Italian reds, barbera and dolcetto, are mentioned in this article and barberas are reviewed.

Congrats to Last.fm

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 30 May 2007 16:41:25 GMT

BBC: Music site Last.fm bought by CBS. That’ll buy a whole lotta servers. It also puts CBS in an interesting position to mine data about listening habits—interesting, because CBS also relaunched CBS Records last year. Maybe they can do a better job than the current crop of majors at dealing with the realities of the music market.

I enjoy Last.fm but I wish their plug-in for iTunes did a better job of reporting playback data from my iPod, which is now my predominant form of listening. If you look at my profile page you’d think that I only listened to classical music last week, but that’s far from true—that’s only what I listened to at home over iTunes.

Links for May 24, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:02:11 GMT

Househack of the day: Sliding bookcase-door Ikea style, courtesy Ikea Hacker, complete with part numbers and instructions.

On the cusp of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Wired finds some guy who never saw the movie for the obligatory first impression. Verdict? A pretty funny set of observations, including “Big fat guys who look like bikers can cut it in the Rebel air force.”

Dirk Gently fan podcast, in memory of the late great Douglas Adams.

And of course, LOLPresidents. Oh dear.

Multiple mazel tovs

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:24:16 GMT

Some very good news for the good guys today. Watertown blogger Lisa Williams was among several local bloggers who won a NewsChallenge grant today. The grants are being given in honor of “ideas and projects that will transform community news”; certainly H2OTown qualifies, as does Ethan Zuckerman for his work on Global Voices (thanks to Universal Hub and Doc Searls for pointing me in their direction).

Another mazel to Feedburner, who is being purchased by the omnivorous Google for $100 million. Guess that says one of two things: there is real money to be made in advertising in RSS feeds, or there’s a buying war on in the online advertising inventory market.

How Teleflip will make money, unless Google takes it all

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 24 May 2007 03:59:14 GMT

New York Times: How to Make Your Cellphone Act Like a BlackBerry. David Pogue discusses three options for doing email on a regular cell phone: Google, Yahoo, and Teleflip. Who? I first linked to Teleflip almost two years ago, in the context of their still-free universal email-to-SMS gateway (now rebranded as FlipOut).

The new service, FlipMail, apparently will allow checking any email account from the phone as SMS messages, provided you’re ok with reading only the first 120 characters, and eventually with seeing ads. But there should be a lot of people for whom this will beat investing in a smartphone so that they can run the Gmail Mobile client or Yahoo Go, and Teleflip stands to make some revenue from the ad stream, which will be nice for them.

Pogue misses the point, too, about the Gmail and Yahoo offerings. They are almost certainly intended first for preloading on smartphones, second as downloads for power users.

Closely observing life online

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:46:11 GMT

The passive-aggressive notes blog (see my prior post) is a great example of a subgenre of blogs that neatly illustrates the idea that there is an advocate and observer for every possible peccadillo in life, no matter how modern. I refer to them as the Obsessively Tracking Mildly Objectionable Things blogs, and their main value is that they provide great sociological data about phenomena that would have previously gone uncommented on because the cost of complaining about the peccadillo is higher than the cost of putting up with it. (The Internet: lowering transaction costs, for better or worse.)

The nice thing about this blog, though, is its blogroll, which is a whole collection of blogs that Obsessively Track Mildly Objectionable Things: the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks; the Literally, a Web Log blog (covering misuse of the word literally; Apostrophe Abuse; the Ban Comic Sans blog; my new favorite, the Lowercase l blog (which calls out signage that uses a lowercase L where it should use upper case); and the old reliable, the Silent Penultimate Panel Watch, tracking wasted silent panels in newspaper comic strips.

Other blogs in this category that I don’t think exist, but should:

The Who Let Their Dog Crap on My Lawn and Didn’t Pick It Up blog
The People Unfamiliar with the Ban on Liquids on Airlines Who Slow Up the Security Line blog
The People Who Forward Ill Thought Out Jingoistic Emails blog
The Blog About the Guy Who Leaves “Citation Needed” on Obvious Statements in Wikipedia Articles.

Don't dock your bottle, and other things I learned at Microsoft

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:13:10 GMT

The passive-aggressive notes blog reminds me of a coworker of mine at Microsoft who used to fly off the handle about water cooler hygiene. At one point, he got so outraged about how people were using the water cooler that he posted a note that said “Don’t dock the bottle! If you must refill a plastic water bottle, don’t place the bottle over the water cooler spigot and share your germs with everyone!”

I don’t think he made too many friends that way.

But there’s something about office kitchens that brings this tendency out in people. Each individual likely is in the kitchen by himself and thinks of it as his or her own domain; when a reminder (in varying degrees of rudeness) comes that it is in fact a shared space, the individual can lash out in some surprisingly ugly ways.

The office kitchen, in short, is a lot like an Internet forum.

Mmm, good

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 23 May 2007 16:56:22 GMT

In the category of ideas that sound horrid unless you consider the alternative: the Nosefrida, a nasal aspirator for kids that works on the same principle as the late-70s gas tank siphon. I don’t care how many filters are on that puppy, the thought of putting my mouth on a tube that is filled with preschooler snot is pretty revolting.

But it’s a great product name. (Via BoingBoing.)

Mashdown

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:11:42 GMT

Lore Sjöberg posits a future of hybrid websites in Wired’s Alt Text column: Let's Make Website Mashups, Like Netflickr, Figg and BoingPress. BoingPress is pretty funny (“This blogging service provides all the functionality of WordPress, and in addition automatically links to stories about DRM, the Creative Commons, Disneyland and anything John Hodgman does ever”).

I clicked through thinking I was going to see something about SalonHerringWiredFool, probably the earliest automated content mashup (it combined RSS feeds from four sites, back in 1999). You can even see what it looked like back in 2000, apparently the last time it ran.

Lolphone

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:34:31 GMT

I realized this morning driving into work that there is a structural reason for my blogging less (though much of the blame is because I have a very busy plate). The specific reason is that my best blogful time is the morning, over coffee, when my synapses are just waking up and my cross-connections are most fruitful. My morning routine has gotten much busier, because (among other reasons) I am doing a lot more work with our office in Munich these days. Because they are six hours behind, that means I basically have to be on the phone first thing to catch them.

Ah well.

In lieu of actual content, I present a phone that one of the carriers really should sell, which I’ve nicknamed the LOLPhone (courtesy Worth1000, linked from BoingBoing):

Links for May 11, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:04:52 GMT

The new news cycle: water main breaks, employee in the building above takes camphone pictures... which are solicited for the evening news. As we’ve always said, the relationship between blogs and “official” news organizations is not one way.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think it’s too bad the Tanglewood Festival Chorus doesn’t get involved in the Pops season opening concerts. Then I could have been there for the big fight.

Most novel use of the DMCA: suing companies for not purchasing your supposedly superior DRM technology, claiming that failure to use the most effective DRM technology constitutes avoidance of a technological encryption measure. I suppose if you can’t sell it, you can always sue...

Forget the VPAC, here come the MMRSS

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:15:28 GMT

Via Smilin’ Tyler, Murdering Masonic Reptilian Shape-Shifters. Looks like fell asleep between the 6 o’clock news and reruns of V: The Final Battle and decided that they were being threatened by human-reptilian hybrids. Favorite line: “In the duration my brother Ken kept getting struck from behind in the skull by assailants using what appeared to be heavy boards or bats on the top of his skull, the attacks occurred when he went to get mail, go to his garage, walk to get a newspaper.” Reminiscent of Woody Allen’s line, “The creatures motioned to me to come forward, which I did, and they injected me with a fluid that caused me to smile and act like Bopeep.”

Right up there with my old friend VPAC, my friends the Vampire Piranha Arsonist Clown… Deer. No, I don’t know where the D went in that acronym, either. And the whole story behind VPAC will have to wait for another time.

Links for May 2, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:04:27 GMT

NY Times: No, Really, It Was Tough: 4 People, 80 Martinis. Having tried and failed to articulate the differences among six or seven types of wine, I can only imagine the challenge that this team of tasters faced in their martini-gin review. Palate fatigue, for one.

Local blogger Evan points out that only in Boston would one see the alfresco bookstore strategy that the Brattle Book Shop uses to display its merchandise. I’d go one farther: only in Boston in the spring, where the whole city temporarily goes giddy as the weather warms up and the sun comes out again.

Slashdot points to an embarrassing story for Business 2.0, a tech centered business magazine that forgot to check the integrity of its backups... and lost its entire June issue. Irony: they had mailed the text for the entire issue to their lawyers for review, so the “only” work that had to be redone was the art and layout. I guess they’d better call in Bono so he can make up the entire issue on the spot; after all, he did it for an album once.

Links for May 1, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:45:19 GMT

Boing Boing: One week to stop REAL ID. Pointer to an interesting list of arguments about why Homeland Security’s push for a national ID is not only ill-thought-out but also potentially illegal.

Boston Singers Resource: John Oliver. An interview with the sui generis director of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

Who are the Webbys for?

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:41:06 GMT

Probably the same people who think Flash intro pages are a good idea.

That appears to be who runs the show, anyway. The Webbys are the only web award that I’m aware of where the agency, as in ad agency, is given prominent mention.

What has me spun up about this? Best Navigation/Structure: Ikea Dream Kitchen, which appears to have won based solely on a Flash-based VR click-and-hold interface which, needless to say, is badly broken on text-based browsers. Please tell me how this qualifies as best structure, guys.

All is not awful in the Webby world; I don’t think I would have found PoetryFoundation.org without the awards. But seriously guys. I think the whole Web 2.0 thing is overwrought, but I can’t help but think Web 1.0 when I look at that list of awardees. (And yes, I know Flickr is there too; I believe the exception proves the rule.)

Links for April 30, 2007

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:41:18 GMT

House in Progress: National Rebuilding Day. Very cool concept, a bit like the home renovation version of Habitat for Humanity. See the national site of Rebuilding Together for more details.

Matthew Kirschenbaum has updates on the status of his forthcoming book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, which is listed as publishing next January.

On Martin Fowler’s Refactoring website, an online catalog of refactorings. Useful for those, like me, whose programming muscles are idle from long disuse.

ITSMWatch: ITIL’s Top 10 Quick Wins. Useful summary of actions that can help illustrate the business benefit of IT Service Management adoption.

Today's links

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:10:45 GMT

Via BoingBoing, an amazingly obsessive recreation and imagination of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins’s home, in miniature. Eight rooms and countless tiny knick-knacks, all to scale for tiny hobbit action figures.

Boston Globe: The bell at Old South Church to toll 33 times. A somber reminder that as Christians we are supposed to care about the soul of the murderer as well as the souls of the murdered. How difficult that is has never been made clearer than today.

The Globe, again: Mom says body found on Cape is her son, a missing MIT student. Daniel Barclay had been missing since April 8. Obligatory eerie note: the last contact he had with anyone was via his AIM away message, which read: “I have to meet with some sketchy people I thought I'd never have to deal with ever again in east Cambridge.”