Boing Boing: Yahoo! bought Flickr!. Very cool, and congrats to the Flickr folks, who (though still not my sole source choice for hosting my images) are starting to intrigue me a little more with some of the possibilities for image flocking via tags. One example: the houseblog image group created by Hewn and Hammered.
History is bunk, of course
Whiskey Bar: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution. A simple compare-and-contrast between rhetoric and incidents from the current conservative backlash on college campuses and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” But we don’t need to worry about the implications of the comparison, right? Because America is different…
The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.
In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.
For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity—which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”
“We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! … We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants.”
Hat tip to Fury for the link.
New mix: “cool covers”
New mix, “cool covers,” published at the Art of the Mix—I didn’t bother publishing it at iTunes because I had a less than 50% “found rate.”
This is the first mix on which I’ve experimented with using spoken word fragments as linking tracks. I used a software package called Amadeus II to do the editing. Good software; reminds me of SoundEdit Pro, the first editing package I ever used back in 1989 or so.
(Republished from a post that was made yesterday that disappeared.)
A blogger returns
My former co-worker Dave Kramer, who briefly blogged before leaving his job at Microsoft about six months before I did, has a new site called Gamestay that provides gaming info for the “casual and grown-up gamers who don’t have time to keep up with every last screenshot and tradeshow video.” The site and his personal blog are both intelligently written, and share some new-to-me tidbits about goodies like the upcoming Lego Star Wars game.
Open source testing: CSS test suite for IE 7
Alex Barnett blog: IE7 and CSS: the Acid2 test – Microsoft has now been challenged. This is a smart way to put the pressure on Microsoft to fix CSS support in their (aging, broken) browser: get a community effort going early in the development process to put together a comprehensive CSS test suite. This would be a good thing for all browsers, btw, including Safari, to work against. Let’s hope that Microsoft jumps on it.
Maybe I don’t want the callback
Boston Globe — Living / Arts News: Levine’s pace proves hard on BSO. I actually auditioned for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (which despite its name is a year-round chorus in residence for the BSO) on Monday. The chorus is involved in far fewer concerts than the orchestra, and the chorus’s director spreads out the assignments, picking subsets of the group for each chorus, so presumably the TFC doesn’t have a lot of instances of blown pipes as a result of Levine’s vigor. I guess we’ll see.
(For recent readers: I’ve sung tenor in various choruses—symphonic, early music, church choirs, glee clubs, a cappella groups—ever since high school. My current singing hiatus, which has lasted the eight months since I left Seattle and the University Presbyterian Church choir, is the longest time I’ve spent outside of a singing group for fifteen years. Which is probably why I’m so out of sorts all the time.)
We could start seriously pushing alternative energy…
…or, as the US Senate decided yesterday in its infinite wisdom, we could just keep looking for those remaining pockets of fossil fuels like a crack addict searching for that last rock that he knows he dropped somewhere.
When one of the last pristine places on earth gets covered in pipes; when the first spill happens; when the caribou go extinct; and when the price of fuel keeps going up regardless, even after we get the first oil from that formerly pristine refuge ten years from now, I want every one of those 51 senators to wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “This is personally on my head.”
Of course, the other question has to be: where was the Democratic leadership? Given the inevitability of the Bush ideology juggernaut rolling over everything, did no one at least try to attach a rider to fund development of alternative energy resources?
UVA gets RSS
Mr. Jefferson’s University is entering the RSS age. I found a blurb on the University of Virginia web site about UVA To Go, a suite of services for news management that includes a streamlined mobile device web site at http://www.uvatogo.net/ (as well as a Pocket PC Screen Theme) and an RSS feed of news releases. The service is still in beta, so no orange and white icons can be found on the main page, but they’re looking for feedback, so get out there and let them know how you feel about the school striding boldly into the 21st century.
White male blogging
Looks like Dave—excuse me, White Male Dave Winer—is springing off a Jeff Jarvis comment to jumpstart the latest blogging meme, and outing bloggers (including myself) as White Males. I liked (White Former Professional Journalist Male) Jeff’s (unpaid) ripost to (White Professional Journalist Male) Steven Levy’s (paid) column (the point of getting to a blogosphere is so that voices, not skin colors, matter), but it is interesting—as I preface every link with a reference to the link-recipient’s sex and skin color, suddenly I’m a lot more self-conscious about what I’m doing.
Incidentally, if you annotate every single link this way, two things become apparent: there are a lot more dimensions that matter than sex and color, and divisions like pro and amateur are difficult to make.
Blogrolling over
BuzzMachine: Turn it off.. Jeff Jarvis gripes about having problems loading sites that include blogrolling lists powered by BlogRolling.com. I’ve noticed the list is slow, too.
Two things: One, you should always consider the performance of an external resource before you include it in your blog template—even if it’s just an image. But for those who like the services that Blogrolling.com provides, including the useful “updated recently” information, consider reducing the potential damage from a service outage. On this blog, for example, I address potential problems with the service by (a) only listing my blogroll on my front page and not on pages that are linked to by my RSS feed; (b) arranging the HTML of my template so that my content loads first and the column containing my blogroll loads next. This is a simple CSS layout trick (well, not so simple—read my post about getting it to work) that not only helps mitigate problems with external services—my content is fully loaded and readable while the page works to load the blogrolls from Blogrolling—but also helps make your page more navigable in screen readers and downlevel browsers.
Second, this is the flip side of the argument I had with Lisa Williams at the last Berkman Thursday Night Meeting I went to. The great thing about the blogosphere is that blogging platforms have a fairly low “lowest common denominator” of features—headline + body + comments + calendar archives + permalinks (+RSS). This means that there is lots of room for innovation by a Blogrolling.com, Technorati, Flickr, or Feedster type service to add additional “missing” features. But because there is no platform that does it all, you have to worry about dependencies on outside services for these functions.
The second point is why I haven’t hopped aboard Flickr yet—besides the incredibly slow speed of uploading multiple images. My photos are too important a part of my site for me to outsource them, and so far I haven’t seen enough benefit from the social aspects of the service to outweigh the shortcomings of being dependent on Yet Another Blog Support Service.
Podcasting might come to this blog…
UserLand Product News: Enclosure Support for News Item Sites in Manila. For non-techies, that means it will now be easier for folks with Manila sites (like mine, or the ones on the Harvard bloggs server) to produce podcasts. Thanks, UserLand!
(There is one point left unclear by the article: has the API been updated to allow for enclosure support as well? If so, then tool vendors like Ranchero will need to update their tools to facilitate this new feature.)
Potboiler
To paraphrase something that Fury wrote this weekend: if there is anything more exciting than boiled dinner, it’s making boiled dinner; and if there is anything more exciting than making boiled dinner, it’s blogging about making boiled dinner. “Lucky you!”
Ah, but the line between New England boiled dinner and a celebratory corned beef and cabbage is very fine—mostly it depends on the presence or absence of horseradish and turnips, apparently. And on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to cheerily conflate the two. So, having packed Lisa and her mom off to the New England Flower Show, I started getting things ready.
I had a few other things I wanted to cook at the same time. We had roasted a chicken the previous night, and I wanted to get rid of its carcass (plus the other two carcasses in the freezer) by making stock. Also, Lisa’s dad had put in a request for Boston brown bread, which turns out to be made by steam-cooking a can filled with batter consisting of graham flour, cornmeal, and rye flour (mixed with buttermilk, molasses and baking soda) for several hours. So that turned out to be three large stockpots atop a stove that could really only comfortably fit two.
I started the stock first (dead easy, incidentally: tie a carrot, several parsley stems, a celery stalk, and bay leaf together with cooking twine; add an onion in large chunks; throw in whatever chicken bones and odd scraps you have handy; cover with water; simmer for several hours, skimming as you go; remove the solids and simmer a little longer to concentrate the stock and skim off any remaining fat) and then got the bread steaming. Somewhat to my surprise, the bread came out beautifully, sliding out of its can (I used a butttered pannetone mold covered with foil) with no resistance, and just needing a few minutes in a 350º oven to firm up the sticky top.
So that was one big boiling pot off the stove, leaving enough room to start the boiled dinner. Which was good, since the recipe I consulted suggested simmering the corned beef for five hours and it was almost 1 pm. I plopped two corned beef briskets (thank you, Costco, for cheap meat) and their spice packets in a big stockpot, covered with water, and brought the thing to a boil, then backed it down to a simmer. And that’s all I really did, except for pouring a can of Guinness into the pot an hour in.
The beautiful things about the meal were: 1) the boiling. On a wetly snowy winter day, as many things should be boiled as possible; 2) the lack of interference needed. I was able (with Lisa’s dad’s assistance) to remove a door that normally goes sticky in summertime when it swells with humidity and get the bare wood top and bottom of the door painted, hopefully mitigating the problem, while the corned beef (and my stock) simmered; 3) the flavor. The vegetables, added in the last hour or so, were good, but the corned beef was spectacular—falling-apart moist and flavorful without being overly salty. And Lisa declared the Boston brown bread her new favorite.
Signs, almost, of spring
Q: How do you know it’s almost spring in Massachusetts? A: There’s a lot of sunlight on the latest six inches of snow, and it’s heavy and wet instead of light and fluffy.
Lisa’s parents came up this weekend for the flower show, and got to enjoy another heavy snowfall while they were here. But the snow stopped overnight, and when I took the dogs outside this morning, it looked like the whole street had burst into bloom with a profusion of white flowers. Comparing the trees behind the house this morning to the same trees this fall, I’m not sure I don’t prefer the winter version; after all, I won’t have to rake those snowy “leaves,” even if getting the snow off the driveway strains a few muscles.
Followup: Smithsonian Global Sound
In January, I bitched about the fact that the pivotal Folkways recordings of world music and American folk were only available on MSN Music. Sometime last week (I don’t know when, I’m behind in my posts), the Smithsonian partially redressed that market inefficiency by opening Smithsonian Global Sound, their own online music store featuring $.99/track downloads (though some longer tracks are more expensive), a wide catalog of field and folk recordings, and a choice of two DRM-free formats—MP3 and FLAC. That’s right, you can buy lossless recordings from the store. Add downloadable liner notes and we’re all in business.
I do have one criticism of the store. This is a good place to buy a la carte from the massive Smithsonian archives, but not a good place to buy albums. There doesn’t seem to be a per-album price, meaning that if you find an album with 20 tracks, you’ll pay 20 dollars. And I think “by the album” is the way that most people will want to explore this music. After all, it’s not as though you’re coming to the Smithsonian looking for “hot singles.” Another, lesser critique: there is no persistent “wish list”—your shopping cart is emptied when you leave your session and there is no other way short of managing a list offline to keep track of songs that you might want to buy at another time.
What’s confusing about all of this is the supposedly exclusive agreement that MSN Music had to sell this music through September of this year, according to the original New York Times article. It sure looks like the same catalog to me.
I’m not complaining, though. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some downloading to do.
Last HBS follow up, I swear: John Dvorak
Tech columnist John Dvorak weighed in yesterday on the ongoing MBA admissions brouhaha in his unofficial blog. His original post came down on the side of the “hackers”; I followed up in his comments to point to my post, and today he wrote the following:
OK after all my rants and various philosophical concepts the actual instructions for the student URL re-direction in the Harvard scandal is revealed here on the PowerYogi site. Reader/blogger Tim Jarrett sent me the link. Jarrett also takes a hard line approach to what I’d now call a script kiddy violation or simple curiosity. But, if indeed, there was a complex and dubious procedure then there may be some justification for complaint. In this case the indication is that the students should have known this was traceable. Making such an error shows bad judgement.
I still think the colleges should have sut up and not showboated and exposed the fact that they were using flawed software. And I’m still not convinced this can be considered “hacking” in any real sense. But I now retract my earlier comments and criticisms made today.
As Adam said in my comment threads, this whole thing has the makings of an excellent business school ethics case. There are so many dimensions, so much going on, that it’s impossible to take a hard line on it without looking at the facts.
I’m actually grateful to the folks who found the flaw and the lousy programmers at ApplyYourself, because I’ve had more honest and productive discussions about business and personal ethics and the Internet in the last four days than the last four years.