Feeling like death warmed over

I’m in pretty bad shape this morning for no apparent reason. I didn’t sleep at all last night, I couldn’t breathe well this morning, and I think I’m feverish. So naturally I decided to go to school. After all, what fun is being sick if you can’t get anyone else sick with you? 🙁

It’s been a rough morning otherwise too. On the way to the T, I saw the wings of a pigeon, feathers intact but separated from their owner, lying on the sidewalk. And I got a lovely email from an old college friend tipping me off about one of our stranger classmates’ arrest record. The story gave me another visual I didn’t really need. Unfortunate kid, this Ilya. He was all of 14 when he started at Virginia, and apparently had a few screws loose….
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And here I thought it would be “The Waste Land”

The Illuminated Donkey: “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Hysterically funny, though somewhat slanted at political blogs. (Also the meter is not quite as catchy as the original.) A sample:

Let us blog, towards certain well-examined URL’s,
The banner ad unfurls,
The caustic digs at less-than-sharp writers,
Punches are thrown as by heavyweight fighters,
Links that lead to endless arguments
And caterwauling laments
But here we raise an overwhelming question…
How to appear in refer logs?
Let us link to A-list blogs.

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Adobe gets SOAP religion: New Web services

Infoworld: Abobe opens Web services publishing door. I’d love to comment more than just the press release, but I can’t find a URL for the service and Adobe hasn’t published anything about it on their AlterCast page.

“… Adobe AlterCast software is designed to automate the production and workflow of Web images and graphics. For example, AlterCast can resize a picture or manipulate layers of text dynamically.

The addition of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) support to AlterCast will allow developers to access the software functionality over the Internet using Java or .Net APIs, which will enable dynamic Web image updating and production from a single command, according to Adobe officials, in San Jose, Calif.”

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The dark side of digitization

Ananova: Ancient Domesday Book outlives electronic version. It was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped about digital content, as it usually does. While human languages change very slowly, digital languages, formats, and fashions age at an incredible rate. This is one thing that most tech people, especially, don’t think of as a hazard of junking paper in favor of bits, but it’s something to be aware of. For existing works, digitization is not a replacement for conservation, just a way to extend the effectiveness of the conservation by providing alternative means of access. For digital works that start out as digital, picking the right format is critical.

News is free…

Well, as a Radio user I have no more gripes about dearths of news feeds, having just found NewsIsFree. The only question remaining is, why don’t the newspapers go out and build their own RSS feeds to share–why do sites like NewsIsFree and Moreover have to do it for them? Seems to me they could disintermediate these guys in a heartbeat. And I would think that newspapers, above all, would understand the importance of syndication.
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Shadow government

The New York Times: 60 Feet Under. Maureen Dowd makes some good points here and gets some great zingers:

“Mr. Cheney is Lord of the Rings, ruling over his very own Moria, an underground kingdom of bureaucratic hobbits and orcs….

Without Democrats or journalists, the underground executive branch can operate the way the real executive branch would like to, and frequently does — without a lot of second-guessing, Freedom of Information Act requests, complaints from civil libertarians and attention to the rights of Marin County hot-tubbers.

Nothing will be transcribed. So there will be no reason to clean up the language in President Bush’s transcripts, as the White House has done routinely since 9/11.”

Interesting question. We’ve always assumed that we get full access to the running of our government, with the exception of stuff that we really don’t want to know about (national security). There’s the rub–this administration thinks everything it does is “national security.” And it doesn’t want to share anything with the people’s representatives in the Congress, either.

Maybe Tom Daschle should talk to Bill Clinton, who came back from being made almost irrelevant by Newt Gingrich. He might have some advice on how to restore checks and balances on a political power hellbent on eliminating them.
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Hooked on Radio

So I have to confess. I’m not using it for weblogging, but I’m finding Radio to be invaluable in feeding my news addiction. I love getting my favorite blogs plus headlines from CNET, Wired, Slashdot, and others all on one page. There are some really cool people out there building RSS feeds.

My question is, why don’t the major news sources (WSJ, NYT (yes I know there’s a scraped feed available), Washington Post) hop on the bandwagon? It would be fairly trivial, and I would think good business, to set up an XML headline link listing that would bring people to your site.
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Good morning!

It’s a beautiful gray day in Boston this morning. I’m feeling on top of the world for no apparent reason.

Lisa is out of town, having taken her mom to London for a shopping trip. (!) I spoke with her yesterday briefly just before my cell phone ran out of battery. They got upgraded to Business Elite class on their flight to London on Thursday. I didn’t hear many details; apparently Business Elite is a mythical place with champagne, good food, and cheese plates. If the rest of their trip is a tenth as good she’ll be on cloud 9 when she gets home.

Nofont is good fonts

Oh man. In the days before blogging, when I used to get sensually excited about the serifs and descenders of well designed fonts, I never dreamed about a site as cool as nofont. Check out the typography experiments, the downloadable experimental fonts, the page design….
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Digitizing Chaucer

The Guardian: British Library digitises Chaucer for the internet. Aside from the lowercase i, what’s interesting about this story is that they’re not talking about making the text available (it’s already pretty widely available), but high resolution images, as they helped to do with the Gutenberg Bible project.

There are two interesting things about this project:

  1. Typography freaks like myself will get to see in glorious hi-res the work of William Caxton, who was one of the earliest printers in England.
  2. The existing books are pretty fragile and this will make sure that people have an alternative to viewing them in person, which exposes them to additional damage.

I used to work at the Electronic Text Center when I was an undergrad at Virginia. I was reading Beowulf in Old English at the time, and was blown away when I saw the British Library’s first digitizations of the Beowulf manuscript. I could look at the passages that were debated by scholars and understand why they were debated (generally, the manuscript was falling apart in places).
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Morpheus: Classic story of tech strategy gone wrong

Among file sharing programs, one strange menage a trois stands out: Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster. All three run essentially the same software, owned by KaZaA. Last week something happened to Morpheus — it’s not clear what. According to Slashdot, the ownership of Morpheus (Music City) has claimed that individuals “launched a DOS attack and tampered with the morpheus network in order to disallow logons to the FastTrack P2P filesharing network through the client. ” According to this message, KaZaA sold out to another outfit and started kicking the Morpheus clients off the network.

Where’s the cautionary tale here? Well, there are two parameters that determine how well you can capture the value you create (i.e., stay in business). Is your product’s uniqueness easy or hard to maintain? Do you hold the complementary assets you need to realize that product’s value tightly or loosely? Well, let’s see. Morpheus licensed its technology wholesale, so uniqueness was hard to maintain. And their network was connected to its competitors (all three P2P clients connected to the same big FastTrack network). I guess they didn’t have too tight a control over their complementary assets. So how was Morpheus going to capture any value??? Somewhere, though, someone thought they were a good idea…
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