Friday crazy rumors day: Clinton replacing Ballmer?

Boy, is it fun to speculate and what-if today. Namely, what if this rumor is true? The one that has Steve Ballmer stepping aside as Microsoft CEO … in favor of Bill Clinton???

For one thing, you’d probably see a lot of red states joining Massachusetts’ ex-CIO in putting policies in place to get Microsoft out of their government. It would probably be the first time that open source advocates and most mouthbreathing conservatives would agree on anything.

Nonetheless, I will say that the only thing that could convince me this rumor is true would be if I looked out my window and saw pork on the wing.

(Via Scripting News.)

Always somebody watching at the Bellagio

Conference season is starting early for 2006. I’ll be at the grandly named Pink Elephant 10th Annual IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition in mid-February at the Bellagio, the hotel famous for inclusion in Ocean’s Eleven and for its masses of art glass by Dale Chihuly.

Looks like I won’t be the only Sloan person in attendance, either: Professor Ralph Katz, a research associate at Sloan (and a professor at Northeastern) will be speaking in the IT Business School track about managing innovation during uncertain times. If you feel like talking a little business at the show, or just quoting lines from O11 at me, I’ll be on the exhibit floor.

Missing more meetups

The Boston Geek Dinner that Dave organized last night at the CambridgeSide Galleria is probably the only blog meetup in recent memory to get covered by ZDNet. I wasn’t there—and haven’t been able to make any blog related gatherings, such as the Berkman Thursdays—because they all insist on Thursday night as the meeting datetime of choice. Which, when we’re not kicking off a BSO concert series, is the night I have choir rehearsal. There just aren’t enough days.

“Last time I answer an MIT survey,” and an offer of help

Last summer’s blogging survey by Cameron Marlow, who created the Blogdex tool at the MIT Media Labs in 2001, has become this week’s backlash story. Marlow promised to publish the results of the research at the end of the summer, then didn’t, and has indicated through an interview with the Bostonist that he’s just too swamped with work at his new job at Yahoo! to publish it. The reaction from the blogging community, who put out a bunch of buttons and banners to encourage people to fill out the survey, has been annoyed at best, angry at worst (as in the headline from Universal Hub above).

I’ve requested a copy of the thesis from the MIT archives. Copyright will prevent me from republishing the whole thing, but I hope to at least get the abstract on line. But I’d like to do better. Cameron, if you’re out there, I’d like to offer my services as a stats savvy MIT (Sloan) grad and blogger to help get the summary of the survey results on line. After all, it’s our collective alma mater’s reputation on the line. Plus I want to see the data too. How ’bout it?

Egolinking

Egolinking
The process of linking to things you find when you egosurf.

Today’s egolinks are to two unlikely sources. The first is to an interview in a Sloan School of Management publication about Sloan bloggers. Which reminds me: I need to add the other folks in that article to the Sloanblogs list.

The second is to my first mention in the New York Times—or more properly on the New York Times website. Not because of the Boycott Sony initiative, as one might think; this is as an addendum to an article about authors reading what bloggers say about them. My blog is linked from a page that summarizes bloggers’ discussions of Julie and Julia by Julie Powell. Ah well. Cool to see one’s name associated with the Grey Lady, no matter how it got there.

FWIW, I don’t think I invented the term egolink, but there aren’t many people using it. Spread the word!

New iTunes script: Increment Playcount

I’ve uploaded a bare bones AppleScript that I’ve found useful over the past few weeks. The script, Increment Playcount, does what it says: it bumps the playcount of a track in iTunes by 1 and sets the Last Played date to the current date and time. It’s been helpful to me because many of my smart playlists rely on knowing if I’ve heard a track or not, but unfortunately sometimes my iPod doesn’t sync playcounts—and sometimes my iTunes library gets blown away, losing all playcount information.

To use the script, unzip it, drop the script in your Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, go to iTunes, select one or more tracks, then select Increment Playcount from the scripts menu.

More detail about this and my other AppleScripts on my Software page.

Tomorrow’s Children

It’s been one of those serendipitious days. A link on Boing Boing about a secret “cornfield” where misbehaving players inside the MMPORG Second Life get banished sent me on a search for the original story. The game makers credit the Twilight Zone, but I remembered reading a short story with the same premise as a kid in elementary school. “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby, always scared the hell out of me, but it’s the sort of story that sticks with me to the present day.

Remembering the title of another story in the anthology, “Gonna Roll Them Bones,” I found a pointer to the anthology. Tomorrow’s Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, was full of extraordinarily creepy stories and hit me, as I was busy reading my way through the entire elementary school library, like a ton of bricks. From that point on I was hooked on science fiction, and remember being disappointed that Asimov’s own works didn’t have anywhere near the eerie resonance that these stories did. Based on the reviews in Amazon, it would appear that I’m not the only one who was warped for life by the book—and based on the prices for it on Alibris, it will be a good long time before I can get my hands on it again.

New music: The Black Angels

Listening to the KEXP podcast today (thanks to Cheryl Waters for bringing me the feeling that I was listening to my favorite radio station in my car from 3000 miles away), I found a new band. Of course KEXP found them first… They’re called The Black Angels (after the Velvet Underground song, not the George Crumb string quartet), and like their antecedent they bring heavy guitars over psychedelic droning rhythms. It’s the sort of sound that keeps getting rediscovered—think the Paisley Underground bands, Mazzy Star, or even Mogwai with vocals—but these young Texans do it really, really well, blending twists of sixties garage rock with their drones and heavy drum beats.

The band has made the KEXP Top 90.3 for 2005 on the strength of its eponymous debut EP. You can check out a full-length MP3 download and some samples on their site, and some live in studio recordings from KVRX (Austin, Texas).

Can you get to that?

Funkadelic is in the iTunes Music Store. Holy hell. I can’t believe I’ve gone so long in my life without hearing “Maggot Brain.” In fact, I distinctly remember being a snotnosed 21 or 22 year old at the (apparently late lamented) Olsson’s Records in Georgetown, checking out the Funkadelic section on the strength of the George Clinton connection (I was a mighty Parliament fan), seeing the cover of Maggot Brain, shuddering and passing by. More fool, I. The title track really is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time. And it doesn’t stop there.

Aside: I don’t know if there is a band that had a better gift for album titles. On the strength of Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Funkadelic should have won some sort of lifetime achievement award.

Mac laptops to buy (or avoid)

Currently being Slashdotted: the Macintouch iBook and PowerBook reliability survey. Usual statistical cautions apply: while the overall sample size of 4,614 repairs out of 10,627 respondents should yield reliable answers at the top level (when did your ‘book need to be repaired? did you buy AppleCare? have you ever dropped your machine?), it’s unlikely to do so at the machine level.

And yet. For the two machines I’ve owned (the Powerbook G3 Firewire and the 1GHz G4 TiBook), the stats are dead on. To wit: the three things that gave me problems on the G3 were the power adapter, the RAM, and the optical drive, and I’ve experienced serious case problems on the G4 TiBook.

Fortunately for Apple, it looks like recent AlBook models have been much more reliable. Which probably means that Apple really is due to introduce some new designs to shake things up at next week’s MacWorld Expo.

WordPress 2.0 hits the streets

Missed this over the weekend: WordPress 2.0 (née 1.6) has been released. I will be looking at the process to upgrade from 1.5 on the Boycott Sony blog, which is currently on WordPress 1.5. (This blog is on the Manila platform.)

Changelist, and what’s new from a developer’s perspective. I’m most excited about the default inclusion of Akismet for distributed spam blocking, as comment moderation for spam comments takes some time today.

Media wiring, penultimate chapter

On New Years Eve, I got a chance to work on a long stalled project—hooking up the cable wiring in our distributed media outlets. As you may recall, back in June and July I ran coax to outlets in the first and second floor bedrooms and connected them to a distribution block—really an oversized panel-mounted tee connector—in our structured wiring panel. That left the last step: connecting the distribution block to a live cable feed.

On Saturday, Lisa and I (with help from Esta) mostly finished this part of the job. What was required:

First: Reroute the existing cable hookup in the basement back behind the fake wall. This takes some explaining: Our basement is built with one finished room, which has drywall walls at a standoff (about six inches) from the actual foundation wall. This leaves a convenient space to run electrical cables back and forth to the service panel, since the panel is mounted in the false wall, as well as for other kinds of cabling projects. There is even a door in the false wall, which is for accessing the house water shutoff but which works well for fishing wire.

Back in 2004 when cable was installed in the basement, the installer drilled a hole through the left top of the window frame and dropped the cable directly into the room. I drilled a hole through the false wall on the upper right side of the window and pulled the cable across behind the blind hardware at the top of the window and through the hole into the access space.

Second: Fish coax cable from the media panel into the laundry room. This was straightforward, since there are lots of cables and ducts passing through openings in the wall between these two rooms that will be boxed in at some point in the future. With everything still open, I could just pass the cable by hand through the wall into the laundry room.

Third: Fish coax from the laundry room, inside the finished ceiling of the library, and down into the access space and connect it to the live feed. This was the nightmare. The last time I looked at the access space, it wasn’t too bad: just a few cables strung across. One of our electricians had even been thoughtful enough to leave a nylon string in place for pulling future cables through. Unfortunately, that was before the first floor ductwork and the bathroom renovations were completed. End result: it took about two hours to work my hand up and fish the coax across, without getting snagged on any live electrical wires or puncturing the insulated ducts, and then to retrieve the fish tape.

Oy. Finally, though, almost all the connections have been made. Still remaining: actually test the cable outlets in the two bedrooms; insert one more tee in the false wall; install an outlet on the wall in the library bedroom; and tack up the cables in the library and the utility room. I’m most nervous about the first item. Anything could have gone wrong with the coax going up to the bedrooms, including bad connector attachment (by me), drywall nails driven into the coax (also me), insulation damaged by the HVAC guys… etc. Well, we’ll see how it goes.

Dealing with a truculent iPod

My second iPod has reached the point of battery senescence. I hadn’t noticed the problem before, primarily because I normally keep the iPod plugged into a charger while I am driving. However, as I tried to update the iPod with some Christmas music, I realized that the thing no longer holds enough charge to complete a sync.

The problem is worsened because of my temporary setup during the Project. I have the single FireWire port on my TiBook tied up by the external 300GB drive that holds my music (and must, therefore, remain attached during the sync). That means I have to connect the iPod to the FireWire port on the back of the external drive, which is, unfortunately, an unpowered port (something I missed when I selected the Venus enclosure). So the iPod has to rely on its flickering battery during the sync and ultimately it fails.

I figured out a workaround this morning—sort of. I ejected and powered down the drive, then reconnected it using the USB connection. I then plugged the iPod into the FireWire port on the back of the TiBook, where it happily charged away. And a good thing, too, because the TiBook only has USB 1.1, which is slow. I think I got about 150 songs onto the device in 45 minutes. But it will do, for now.

The ultimate solution? Well, for one thing, once the Project is done I will be accessing the music files over the network, so there won’t be that problem any more. In the meantime, I think I need to look into battery replacement for the iPod, which means I’ll be updating the iPod Autopsy page with pics from the innards of my 3rd G device. I have some other ideas as well, but will try the battery replacement first to see how it goes.

Update: There’s also an Apple support note on five things to try with an iPod before sending it in for battery replacement. We’ll see.

Tech Trek hits the media

CNET News.com: MIT grads to size up Silicon Valley. Heh. Funny that this makes the news, with so little substance. There’s a lot to say about the Tech Trek (which is unnamed in this article), but this article doesn’t say it—just suggests that MIT finds the Valley interesting. Which it did back in January 2001, when I participated. But it’s good to see that the Sloan crew can still raise press attention.

Project update: somewhat stalled

It had to come. My initial prediction, which said that 275 GB would be enough for my collection, was just a little too smug.

As of today, tracks from The Project, my endeavor to losslessly rip all my CDs to a hard drive, comprise 7746 songs from 569 albums, lasting 24:17:58:02, at a total disk cost of 166.57 GB. Unfortunately, the other tracks in my library—those purchased from eMusic or the iTunes Music Store, or ripped from CDs I no longer possess, or downloaded from other sources—also take up space on the drive. So, at the start of digitizing the other half of my collection, my rock and pop CDs, I only have 70 GB free on the drive—about half what I need.

What went wrong? Well, for one thing, I think I underestimated the number of albums I owned by about 100. (Oops.) For another, I underestimated the number of classical discs that I owned that were actually 2 CDs in length. Each album weighs in, on average, at 0.2927 GB—somewhat fewer than my anticipated 0.297 GB per album. So the biggest contributor to “scope creep” appears to be undercounting the discs I own.

What to do about it? Well, “purchase more space” is certainly an answer, but not the one I want right now. Should have gone RAID to begin with, I’m afraid. So for right now, my answer has been to halt the digitization until I can figure out the best solution to add the additional disc space I need. The other option—to use lossy ripping for the rest of the collection—is one I’m not comfortable with.