jing on bang

2005-11-15T01:35:00.000-08:00

MSN expects China to be top five market by 2010 (Reuters)

Reuters - Microsoft Corp.'s Internet unit, MSN,expects China to become one of its top five markets by 2010,fueled by growing demand for its popular email and searchengine software, executives said.

Study finds TiVo losing ground among DVR users (Reuters)
Reuters - TiVo Inc. has created adigital video recorder with a name that has worked its way intothe American lexicon, but its reputation among users andwould-be users is beginning to erode amid generic competitors,according to a new study that relies on Internet buzz to studyconsumers'opinion.

2005-11-08T19:08:00.000-08:00

Funds could move on C&W, says chief (FT.com)
FT.com - Richard Lapthorne, chairman of Cable and Wireless, on Tuesday signalled the UK's second-largest fixed-line telecoms network operator could become a takeover target for private equity funds following a recent profits warning.

U.S. wireless carriers take aim at adult content (Reuters)
Reuters - With Internet and video more readilyavailable on wireless phones, the major U.S. carriers onTuesday unveiled guidelines aimed at limiting children's accessto adult content and services.

Samsung Denies Plans for Music Service (PC World)
PC World - Online store isn't in development, just a new interface, company says now.

Microsoft sees up to 3 mln early Xbox 360 sales (Reuters)

Reuters - Microsoft Corp. onTuesday said it expects to sell as many as 3 million Xbox 360sin the first three months after its launch -- a strong start inits battle to dominate the market for next-generation gamingconsoles.

Worm Targets Linux Systems (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - A new worm that attacks Linux systems and exploits several vulnerabilities in the operating system has been reported, and security firms are urging caution among users.

Analyst: Security Will Drive Windows-to-Mac Switch (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - A financial analyst predicts that the ubiquity of computer viruses, and Apple's success in its music ventures, will drive more and more Windows users to switch to Macs.

Quest Software Shares Rise on 3Q Results (AP)
AP - Shares of Quest Software Inc. rose sharply, a day after the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations.

Verizon Reduces Prices for Phone Service (AP)

AP - Verizon Communications Inc. sharply cut its prices for unlimited telephone service across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic on Tuesday, including markets where Cablevision Inc. has just boosted broadband Internet speeds.

FCC Clarifies VoIP Disconnection Deadline (AP)
AP - The Federal Communications Commission won't require Internet phone service providers to cut off customers who don't have reliable 911 emergency call service.

2005-11-07T21:28:00.000-08:00

Promo Uploads
I’m still getting used to all the functions of Wordpress and haven’t enabled file upload yet, but you should be able topost a promoand point the URL for the enclosure to a file on any server.

XJ Super V8

XJ Super V8
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

Presenting the new Curry Cruiser!
Details in Today's Source Code

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

#273 Daily Source Code for Thursday November 3d 2005
#273Daily Source Code for Thursday November 3d 2005
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, United Kingdom
DirectLinkto the show
Subscribe to thefeed
Subscribe withiTunes
On the talking tip today!
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Friday October 28th 2005 #269
Daily Source Code for Friday October 28th 2005 #269
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

2005-11-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

David Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and Handy
The new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.
DAVID POGUE

2005-11-04T18:40:00.000-08:00

Basics: Deleted but Not Gone
Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.
THOMAS J. FITZGERALD

Microsoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and Yahoo
Microsoft is offering two new advertising-supported Web services, Windows Live and Office Live, as a direct response to competitors'challenges.
JOHN MARKOFF

Advertising: CBS to Acquire CSTV for$325 Million in Stock
Viacom announced that the new CBS Corporation would acquire CSTV Networks, a cable channel and confederation of Web sites that focus entirely on college sports.
RICHARD SANDOMIR

David Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and Handy
The new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.
DAVID POGUE

Buying: Stores Look for a Niche as Gadgets Grow Up
If the prices for high-tech gadgets are slightly out of reach for the average Wal-Mart shopper, that is fine by the company. In fact, it is by design.
MICHAEL BARBARO

Video Games Are Facing Soft Demand
Electronic Arts became the second major video game maker this week to warn that it was seeing soft demand from retailers as it heads into the holiday season.
MATT RICHTEL

David Pogue: 10 Ways to Please Us, the Customers
Dear electronics makers, you should worship at the altar of good design and make customer satisfaction your religion. These should be your commandments.

2005-11-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

Microsoft Introduces Web Services, Competing With Google and Yahoo
Microsoft is offering two new advertising-supported Web services, Windows Live and Office Live, as a direct response to competitors'challenges.
JOHN MARKOFF

Basics: Deleted but Not Gone
Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.
THOMAS J. FITZGERALD

Jumpy Enough to Chew a Chair? Try DogCatRadio
A new Internet radio station for pets aims to keep the loneliness at bay while owners are out.
DINITIA SMITH

Design: Style Meets Function, and Technology Gets a Human Touch
Like many new technologies, dongles - the tiny sticks that attach to computer ports and transport files from one computer to another, have been designed in many guises.
PHIL PATTON

Dell Says New Focus Will Cut Into Profit
Dell Inc. warned that its shift in strategy to focus on higher profit margins would result in lower-than-expected revenue and earnings in the third quarter.
DAMON DARLIN

Qwest Loss Narrows in Quarter
Qwest Communications reported a smaller loss for the third quarter and announced a tentative$400 million settlement of shareholder lawsuits.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

E.D.S. Shifts to a Profit
The Electronic Data Systems Corporation reported a third-quarter profit after it worked out differences with the federal government on a huge Naval contract.
REUTERS

InterActive Profit Off
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the television and Internet-services company, said that third-quarter profit fell 25 percent on costs of spinning off the Expedia travel business.
BLOOMBERG NEWS

David Pogue: Corporate Tool, Yes, but Bright and Handy
The new BlackBerry 8700c is a thoroughly modernized version of a gizmo whose technologies were rock-solid but a tad behind the times.
DAVID POGUE

2005-11-02T15:53:00.000-08:00

safe in sf
15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SF

Podsfae xmas tunes
After a discussion on the source code, a list ofpodsafe christmas musicappeared in the shownotes. These songs can be recorded or performed by anyone.

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
From Curry Cottage, Guildford United Kingdom
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

MK Video Promo
Avideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"

Daily Source Code for Friday October 21st 2005 #264
Daily Source Code for Friday October 21st 2005 #264

From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California

DirectLinkto the show

2005-11-01T14:37:00.000-08:00

Viva BBC America

I caught the first episode ofViva Blackpoollast night on BBC America, a six-episode mini-series that features the most wonderfully vile lead character sinceThe Sopranos.

The show's a funny drama about Ripley Holden, an Elvis-loving Brit trying to bring Vegas-style excess to Blackpool, England, in the form of the Yankee Dollar Casino. When a dead body turns up one morning, a Scottish detective shows up poking around Ripley's business (and his wife).

The comparisons to Tony Soprano are unmistakeable -- Ripley's a larger-than-life oaf ruling the lives of his wife, son and daughter, and he mixes bullying and charm in a way that makes me think the U.S. will steal actorDavid Morrisseythe way we've absconded with Ricky Gervais.

The strangest and most amazing thing about the show was the occasional use of musical numbers a laCop Rock. The first episode ends with a"These Boots are Made for Walkin'"dance between Holden and the detective, and though it sounds excruciatingly bad, it was so great I scrambled for the TiVo to record the show for my wife.

I try to avoid watching television aside fromLaw&Orderand football, because it robs me of time I could be wasting on the web. But I'm in for the next five hours ofBlackpool, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. and has one last repeat airing of the first episode at 7 p.m. tonight.

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.

Harriet's Homework Helpers
A postscript on Harriet Miers, buried in aWashington Poststory on the burial of her Supreme Court aspirations:

White House aides finished Miers's second response to the Senate questionnaire and delivered it at 11:40 p.m., more than three hours after she decided to abandon her nomination. The 59-page document makes it clear that the struggle to learn about her advice to Bush would have continued had she stayed in the fray. Asked for details about her work, she submitted 135 boilerplate, publicly available fact sheets on White House policies and 67 policy statements the administration has sent Congress on legislation.

Miers wasn't even working on her own questionnaire! I know that Supreme Court justices often lean heavily on their clerks in drafting opinions, but you'd think a person described as"detail-oriented"in four billion media stories might have given her homework a look-see before aides turned it in.

I'm beginning to wonder if she's even agood bowler.

My Reign as the King of Pings
I've been runningWeblogs.Comsince June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it.

Weblogs.Com ran onFrontierfor six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year.

In a frenzied weekend, I recoded the site as an Apache/MySQL/PHP web application running on a Linux server, writing all of the code from scratch except forXML-Simple, an XML parsing library I adapted from code byJim Winstead. Hosting was provided byServerMatrix, which charges around $80-$140/month for a dedicated server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 1,200-gigabyte monthly bandwidth limit.

On an average day, my application served 34.65 gigabytes of data, took 1.1 million pings and sent 11,000 downloads of changes.xml, a file larger than 1 megabyte. TheLAMP platformis ideal for running a high-demand web application for as little money as possible.

When Dave rerouted Weblogs.Com to my new server and it instantly deluged the box with more than a dozen pings per second, I felt like Lucy Ricardo pulling chocolates off the conveyer belt.

The server ran well, crashing only a few times over four months because of a spammer sending thousands of junk pings per minute. Every few days, I used theiptablesfirewall to block requests from the IP addresses of the worst abusers.

Business reporterTom Foremskiand others have suggested that the Weblogs.Com sale might reveal a lack of faith in blogging as a business.

I think the sale was motivated by the realization that the demands of running Weblogs.Com had become much too large for Dave's one-man company. He could either hire people and start pursuing revenue opportunities or sell the service.

VeriSign got a good deal acquiring it for a reported $2 million. The company's now at the center of the blogosphere, a giant web application and information network with more than 15 million users, and ought to be able to leverage those pings into new services built on XML, XML-RPC and RSS.

One thing I'd like to see is a real-time search engine built only on the last several hours of pings, which could be a terrific current news service if compiled intelligently. While I was running Weblogs.Com, I wanted to use my brief moment as the king of pings to extend the API, which VeriSign appears to beconsidering, but Dave didn't want to mess with things while companies were loading a truck with money and asking for directions to his house.

Any legislator who is publicly supporting laws which favor abortion or euthanasia may not present himself or herself for Holy Communion. --Raymond Burke, Catholic Archbishop of St. Louis

If Judge Samuel Alito is approved by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have five Catholic justices, a religious majority that is nearly without precedent in U.S. history. He would join Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The only time thisappearsto have happened was 1792-1793, when four of the six justices belonged to the Episcopal church: Chief Justice John Jay and Justices James Iredell, Thomas Johnson and James Wilson.

The Constitution expressly forbids religious tests in consideration for public office, so there's a strong inclination against scrutiny of a nominee's religious beliefs, whether in support or opposition. With Catholics, this comes into conflict with agrowing movementwithin the church to deny sacraments to lawmakers who oppose its views on subjects like abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia.

In 2002, the Vatican issued adoctrinal notestating that Catholic lawmakers must act in accordance with its teachings:

John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.

The Catholic Church comes into conflict with different political factions over the Vatican's voluminously documented views. John Kerry, a practicing Catholic who regularly attends mass, was publicly denied the right to communion by Archbishop Burke during the 2004 presidential campaign, an action with theapprovalof Pope Benedict XVI while he served as cardinal. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey was denied by another bishop for remarrying without getting an annulment.

Up to this point, American bishops have played the communion card solely against socially liberal Democrats. There has been no comparable effort to deny Justice Scalia for his support of capital punishment, nor a rejection of Catholic politicians who favor the Iraq war.

Though I'm undoubtedly going to be accused of anti-Catholic bigotry, one of my concerns with Alito's selection is the historic majority that it establishes. When the church began actively politicizing the Eucharist, it called into question how life-tenured justices will reconcile conflicts between their Constitution and their church.

And the Booker Goes To ...
There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of theBooker Prize for Fictionis one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows uponSurvivorfinales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.

The Booker's such a big deal there's atell-all bookcoming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:

There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.

When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.

This year's Booker, announced live last night on British TV, went to Irish novelist John Banville forThe Sea, a novel of a grieving man returning to a vacation spot where something very bad happened in his youth. (The titleThe Prince of Tideswas already taken.)

Banville put some work into this victory. He shredded a critically acclaimed book,Saturdayby former Booker winner Ian McEwan, and may have contributed to the"dismayingly bad book"being left off the list of finalists for 2005.

The review's on afor-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidsonbloggedthe good parts:

It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
Something of the kind seems to have happened here.Saturdayis a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however,Saturdayhas the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.

Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.

Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth Bomb
A letter toNational ReviewcolumnistDavid Frum:

I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system.
I'm considering abandoning them after watching how such advocacy often turns into a negative blotch on an attorney's resume and a disqualifier for any high level judiciary or executive service ...

Since the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the most fascinating political site on the web has beenConfirm Them, a weblog created by Republican activists to support the confirmation of President Bush's judicial appointments.

Miers has made a mockery of the site's name, splitting conservative contributors into angry pro- and anti-Miers camps. They were gearing up for a fight to get an openly conservative jurist with an established track record past the Senate, but instead have been handed another stealth nominee whose judicial philosophy must be taken on faith.

No conservative had the White House counsel on their short list of prospective choices, according toGeorge Willin one of the greatest insults in the history of punditry:

... there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.

Snap! You go, George!

Stealth nominees have a strategic short-term advantage that makes it difficult to keep them off the court, so it's likely that Miers will be confirmed unless President Bush withdraws the nomination, which ranks in probability somewhere between"no chance in hell"and"never in a million years."The president's so stubborn that were he captain of the Titanic, he would have run the ship into a second iceberg to prove he meant to hit the first one.

There's a long-term price for filling the Supreme Court in secrecy, as this clerk's letter illustrates. Conservatives have built an intellectual foundation for their interpretation of constitutional law over a quarter century, as embodied by theFederalist Societyand the embrace oforiginalism.

Neither Bush appointment has publicly nurtured this movement during their careers. In some instances, they've even distanced themselves from it. When asked her most admired Supreme Court justice, Miersdid not chooseJustices Scalia or Thomas. When John Roberts showed up in a Federalist Society membership directory, the White House issued aquick denial, stating that he"has no recollection of being a member."

Roger Pilon, a Cato Institute vice president and society member, was stunned to see Robertsrun away from the associationas if Joseph McCarthy was after him."Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Federalist Society?"

If you're a 25-year-old conservative who graduated Harvard Law first in your class and clerks for Chief Justice Roberts, do you spend the next 20 years contributing to law journals, actively participating in the Federalist Society and seeking a judgeship from which you can foster conservative jurisprudence?

Clearly, if you have supreme ambitions, the answer is no. By choosing Roberts and Miers, Bush has publicly affirmed the notion that judicial conservatives believe in an ideology that dare not speak its name. Friends of Clarence are the new Friends of Dorothy, forced to develop furtive code phrases to seek each other out -- just like how President Bush namedropsDred Scottas a double-secret shout out toanti-abortion activists.

"I couldn't help but overhear what you said aboutGriswold v. Connecticutat the bar, friend. Want to take this someplace more private so we can disrespectstare decisisaway from all of these living constitutionalists?"

Harriet Miers is the best thing to happen to liberals since the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. I hope she has a sister.

Stuart Smalley: Bush Needs Therapy
Stuart Smalley made his first appearance onAl Franken's radio showFriday, venturing into politics to discuss tabloid rumors that the president has returned to the bottle (attached podcast).

I'm surprised it took so long to hear from the caring nurturer, who believes the president should get into an anonymous recovery group, regardless of whether or not he's drinking:

Right away. Imagine the stress. There but for the grace of God go I. If I were president, I'd be a complete wreck. I'd be doing a worse job than him, I really believe that. If that's possible.

2005-10-30T13:48:00.000-08:00

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 25th 2005 #266
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Attention Tech
Steve Gillmor's dailyAttention Techis now available as a podcast

Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1
Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1
From Curry Condo, San Francisco California
Directlinkto the video.

I got a video iPod yesterday, subscribed to a multitude of video Podcasts. Quite interesting
My own experimentation with the platform starts with this short'cast of Curry Condo.
If you own a video iPod, it should show up automatically under Video Podcasts. Lemme know if it worked!

[Details of clip]
Recorded with an iSight on a G4 Powerbook (the new one!)
Edited in iMovie on a G5 iMac (a new one!)
Exported as'Quicktime to iPod'

iPod Video
If you have one of the new iPods,thismay look cool on it. I've added it to the Daily Source Code podcast feed, should work fine in iTunes as well.

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 27th 2005 #268
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 27th 2005 #268
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

2005-10-29T14:07:00.000-07:00

Chief Justice Denies Stay in BlackBerry Case
The maker of BlackBerry e-mail devices lost an emergency Supreme Court appeal that sought to suspend a long-running patent suit against the company.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Engineers Make Leap in Optical Networks
A team of engineers has discovered how to switch a beam of laser light on and off up to 100 billion times a second with materials that are widely used in the semiconductor industry.
JOHN MARKOFF

Q.&A.: Fax Software for Windows XP
Is it possible to get the fax software added to Windows XP like the built-in fax ability that was included in previous versions of Windows?
J.D. BIERSDORFER

Sprint Nextel Beats Estimates in First Report Since Merger
The Sprint Nextel Corporation posted sales and pro forma income that narrowly beat Wall Street estimates.
MATT RICHTEL

2005-10-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

Nude Dancer Denudes Wallet
Today'sNew York Timeshas an op-ed defending the right of strip clubs torip off their clientele:

With many customers, fawning is key. What a stripper sells is not her ability to dance or take off her clothes, but her ability to suspend the customer's disbelief.
If she is doing her job right, his bald spot and his mortgage cease to exist, and he enters an adolescent fantasy of sexual prowess, temporarily transformed into James Bond, Han Solo and Hugh Hefner all rolled into one. The dancers keep cooing and flattering until the money runs out. It's not duplicitous; it's what the patron signs up for.

The author of the essay is Elizabeth Eaves, a former stripper who has turned the experience into a work of scholarship:Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power.

There's something poetic about a stripper who hates her customers so much she believes her job is to bankrupt them, since there isn't a lot of respect coming in the other direction of the"shake your moneymakers"business.

Eaves has anextremely low opinionof the men whose wallets she used to lay bare:

I don't have a lot of respect for these men. I don't think they're evil people, but I think that they're weak. I see visiting strip clubs as a form of cheating; I'm bothered by the idea that women are for sale, and I see this in many aspects of our society.

$500,000 for a Flying Fish

There may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.

A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.

A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner.
"There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."

The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.

Everyone Who Uses Must Converge
Last March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible andThe Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully.

Wall Street Journalpundit Peggy Noonan wasdeeply movedby the incident:

Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours.Thisis Nichols's mug shot.Thisis Nichols's face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.
Something changed.
Something happened. ...
It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.

Something did happen. Smith revealed a secret in hernew memoirthat she kept from police, the press, and Peggy -- during the ordeal, she gave Nichols some of hercrystal meth:

... as the night wore on -- after Nichols had snorted some of Smith's meth -- she tried to win Nichols' trust by talking about her faith in God and relating to him her personal stories. ...
She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying,"Let go and let God."

In the short term,crystal methbrings reduced fatigue and adeep feelingof well-being, intelligence and power. (In the long term,not so much).

Noonan found in Nichols' transformation a redemptive Easter miracle:

This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.
I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.

Oops.

Update: Lee Siegel, a critic for theNew Republic, questioned Smith's story from the beginning, faulting the broadcast media for spinning a fable that omitted her criminal record, the circumstances of her husband's murder and the reason she lost custody of her child.

Brownie Backs Brown-Noser
The White House has enlisted a new ally in the effort to seat Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court:

Conservative activist Michael D. Brown said internal GOP polling being cited by party and administration emissaries purports to show that"70 percent of self-identified conservative voters have a favorable impression of Harriet Miers."
The emissaries are warning that ordinary Republicans beyond the Washington Beltway continue to support the nomination because they trust President Bush, even after several weeks of conservative opposition to her, according to several conservative Miers critics who have been courted by the White House.
The administration is"disappointed that conservatives inside the Beltway are fighting among ourselves over this nomination, and it fuels the fires for our enemies, for Democrats,"said Mr. Brown, the former Federal Emergency Management Agency director.

Brown also gave Miers 500 bottles of water and $200,000 in federal relief to replace a tree outside her Dallas home that was toppled by Hurricane Rita.

Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs
I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank.SportsFilterjumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.

A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins withwwwand one that doesn't -- for the same site.

Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at eithermydd.comorwww.mydd.com.

When you use two domains, pick one that's the real address and redirect the other address using an HTTP status code of"301 moved permanently,"which indicates a permanent move, rather than"302 found,"which may be temporary.

If you take another approach, Google's likely to treat them as different sites. For example, Google tracks 24,600 incoming links towww.mydd.com, giving the site PR 7, and 808 links tomydd.com, giving it PR 6.

The site's hosted with Apache, so ifmod_rewriteis installed, a two-line.htaccessfile in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]

To see if your site could benefit from this technique, try both of its addresses as a Google search. If the number of results is different, Google thinks you're publishing two different sites and you're losing page rank. I know this affects all Manila-published sites, because I've experienced it atBuzzwordand am abjectly begging UserLand for a fix, and other weblogging tools as well. Among the top 10 blogs onTechnorati, onlyDooceandKottke.Orgaren't giving up some rank.

And the Booker Goes To ...
There aren't many instances where I wish the American Revolution had turned out differently, but the yearly award of theBooker Prize for Fictionis one of them. Our former rulers treat an annual literary contest with the pagaentry and hype that the U.S. bestows uponSurvivorfinales and the joyous day Tom Cruise announces that he has anointed his next bride. Advantage Britain.

The Booker's such a big deal there's atell-all bookcoming out about the contest, written by departing administrator Martyn Goff:

There will be a number of stories that have not appeared ever before, including stories about judges. Yes, there will be sexual shenanigans, but that's quite minor compared to other things.

When this becomes a movie, I see Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren in the roles of the sexually rapacious literary judges, with F. Murray Abraham hiding in the closet taking pictures.

The review's on afor-pay site, but the writer Jenny Davidsonbloggedthe good parts:

It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art -- no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong -- the thing will not flow, the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right -- but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for the agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place.
Something of the kind seems to have happened here.Saturdayis a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces -- brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. -- are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however,Saturdayhas the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair -- who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, ozozing insincerity -- were to appoint a committee to produce a 'novel for our time,' the result would surely be something like this.

Meow! I do not expect to learn in Goff's book that these two are having sex.

Harriet Miers, Bush's Stealth Bomb
A letter toNational ReviewcolumnistDavid Frum:

I graduated from law school this past May, and am currently a **th Circuit law clerk. I have always been a member of the Federalist Society, and have devoted much of my recent spare time to working on several law review articles that, while on subjects esoteric to non-attorneys (such as subject matter jurisdiction priority over personal jurisdiction), remain important to the proper position of the courts in our governmental system.
I'm considering abandoning them after watching how such advocacy often turns into a negative blotch on an attorney's resume and a disqualifier for any high level judiciary or executive service ...

No conservative had the White House counsel on their short list of prospective choices, according toGeorge Willin one of the greatest insults in the history of punditry:

... there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.

Snap! You go, George!

Harriet Miers is the best thing to happen to liberals since the repeal of anti-sodomy laws. I hope she has a sister.

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.

2005-10-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

safe in sf
15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SF

MK Video Promo
Avideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"

trippy plants
Thisvideoreally tripped me out the first time I saw it.

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 19th 2005 #262
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259

From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The Netherlands

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 20th 2005 #263
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 20th 2005 #263
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 26th 2005 #267
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

2005-10-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259

From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The Netherlands

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

MK Video Promo
Avideo promofrom Mary and Karla"mmmm kaaay!"

Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1
Daily Source Code Video for Sunday October 23d 2005 #1
From Curry Condo, San Francisco California
Directlinkto the video.

I got a video iPod yesterday, subscribed to a multitude of video Podcasts. Quite interesting
My own experimentation with the platform starts with this short'cast of Curry Condo.
If you own a video iPod, it should show up automatically under Video Podcasts. Lemme know if it worked!

[Details of clip]
Recorded with an iSight on a G4 Powerbook (the new one!)
Edited in iMovie on a G5 iMac (a new one!)
Exported as'Quicktime to iPod'

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 20th 2005 #263
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 20th 2005 #263
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Adam Curry ice thinking

Adam Curry ice thinking
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

Getting ready for christmas as I rebuild my mp3 and photo collectionsfrom various saves on multiple firewire drives. I'm asked for picturesso often that I figured I'd throw this one on the blog sogooglecan pick it up.

safe in sf
15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SF

Daily Source Code for Monday October 24th 2005 #265
Daily Source Code for Monday October 24th 2005 #265
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Podsfae xmas tunes
After a discussion on the source code, a list ofpodsafe christmas musicappeared in the shownotes. These songs can be recorded or performed by anyone.

trippy plants
Thisvideoreally tripped me out the first time I saw it.

2005-10-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

2005-10-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Blackberry Users Learning Painful Lesson (AP)

AP - Chris Claypool was addicted to his BlackBerry wireless handheld. Like many users, he never thought twice about pecking away at lightning speed, replying to a wave of e-mails from clients around the globe. Last year, the 37-year-old agricultural sales director from Post Falls, Idaho, noticed a throbbing sensation in this thumbs whenever he typed.

2005-10-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

Lawmakers back U.S. control of Internet (Reuters)
Reuters - Three lawmakers in the U.S. House ofRepresentatives called on Friday for the Internet's coreinfrastructure to remain under U.S. control, echoing similarlanguage introduced in the Senate earlier this week.

Ericsson quarterly profits slightly ahead of forecasts (AFP)

AFP - Ericsson, the world's biggest supplier of mobile telecommunication systems, reported on Friday third-quarter earnings slightly ahead of forecasts, but warned that the world systems market would show only moderate growth this year and next.

RIM ruling risks US Blackberry shutdown (Reuters)

Reuters - A U.S. appeals court on Friday denied amotion to stay a patent case against Research In Motion Ltd.,bringing RIM closer to an injunction that could shut down itspopular BlackBerry email service in the United States.

Firefox Downloads Top 100 Million (PC World)
PC World - Mozilla browser continues to make headway on IE, despite some glitches.

Man Accused of Stealing Corning Secrets (AP)
AP - A former employee of a Corning Inc. glassmaking plant is charged with stealing trade secrets and selling them to a Taiwanese company.

Bertelsmann to Launch File-Sharing Service (AP)
AP - Bertelsmann AG said Friday it will launch a new service that uses the technology made popular by file-swapping businesses for legal downloads of music and movies.

2005-10-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

A story on the10th anniversaryof the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10,"it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen,"he said. It never happened.

I haven't seen much reality TV sinceMarried by Americaperfected the form, but I'd watch an alleged double murderer being sprung on unsuspecting prank victims. O.J. would be the newAllen Funt, who had to go off-camera towards the end of hisCandid Cameradays because he was scaring the hell out of people.

IfJuic'dbecame a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!

Hysteria is Contagious
An article on the 50-year effort by scientists torevive the 1918 Spanish flu virusreads like a Michael Crichton novel:

He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza.
The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918.
Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. At the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer believes it'smore of a Steven King:

We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notesNew Scientistmagazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.

Though he citesNew Scientist, Krauthammer omits a few facts from the magazine'sflu coveragethat are worth considering before completely losing your shit, as doRay Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who call this flu's published genome a"recipe for disaster."

The laws of probability suggest that if Earth sticks around long enough, scientists will eventually stumble upon a discovery that wipes out humankind and gives the rest of the universe one less thing to worry about. That's why we must colonize other planets as soon as possible. Our genes need places to store backups.

But I'm not ready to hit the panic button about the return of the killer of 1918. Most people have been exposed to milder descendants of that flu or vaccinated against them, both of which provide natural protection. Existing antiviral drugs also are likely to offer resistance.

The more pressing concern is the next pandemic flu, which hasn't been filtered through survivors and weakened by the collective might of antibodies and evolution. Learning from the publication of the Spanish flu's genome also may enable researchers to devise an effective response to the next killer flu or biological terror attack.

Besides, if hiding information from bad, bad people is Earth's best hope, we might as well max out the credit cards and stock up on beer, medicinal marijuana, and fatty foods, because we're screwed. As technologists like Kurzweil and Joy must realize, security through obscurity never works.

In a story that will not become an inspirational ESPN movie starring Gene Hackman, a Florida high school hasdropped its football programmidseason after losing its first six games by a combined score of 299-0. The Doral Academy Firebirds, who returned13 startersfrom last year's 0-11 team, still had thetoughest part of the scheduleto come. During the first six games of this season, they lost 29 out of 45 players with season-ending injuries to their pride.

This is Anna Badkhen

The most compelling stories from a newspaper reporter in Iraq are being penned byAnna Badkhen, a 29-year-old foreign correspondent for theSan Francisco Chronicle. She frequently writes stories that bring first-hand accounts from frontline soldiers home, such as her article this morning of aMarine platoon outside Sada, a town near the Syrian border that's one of five controlled by insurgents:

The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.
The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.
The second round landed closer ...

Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marinesmake their beds:

"It's like digging a grave,"he says."I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets."
"Last time we were out,"he continued,"the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."

TheChroniclethinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to theaftermath of Hurricane Katrinain New Orleans.

Badkhen, who publishes anonline journalfor the paper, described herself asanti-warin a 2003 interview. Before bias monitors make too much of that, it appears to be an apolitical expression of sympathy for civilians caught in a warzone:

I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.

Another blogger hasdiscovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that"snottier, glitzier reporters don't."

The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the nextPulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Throw the Book at Google
Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is aclear violation of copyright.

I'm not so sure.

If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call itMovable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright?

Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?

There are full-text books on the web under copyright, such asLive Simpleby John December. Google did to this book what it wants to do to library books in the real world -- it grabbed copies of all the pages and will search the text in response to aquery, presenting the relevant excerpts.

As an armchair copyright lawyer, I can't figure out how it matters that Google grabbed one book with a bot and grabbed the other with a scanner. Google grabs the full text of copyrighted works all the time --56,000on this server alone. If Google Print is illegal, wouldn't Google be illegal as well?

Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.

Losing Page Rank with Two Site URLs
I've been tracking the Google page rank of my web sites for the past year, trying to learn about effective, non-abusive techniques that improve their positions in search engines. You can really see a difference in a site's traffic when it goes up in rank.SportsFilterjumped to PR 7 in the last three months, and the site's membership is booming as a result.

A lot of publishers are losing page rank because they use two different domains -- one that begins withwwwand one that doesn't -- for the same site.

Most sites offer both forms of address to help users. For instance, you can reach the political analysis site MyDD at eithermydd.comorwww.mydd.com.

The site's hosted with Apache, so ifmod_rewriteis installed, a two-line.htaccessfile in mydd.com's root directory will redirect requests to the real address with the proper HTTP code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.mydd.com/$1 [R=301]

There may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.

A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.

A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner.
"There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."

The fishy expenditure comes from the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board, whose chairman Ben Stevens was spawned by U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens. The board received $29 million in federal funding to promote Alaskan seafood.

My Reign as the King of Pings
I've been runningWeblogs.Comsince June for Dave Winer, who wanted to see if service performance could be improved as he began to receive seven-digit inquiries about selling it.

Weblogs.Com ran onFrontierfor six years from its founding in 1999, handling the load reasonably well until the number of pings topped one million per day within the last year.

When Dave rerouted Weblogs.Com to my new server and it instantly deluged the box with more than a dozen pings per second, I felt like Lucy Ricardo pulling chocolates off the conveyer belt.

Business reporterTom Foremskiand others have suggested that the Weblogs.Com sale might reveal a lack of faith in blogging as a business.

I want to pursue these ideas, either independently or in concert with VeriSign andYahoo Blo.gs. No knock intended, but big companies tend to sit on purchases like this rather than implementing new features.Bloggerstill lacks category support two years after being purchased by Google, an omission so basic you have to wonder whether it's serious about fending off competition fromSix Apart,UserLand, andWordPress.

Everyone Who Uses Must Converge
Last March, Ashley Smith was taken hostage by Brian Nichols after he shot a judge and three other people to death escaping an Atlanta courthouse. During a seven-hour ordeal, she read to him from the Bible andThe Purpose-Driven Life. He eventually let the 27-year-old woman leave and tell the police his whereabouts, surrendering peacefully.

Wall Street Journalpundit Peggy Noonan wasdeeply movedby the incident:

Ashley Smith and Brian Nichols were together for seven hours.Thisis Nichols's mug shot.Thisis Nichols's face after he gave himself up to police Saturday.
Something changed.
Something happened. ...
It is an amazing and beautiful story. And for all its unlikeliness you know it happened as Smith said. You know she told the truth. It's funny how we all know this.

Something did happen. Smith revealed a secret in hernew memoirthat she kept from police, the press, and Peggy -- during the ordeal, she gave Nichols some of hercrystal meth:

... as the night wore on -- after Nichols had snorted some of Smith's meth -- she tried to win Nichols' trust by talking about her faith in God and relating to him her personal stories. ...
She writes that she asked Nichols if he wanted to see the danger of drugs and lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso -- the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis. She says she let go of the steering wheel when she heard a voice saying,"Let go and let God."

In the short term,crystal methbrings reduced fatigue and adeep feelingof well-being, intelligence and power. (In the long term,not so much).

Noonan found in Nichols' transformation a redemptive Easter miracle:

This is all quite a mystery, too big to be understood, too beautiful to be ignored.
I just feel like bowing to everyone, all the victims and all the survivors, the good judge, the good guards, the good woman, the reporters, all of whom became part of something big and without borders. The only lesson is love. I feel certain this is true.

Oops.

Update: Lee Siegel, a critic for theNew Republic, questioned Smith's story from the beginning, faulting the broadcast media for spinning a fable that omitted her criminal record, the circumstances of her husband's murder and the reason she lost custody of her child.

Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com
Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.

A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:

Dear Amazon member,
Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.
Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.
Please follow the link below:
[link removed]
and update your account information.
We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.
Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.
Regards,
Amazon Safety Department
NOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.

The link had the Chinese hostname www.amazon.com.encrypted-inquiry.cn, which resolves to an IP address in Germany. Yesterday, a net abuse monitor reported on Usenet that it had a different IP address in Thailand. The site looks exactly like Amazon.Com and asks for your username, password and credit card information.

Never respond to an e-mail asking for your account or credit card information, no matter how official it looks. These are always scams, run professionally by criminals who will rapidly hit your accounts for everything they can get and are unlikely to ever be caught. Most operate outside the U.S., as this globe-trotting Chinese/German/Thai effort demonstrates.

Considering the importance of ecommerce, browser users need more help detecting these scams. I could tell that the host encrypted-inquiry.cn was suspicious because I am adomain name geek, and Amazon.Com would never use a host in China for American customers. A Microsoft program manager wasnot so lucky, falling for a similar e-mail because he had just ordered from Amazon.

The server monitoring company Netcraft offers a freeInternet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox toolbarthat warns users of known phishing sites, providing hosting information about each site you visit. When I installed it this morning, it already had the Amazon scam attempt in its database,alerting menot to visit before I loaded the page.

The toolbar displaysdetailed informationabout each site, revealing where it's hosted, what company controls the IP address, and how long it has been online. Toolbar links opendetailed reportson each site.

2005-10-18T23:38:00.000-07:00

Taps for the PB
Ding dong, the [Power]Book is dead :(

Thanks to all who sent me emails with fantastic tips and other offersof help. I was able to save most of my data, bar a few photos and myroute66 install. Currently I'm running the PB off an external 30 gigfirewire drive, not too shabby. I installed using the migration optionfrom another mac. Unbelievably easy and cool. Duplicates everything,right down to your browser cookies and all prefs!

Despite the urge to dash off to the store to pick up a new PB, I'mholding off, since I think next week's Apple announcement won't be ofthe video iPod, but of a new range of professional macs...

Google Reader ~ Not bad!
Plenty of pushback on the new Google RSSReader.
At first glance it didn't look like the typical usefulRiver Of Newsthat I enjoy so much, but after a quick and effortless import of my 400 subscription opml file, I kinda got the hang of it.

I like the shortcuts, same keyboard commands used in GMail, of whichI'm a big fan. Seeing your feeds sorted by relevance of each story isan interesting experience, sorting by date shows the top level of theriver. Enclosures in audio pop up an embedded player for immediateaudio gratification.

Still fooling around with it, very promising for sure.

Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

iPod Video
If you have one of the new iPods,thismay look cool on it. I've added it to the Daily Source Code podcast feed, should work fine in iTunes as well.

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

safe in sf
15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SF

dead powerbook
Right after I recorded today's DSC my PowerBook gave up. It no longer can boot from the harddrive. Booting from the install disk to use disk utilities gives no joy, as disk utilities can't see the drive at all.

On boot up I hear the drive spinning and crunching, but it either stays greyscreen, flashes the'can't find system'icon or defaults eventually to the CD for boot.

Since I'm still usingRadio UserLandto update the podcast feed (really must change that -ed) I can't post and thus you can't get the show in iTunes or any other podcatcher software.

Any help is ofcourse greatly appreciated. Listen to DSC-255 to hear what steps I took in cleaning up the health of my drive before is hosed out...

Update: On one of my many boot attempts, I got the PB to boot from thje install disk, and am able to see the Macintosh HD volume. I decided to cp -R that entire volume to my 100GB Firewire drive before doing anything else. At least the data is now safe :)

If I can't get it fixed, I will use the Firewire drive on my other mac to post the DSC feed through Radio Userland...

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259

From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The Netherlands

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
From Curry Cottage, Guildford United Kingdom
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

2005-10-18T00:15:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
Daily Source Code for Monday October 17th 2005 #261
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

safe in sf
15:30, arrived safely at the Curry Condo in SF

Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Monday October 3d 2005 #252
Daily Source Code for Monday October 3d 2005 #252
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

changes.xml?
Cngratulations to Dave Winer on hisdealwith Verisign. Sounds like he sold weblogs.com for all the right reasons. One question I have: will thechanges.xmlfile remain available to the rest of the ping-infrastructure?

2005-10-16T04:36:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
Daily Source Code for Monday October 10th 2005 #257
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Friday October 7th 2005 #256
Daily Source Code for Friday October 7th 2005 #256

From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

2005-10-15T07:52:00.000-07:00

Its alive
22:08 Powerbook booted from the drive. iTunes opened by itself and started downloading podcasts. The entire system is responding slow, took quite a while for the CD to eject after I dragged it to the trash. I have not done anything else yet. Suggestions?

PodShow Jobcast
A short PodShowJobCast. We're hiring!

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259

From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The Netherlands

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
Daily Source Code for Friday October 14th 2005 #260
From Curry Cottage, Guildford United Kingdom
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

2005-10-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

A story on the10th anniversaryof the O.J. Simpson verdict notes his recent plans:

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the murders, he told Fox News that he was about to re-enter public life with a TV show in which he would pull practical jokes on unsuspecting victims. On a scale of one to 10,"it's 7 or 8 that it's gonna happen,"he said. It never happened.

IfJuic'dbecame a hit, think of the copycats it would spawn: Kobe Bryant runs a rape crisis hotline! Roman Polanski teaches junior high girl's soccer! John Bolton serves as U.N. ambassador!

This post onThe Corner, the weblog of contributors to the conservative magazineNational Review, sums up how the Harriet Miers pick is going over with the right wing:

I am actually hoping there are no more vacancies during this presidency.

ConfirmThemappears to be considering a name change.

$500,000 for a Flying Fish

There may be no fat left in the federal budget, if you believe the assessment of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, but there's a lot of protein and Omega 3 fatty acids.

A non-profit in Alaska led by a Republican Congressman's son spent $500,000 in federal funds to paint an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 like a salmon, according to theAnchorage Daily News.

A team of 30 painters and airbrush artists used more than 140 gallons of paint and took 24 days to render the lifelike chinook -- triple the time normally needed to coat an airliner.
"There's no question, at least in my mind, that this is the finest airline art ever conceived,"said Bill MacKay, the company's Anchorage-based senior vice president."People will just be amazed at the detail."

The mortar rounds hit in the early morning. The first one, a harbinger of the assault to come, whooshed up from the sleepy border town of Sada at around 5:30 a.m. Friday, landing in a burst of sparks several hundred yards short of the sandstone cliffs where U.S. Marines were camped out.
The shell's trajectory left a momentary orange trace in the predawn sky, but the impact was almost inaudible, and most of the Marines slept right through it, wrapped in their sleeping bags in the foxholes they had dug in the hard-packed desert dust.
The second round landed closer ...

Badkhen has a novelist's ear for dialogue, relating Thursday how desert-encamped Marinesmake their beds:

"It's like digging a grave,"he says."I'll lay in my little grave, I'll put my sleeping bag on top of me, and I'll be warm. I've found out that the deeper you dig, the warmer it gets."
"Last time we were out,"he continued,"the first day, I dug like a champion. The second day, I didn't dig deep enough, and I was cold."

TheChroniclethinks so much of Badkhen's work that it sent her from one warzone to another, assigning her to theaftermath of Hurricane Katrinain New Orleans.

I don't like wars. I think wars are bad. I see a lot of people suffer ... If one government doesn't like the other government and they go to war, or if one regime doesn't like the separatists, and they go to war, then the people who suffer are not just the government and the separatists. The people who suffer are the people in between, just people who are living their lives. I'm on their side.

Another blogger hasdiscovered Badkhen, complimenting her ability to note things that"snottier, glitzier reporters don't."

The more I read of her work, the more it feels like the nextPulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

While deleting some comment spam in theDrudge Retortdatabase, I just had to use the following MySQL query:

delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%';

Bill Bennett Races to Judgment
The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during hisnationally syndicated radio showyesterday:

... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

The belief that a particular race is more prone to criminality is often based on rates of incarceration, such as aBureau of Justice Statisticsreport that blacks have an 18.6 percent lifetime chance of being incarcerated, compared to 10 percent for Hispanics and 3.4 percent for whites.

Judging this solely on the basis of current incarceration is both extremely ugly and misleading. Other contributory factors are ignored, such as a2004 poverty ratefor blacks that's 24.7 percent, three times as high as that for whites, and the fact that minorities aresignificantly more likelyto be arrested and convicted than whites who commit the same offenses.

There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.

Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

By choosing to make this about race and single out blacks, Bennett engaged in one of the uglier examples of race baiting I've heard from a national radio host, even though he tried to qualify his thoughts by admitting they were"morally reprehensible."I hope he has the decency to offer a full apology.

Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award,defends Bennetton TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for hissuspension.

Throw the Book at Google
Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is aclear violation of copyright.

I'm not so sure.

Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?

Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.

Bill Bennett's Reproducible Error
Eugene Robinson of theWashington Postresponds to Bill Bennett'son-air musingabout blacks and abortion:

He should know enough history to understand why black Americans would react strongly when whites start imagining experiments to limit black reproduction. For hundreds of years, this country was obsessed with the supposed menace of black sexuality and fertility. Bennett's remarks have to make you wonder whether that obsession has really vanished or just been deemed off-limits in polite discourse.

Bennettquit his jobas chairman of the board of the educational curriculum company K12 this weekend, claiming to be the victim of a"coordinated campaign willfully distorting my views, my record, and my statements."

I spoke to a producer of theEd Schultzradio show yesterday who told me exactly how this vast left-wing conspiracy began. Schultz heard Bennett's show while driving, couldn't believe his ears, and asked his producer to see if Media Matters had the audio.

Media Mattersran the audio, dozens of bloggerspicked it up, and the media followed the story.

Bennett probably could have aborted this controversy with an apology, but humilitymust be missingfrom his book of virtues:

A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has. Anyone paying attention to this debate should be offended by those who have selectively quoted me, distorted my meaning, and taken out of context the dialogue I engaged in this week. Such distortions from 'leaders' of organizations and parties is a disgrace not only to the organizations and institutions they serve, but to the First Amendment.

Why do people always wrap themselves in the First Amendment when their words get them into trouble? I'm not clear on how criticizing Bennett is any less an expression of free speech than his expressed belief that blacks are more prone to criminality.

Don't Fall for Scamazon.Com
Considering the sophistication of the scam e-mails that I've been receiving lately, there must be a huge black market in phishing, the practice of tricking people into revealing their passwords from ecommerce sites and banks.

A phony Amazon.Com e-mail I received last night is pretty convincing:

Dear Amazon member,
Due to concerns we have for the safety and integrity of the Amazon community we have issued this warning.
Per the User Agreement, Section 9, we may immediately issue a warning, temporarily suspend, indefinitely suspend or terminate your membership and refuse to provide our services to you if we believe that your actions may cause financial loss or legal liability for you, our users or us. We may also take these actions if we are unable to verify or authenticate any information you provide to us.
Please follow the link below:
[link removed]
and update your account information.
We apreciate your support and understanding, as we work together to keep Amazon market a safe place to trade.
Thank you for your attention on this serious matter.
Regards,
Amazon Safety Department
NOTE: This message was sent to you by an automated e-mail system. Please don't reply to it. Amazon treats your personal information with the utmost care, and our Privacy Policy is designed to protect you and your information.

2005-10-13T14:59:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 11th 2005 #258
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 5th 2005 #254
Daily Source Code for Wednesday October 5th 2005 #254
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 6th 2005 #255
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

dead powerbook
Right after I recorded today's DSC my PowerBook gave up. It no longer can boot from the harddrive. Booting from the install disk to use disk utilities gives no joy, as disk utilities can't see the drive at all.

On boot up I hear the drive spinning and crunching, but it either stays greyscreen, flashes the'can't find system'icon or defaults eventually to the CD for boot.

Since I'm still usingRadio UserLandto update the podcast feed (really must change that -ed) I can't post and thus you can't get the show in iTunes or any other podcatcher software.

Any help is ofcourse greatly appreciated. Listen to DSC-255 to hear what steps I took in cleaning up the health of my drive before is hosed out...

If I can't get it fixed, I will use the Firewire drive on my other mac to post the DSC feed through Radio Userland...

Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
Daily Source Code for Tuesday October 4th 2005 #253
From Curry Cottage, Guildford, UK
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259
Daily Source Code for Thursday October 13th 2005 #259

From the Amstel Hotel, Amsterdam The Netherlands

DirectLinkto the show

Time-code basedShownotes

changes.xml?
Cngratulations to Dave Winer on hisdealwith Verisign. Sounds like he sold weblogs.com for all the right reasons. One question I have: will thechanges.xmlfile remain available to the rest of the ping-infrastructure?

one more thing
Heh, I waswrong!

lovin'the community shownotes
Now these are greatcommunity shownotes, with pictures and links galore!

Google Reader ~ Not bad!
Plenty of pushback on the new Google RSSReader.
At first glance it didn't look like the typical usefulRiver Of Newsthat I enjoy so much, but after a quick and effortless import of my 400 subscription opml file, I kinda got the hang of it.

I like the shortcuts, same keyboard commands used in GMail, of whichI'm a big fan. Seeing your feeds sorted by relevance of each story isan interesting experience, sorting by date shows the top level of theriver. Enclosures in audio pop up an embedded player for immediateaudio gratification.

Still fooling around with it, very promising for sure.

2005-10-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

I.T. Firms Push Next-Generation Internet (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Rollout of the next generation of Internet Protocol technology is moving ahead with Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) and Global Crossing announcing that the companies are starting to deploy IP version 6 (IPv6) systems.

In Brief: Zend Core for Oracle available (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - Oracle and Zend Technologies have announced that Zend Core for Oracle for IBM AIX, Linux, and Sun Solaris, and the beta version of Zend Core for Oracle for the Windows platform are now available.

2005-10-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

2005-10-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

2005-10-05T01:14:00.000-07:00

2005-10-04T00:44:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for Thursday September 29th 2005 #249
Daily Source Code for Thursday September 29th 2005 #249
From Curry Condo, San Francisco, California
DirectLinkto the show
Time-code basedShownotes

Shownotes Wiki
Wow, the shownotes for last night's DSC are rockin'on thewiki!

2005-10-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

2005 Readers'Choice Awards (TechWeb)
TechWeb - Are Microsoft tools popular simply because users haven't been exposed to anything else? New questions qualify the results of our annual survey on preferred suppliers. Adobe, Business Objects, Google, IBM, Oracle, SAS, SAP and, of course, Microsoft are among the winners in 39 categories.

Baidu Facing the Music Over MP3 Function (AP)
AP - Like thousands of tech-savvy young Chinese, Samuel Ying regularly checks in at Baidu.com to top-up his music collection from its links to more than 4 million MP3 files.

Google Bids to Offer WiFi in San Francisco (AP)
AP - Google Inc. wants to connect all of San Francisco to the Internet with a free wireless service, creating a springboard for the online search engine leader to leap into the telecommunications industry.

Microsoft to Build PDF Support Into Office 12 (Ziff Davis)
Ziff Davis - The software kingpin also is releasing pre-Beta 1 Office 12 bits to some of its Most Valuable Professionals.

New Bans Show China's Concerns About Tech (AP)

AP - Two new Internet bans may offer insight into the Chinese government's biggest fears. One bars Internet news services from inciting "illegal" assemblies, marches and demonstrations; the other prohibits activities on behalf of "illegal" civil groups.

2005-10-02T02:29:00.000-07:00

Internet Grows as Factor in Used-Book Business
In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books.
EDWARD WYATT

Must Go Well With Dog
My plan was to find the perfect jacket and then rush home to use the full powers of the Internet to get the right size.
MICHELLE SLATALLA

Photoshop Elements 4.0
The latest Photoshop never forgets a face. And it isn't bad at names either.
ROY FURCHGOTT

Google Bids to Help San Francisco Go Wireless
Google ended months of speculation late Friday afternoon by submitting a proposal to offer a free wireless Internet service to the city of San Francisco.
JOHN MARKOFF

Big Picture Beyond Photos
Stewart L. Cohen, chairman of the Polaroid Corporation, discusses why the company is primed to be reinvigorated, not liquidated.
CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH

2005-10-01T01:36:00.000-07:00

Bill Bennett Races to Judgment
The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during hisnationally syndicated radio showyesterday:

... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.

Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award,defends Bennetton TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for hissuspension.

2005-09-30T04:21:00.000-07:00

Is Kate Moss'Soapy'?'A Minger'? That's What Some in Britain Say
For years, consumers have generally approved of the"Kate Moss look."Or so it would seem.
TOM ZELLER JR.

Army Investigates Photos of Iraqi War Dead on Web
The Army is investigating whether troops have sent gruesome pictures of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where soldiers were given free access to pornography.
THOM SHANKER

How Microsoft and Palm Got Together Over Software
Microsoft's truce with Palm, its longtime rival in palmtop software, was forged with a rare agreement to allow Palm to tinker with the Windows Mobile software.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

Defragmenting to the Finish
I cannot defragment my hard drive because the Disk Defragmenter program never finishes. What can I do?
J.D. BIERSDORFER

At Cellphone Show, the Talk Is About Music
The hot topic among mobile phone executives gathered in San Francisco for a cellphone trade show is the push to transform handsets into portable music players.
MATT RICHTEL

TicTalk
This cellphone is for children, but has lots of parental control.
WARREN BUCKLEITNER

If Parks Offer Free Internet, Why Can't Costly Hotels?
Business travelers are getting fed up with being charged$9.95 or more in an expensive hotel for broadband Internet service.
JOE SHARKEY

2005-09-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Is Kate Moss'Soapy'?'A Minger'? That's What Some in Britain Say
For years, consumers have generally approved of the"Kate Moss look."Or so it would seem.
TOM ZELLER JR.

DVD Fight Intensifies: Microsoft and Intel to Back Toshiba Format
Microsoft and Intel are throwing their full weight behind one side in the long-running battle over the format for the next generation of high-definition DVD's.
KEN BELSON

How Microsoft and Palm Got Together Over Software
Microsoft's truce with Palm, its longtime rival in palmtop software, was forged with a rare agreement to allow Palm to tinker with the Windows Mobile software.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

Internet Grows as Factor in Used-Book Business
In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books.
EDWARD WYATT

If Parks Offer Free Internet, Why Can't Costly Hotels?
Business travelers are getting fed up with being charged$9.95 or more in an expensive hotel for broadband Internet service.
JOE SHARKEY

2005-09-28T06:40:00.000-07:00

New Sun Software to Work With Microsoft
Sun Microsystems is hoping to steal market share from Microsoft with the release of a new version of its business software, StarOffice.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

Pride in a Vintage Cellphone
The proud owner of a five-year-old cellphone realizes it's hard to avoid buying new gear that will download faster, sync better or just do more.
M.P. DUNLEAVEY

Yahoo Signs On Business Writers
Yahoo has hired nine financial writers to supply columns on topics including personal finance, investments and economics.
BLOOMBERG NEWS

Why Time Warner Has Fallen in Love With AOL, Again
America Online is not merely alive but healthy, having taken a terrifying but necessary step: making nearly all of its content available free online.
RANDALL STROSS

Is Kate Moss'Soapy'?'A Minger'? That's What Some in Britain Say
For years, consumers have generally approved of the"Kate Moss look."Or so it would seem.
TOM ZELLER JR.

It's Not TV, It's Yahoo
Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo's media operation, aims to build the studio of the future.
SAUL HANSELL

Aha!Video Straight to a Computer
JVC has tiny, reasonably priced camcorders that contain iPod-type miniature hard drives. Did JVC have one of those"Aha!"moments that propels society forward?

Army Investigates Photos of Iraqi War Dead on Web
The Army is investigating whether troops have sent gruesome pictures of Iraqi war dead to an Internet site where soldiers were given free access to pornography.
THOM SHANKER

Fewer Clicks but More Follow-Through
DoubleClick announced that consumers opened direct-marketing e-mails less often, but were more likely to buy if they opened such messages.
ALEX MINDLIN

MTV to Use Warner Videos
MTV Networks said that it would license the Warner Music Group's music video catalog to create programming for mobile phones worldwide.
REUTERS

2005-09-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

2005-09-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

2005-09-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

Aha!Video Straight to a Computer
JVC has tiny, reasonably priced camcorders that contain iPod-type miniature hard drives. Did JVC have one of those"Aha!"moments that propels society forward?

Avidly Seeking Wireless Clues From Google
Google keeps marching beyond Internet searching into new markets. Where next? The most intriguing recent guess is free wireless Internet service.
STEVE LOHR

To Find a Doctor, Mine the Data
Many people are using the Web to comparison-shop online for hospitals and doctors.
MILT FREUDENHEIM

2005-09-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

European Commission Shortens Time That Phone and Internet Records Must Be Kept
The European Commission will require telephone network operators and Internet service providers to keep records of phone calls and Internet traffic for a shorter amount of time.
KEVIN J. O'BRIEN,International Herald Tribune

2005-09-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

CEO: Oracle to Slow Shopping Spree for Now (AP)

AP - Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison said Wednesday the business software maker probably won't make another major acquisition for at least another year to give the company ample time to assemble all the pieces snapped up during a recent $18 billion shopping spree.

Open-Source Success Roiling Software Field (Investor's Business Daily)
Investor's Business Daily - You probably paid too much for the software you're using -- not to mention the software company you've invested in.

Opera Makes Its Browser Free, With No Ads (AP)
AP - Opera Software ASA is now giving away its Web browser and removing ads in an effort to broaden its user base and capture revenues by referring traffic to search engines and e-commerce sites.

Dell Launches Flash-Memory Music Player (AP)
AP - Dell Inc., the world's largest direct computer seller, on Tuesday launched a new flash-memory digital music player designed to compete with the iPod Shuffle.

Tool Aims to Ease Academic File-Sharing (AP)
AP - Researchers at Penn State and other universities have developed a tool to more easily share or search for large academic files— using the principles most associated with trading music and movies illegally.

2005-09-20T21:33:00.000-07:00

Doctors Join to Promote Electronic Record Keeping
A program intends to help make modern information technology accessible to small-scale doctors'offices across the country.
MILT FREUDENHEIM

2005-09-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

2005-09-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Macworld Expo Boston cancelled (MacCentral)
MacCentral - IDG World Expo on Friday said that have cancelled Macworld Expo Boston and will insteadfocus their efforts on a single conference and expo in San Francisco. Theevent, which has been a mainstay of East Coast conferences for almost 20years, has been axed just twoyears after returning to Boston from New York City.

IBM jumps into ESB camp with SOA rollout (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - IBM has jumped on the bandwagon. In a comprehensive SOA products-and-services push last week, Big Blue joined a list of companies offering products labeled as ESB (enterprise service bus).

Top 10 DVD Rentals -- Week Ended September 11 (Reuters)
Reuters -"Crash"was the leading DVD rentaltitle in the United States for the week ended September 11,according to Rentrak Corp., which collects retail data for theindustry.

BEA seeks open source accommodation (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - At face value, it might appear that BEA Systems has its work cut out for it competing with free, open source alternatives to its own commercially available WebLogic Server application server platform.

Google to Put Copyright Laws to the Test (AP)
AP - Tony Sanfilippo is of two minds when it comes to Google Inc.'s ambitious program to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet.

Gartner: VoIP Security Uncertain in EBay/Skype Deal (TechWeb)
TechWeb - In another twist on the eBay/Skype deal, a research firm cautions big businesses should steer clear of the combined companies'technology. The problem: lackluster VoIP security.

IBM preps'BI-lite'productivity app (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - IBM next month plans to release a new software product designed to bring business intelligence-style data views to the masses. The goal is to make it easier for workers to transform business objectives into accomplished tasks that align with an organization's larger strategy.

Survey: Broadband Prices Up, DSL Down (AP)
AP - The price gap between cable broadband service and phone carriers'digital subscriber lines widened to an all-time high in August, according to a survey by SG Cowen.

Internet Oversight Board OKs New Domains (AP)
AP - The Internet's key oversight agency approved a domain name for the Catalan language Thursday while deferring final action on creating a red-light district on the Internet through a".xxx"suffix.

Database Seeks to Lower Firefighter Deaths (AP)

AP - It's a scene that plays out in firehouses every day: Firefighters return from a blaze or rescue call and talk about a close call that could have injured orkilled someone. The International Association of Fire Chiefs wants firefighters nationwide to learn from such stories through the National Fire Fighter Near-Miss Reporting System.

2005-09-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

Henri Bergius has incorporated code from myWeblog Pinger Library for PHPinto theMidgard Content Management System.

This represents a Sally Field moment for me, the first time that any code I've written has made its way into another project thanks to an open source license. I'm going to celebrate my increased geek cred by buyingsomething like this.

Senate Testimony Signifying Nothing

Andrew Hyman, a conservative attorney who has been promotingJohn Robertsvigorously since his selection by President Bush,abandoned the judgein response to his answers during the first day of the confirmation hearings:

It now appears very possible to me that President Bush has nominated a pro-Roe vote in place of an anti-Roe vote. It appears from this morning's testimony -- and I could be wrong about this -- that Judge Roberts will probably affirm the so-called right to obtain an abortion all the way up until viability, even though 72% of women in the United States have consistently said that abortion should generally be illegal months before viability.

Read the entire discussion, one of the most fascinating I've found on the Roberts hearings, and you'll find that conservatives have no more idea than liberals what we're getting for the next 30 years. With a voice as soothing as an NPR host, Roberts has shown that he's expert on constitutional law, quick-witted, and intelligent enough to give the American public absolutely no clue as to his judicial philosophy.

He's alsoextremely personable. After hearing his encyclopedically vague answers for three days, I like Roberts so much I resent myself for wanting to know anything about him.

Throughout the hearings, Roberts has relied often on the rationale that he can't provide his opinion on matters that might be revisited by the court. He even used it to avoid discussingBush v. Gore, a case in which the Supreme Court explicitly stated it was not setting a precedent. Here's theexchangeabout the case with Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl:

KOHL: I asked you what your opinion of that decision was at that time.
ROBERTS: Well, that's an area where I've not been -- I've not felt free to comment whether or not I agree with particular decisions or...
KOHL: Well, it's not likely to come up again.
ROBERTS: Well, I do think that the issue about the propriety of Supreme Court review in matters of disputed electoral contests, it is a matter that could come up again. Obviously, the particular perimeters in that case won't, but it is a very recent precedent.
And that type of a decision is one where I thought it inappropriate to comment on whether I think they were correct or not.

If the nationno longer expects candorfrom Supreme Court justices, the Judiciary Committee should adopt the format ofWhat's My Line?, with blindfolded senators asking a series of yes-no questions of the nominee to determine his identity. The winner could receive afederal highwaynamed in his honor and three ethical violations to be named later.

2005-09-17T03:47:00.000-07:00

Oracle to Pay$5.85 Billion for Siebel
Oracle, the giant database-software maker, announced on Monday that it would pay$5.85 billion to acquire Siebel Systems.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

2005-09-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

Time Warner, Microsoft in talks on AOL - source (Reuters)
Reuters - Time Warner Inc. and Microsoft Corp.are discussing ways they could combine their Internet assets,including the possibility of an investment by the softwaregiant, sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

Analysts: iPod nano solidifies Apple's dominance (MacCentral)
MacCentral - When Apple Computer released the iPod nanojust over a week ago, replacing the popular iPod mini, they effectivelysolidified their place of dominance in the MP3 player market. While thecompany has released no official sales numbers, industry analysts have beenclosely watching the progress of the device.

Nintendo controller steals limelight from Microsoft's new Xbox (AFP)

AFP - Nintendo trumped its rivals at the start of an industry show by revealing a one-handed remote controller that stole attention from Microsoft's new Xbox games machine, which was demonstrated in public for the first time.

Seagate Acquires Mirra (PC World)
PC World - Hard drive leader will operate personal server maker as subsidiary.

2005-09-15T07:17:00.000-07:00

Review: Apple IPod Nano Packs Big Punch (AP)

AP - Ever since Apple Computer Inc. jumped into the music player business with the original iPod in 2001, the rest of the consumer electronics industry has been playing catch-up. So far, nobody has come close in terms of coolness or sales.

Microsoft Targets Workflow Apps (PC World)
PC World - New engine supports enterprise applications by managing documents throughout Office.

Security Patch Watch: Apple Plugs Mac OS X Java Holes (Ziff Davis)
Ziff Davis - Security vulnerabilities are patched in Apple's Mac OS X, the Sun Java System Application Server and Cisco's Linksys WRT54G router.

Time Warner, Microsoft in talks on AOL-NY Post (Reuters)
Reuters - Time Warner Inc. and Microsoft Corp.are in advanced talks over Microsoft buying a stake in TimeWarner's America Online unit, the New York Post reported onThursday.

New Google Search Engine Boosts'Blogging'(AP)
AP - A new Google Inc. specialty search engine sifts through the Internet's millions of frequently updated personal journals, a long-anticipated development expected to help propel"blogging"into the cultural mainstream.

Mozilla Issues Workaround for'Critical'Firefox Vulnerability (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Following the public disclosure of a Firefox security flaw, the Mozilla Foundation has issued a temporary patch and workaround instructions for all versions of the Internet browser.

Edward C. Baig: Personal Tech - Headphones do double duty (USATODAY.com)
USATODAY.com - Next month, Plantronics will start selling a wireless Bluetooth stereo headset that promises to let you press a button to switch from listening to music, watching movies or playing video games to take an incoming cell phone call.

Nokia Wades Into Crowded Blackberry Market (AP)

AP - Nokia Corp. is joining a suddenly crowded field of BlackBerry rivals, becoming the first major cell phone maker to weigh into the mobile e-mail market with its own brand and service.

Xbox 360 to Launch in U.S. Nov. 22 (AP)

AP - The next version of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox game console will be available in the United States two days before Thanksgiving, in time for the important holiday shopping season, the company said Wednesday.

2005-09-13T06:25:00.000-07:00

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superuser
TheDetroit Free TimescoversMichael Barnett, the network admin barricaded in downtown New Orleans who's been publishing a post-hurricane journal calledThe Interdictor.

Barnett, an unabashed libertarian with a military background, has covered the disaster with his blog and streaming webcam while remaining online, which is both a journalistic and technological feat. To my knowledge, his connection never went down.

Last night, some of the troops stationed in the cityfound them:

Sometime around midnight, a squad of 82nd Airborne guys accompanied by a US Marshall busted into our Data Center with their M4-A1s to investigate the lights and movement. Personally, I know they were just bored -- there's no way they honestly thought there was some kind of threat up here just yards away from several huge military and police presences.

Police Trapped Thousands in New Orleans
As the situation grew steadily worse in New Orleans last week, you might have wondered why people didn't just leave on foot. The Louisiana Superdome isless than two milesfrom a bridge that leads over the Mississippi River out of the city.

The answer: Any crowd that tried to do so was met by suburban police, some of whom fired guns to disperse the group and seized their water.

Around 500 people stuck in downtown New Orleans after the storm banded together for self-preservation, making sure the oldest and youngest among them were taken care of before looking after their own needs.

Two San Francisco paramedics who were staying in the French Quarter for a convention have written afirst-hand accountthat describes their appalling treatment at the hands of Louisiana police, a story confirmed today by theSan Francisco Chronicle,UPI, andSt. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When buses charted by the group to escape New Orleans never showed up, they camped out beside a police command center on Canal Street, believing it was the best place to get aid, protection, and information. They were told they could not stay there and should leave the city on foot over Highway 90, whichcrosses the Mississippi Riverfrom New Orleans to the suburb of Gretna, a city of 17,500 people.

Running out of food and water, they walked to the bridge, growing in number to around 800 people as word spread of a safe way out:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across thefoot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firingtheir weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in variousdirections. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward andmanaged to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of ourconversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. Thesheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us toget us to move.
We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as therewas little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank wasnot going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in theirCity.

In an interview with UPI, Gretna Police Chief Arthur Lawson confirmed that his department shut down the bridge to pedestrians:"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

The increasingly desperate group set up camp on the New Orleans side of the bridge, where they were seen by several media outlets, until they were chased off at gunpoint by Gretna police:

Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refugein an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hidingfrom possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding fromthe police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-killpolicies.

The paramedics believe that race played a factor in the decision to block evacuees on foot. Gretna's population is 56 percent white and 36 percent black, according to the2000 U.S. Census.

A columnist for theOrlando Sentinelponders the political impact of having so many New Orleans-area voters living in other states, perhaps permanently.

Even while carrying the state in 2004, Bush lost Orleans Parish by almost 110,000 votes out of fewer than 200,000 cast. Without Orleans Parish, Landrieu would not be in the Senate, and Blanco's election could have been very, very close.

2005-09-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

Buy.com says to undercut Amazon.com's prices on books (Reuters)
Reuters - Online retailer Buy.com said on Mondayit would undercut its bigger rival Amazon.com, offering booksat 10 percent below the Amazon.com price for the rest of theyear.

My ROKR doesn't rock (MacCentral)
MacCentral - It was a pretty exciting week in San Francisco as Apple unveiled the iPodnano and the MotorolaROKR (a.k.a the iTunes phone). The nano has been an incredible deviceand worked exactly as you would expect it to— unfortunately, Ican’t say the same for the ROKR.

"IPhone"could be music to Apple's ears (Reuters)
Reuters - With the help of Motorola Inc.,Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs finallymade good last week on his pledge to deliver a cellular phonethat plays music like an iPod, Apple's wildly successfuldigital music player.

2005-09-11T01:55:00.000-07:00

A columnist for theOrlando Sentinelponders the political impact of having so many New Orleans-area voters living in other states, perhaps permanently.

Even while carrying the state in 2004, Bush lost Orleans Parish by almost 110,000 votes out of fewer than 200,000 cast. Without Orleans Parish, Landrieu would not be in the Senate, and Blanco's election could have been very, very close.

Tropical Storm Ophelia ishanging outoff Florida's east coast, awaiting further orders from God. Yesterday's projected path was due west across Florida into the Gulf of Mexico. Today it's predicted towiggle towards South Carolina, butJeff Mastersbelieves it will head northeast for a few days, do-se-do, alaman right, and come back to the U.S.:

After heading east for a few days, all the models except the GFS agree that Ophelia will eventually loop back and hit the U.S. as a hurricane, perhaps even a major hurricane, seven or more days from now. The GFS takes Ophelia out to sea, but the latest NHC discussion notes that the GFS performed poorly in a similar situation withHurricane Jeannelast year, and is probably on the wrong page this time around, too.

2005-09-10T02:44:00.000-07:00

Apple Launches New iTunes Phone and iPod (AP)

AP - Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs introduced a long-anticipated music-playing cell phone on Wednesday and surprised the faithful with a new pencil-thin iPod.

PalmSource Stock Price Skyrockets (AP)
AP - Shares of PalmSource Inc., maker of the Palm operating system for handheld computers, surged 78 percent on Friday on news that the Japanese software company Access Co. had agreed to pay$324 million for it.

Marine Corps Unveils High-Tech Humvee (AP)
AP - The Marine Corps on Thursday unveiled new Humvee-mounted technology to allow troops in the field to communicate with each other, their commanders, and even headquarters hundreds of miles away— all while driving over 30 miles per hour.

2005-09-09T00:43:00.000-07:00

Podcast Complex Stool

Podcast Complex Stool
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

Here it is in it's full glory. The Podcast Complex Stool. More pictureson the flickr pages. It's fantastic! Made today's show much better :)

Podsafe Music Network Terms updated
As announced onyesterday'sDaily Source Code, we've changed the podcastertermson thePodSafe Music Network. This is a great example of how the web works; it started with aposton Boing Boing and was followed by a host ofpile-jumpers. Although a personal email would have been preferred, it certainly got my attention.

After reviewing the terms and feedback we decided to change the termsto more suitable language. Everyone seems happy with them, and we'realways open to suggestions.

civilian pilots help refused
Americas Amber Alert News Center:"Ex Military Pilots with civilian experience with their own expenses and aircraft have been refused airspace. Every effort yesterday to get into bring food and water were refused."

Daily Source Code for Tuesday August 30th 2005 #231
Daily Source Code for Tuesday August 30th 2005 #231

▼ Daily Source Code for Tuesday August 30th 2005 #231

 From Curry Cottage, Guildford, United Kingdom

 DirectLinkto the show

 Shownotes FullOutline

 ShowNotes inOPML

 Hurricane not as bad as expected?

 MTV Awards

 Mashup: Hollaback Girls Feel Good - Arty Fufkin [Site]

▶ Driving music sales through podcasting

▶ MP3 Licensing

▶ The New Shownotes

 Promo: Mac Gab [Site]

 Promo: KZFO Micronational Radio [Site]

▶ BioDiesl Cont...

▶ Teenagers cont.

 Mashup: Imagine This - Wax Audio [Site]

 Promo: Yeast Radio[Site]

▼ Feedback PodcastCon UK [Site]

 Via The Tartan Podccast [Site]

▶ Happy Birthday email

▶ Lybia, Syria?

▶ PodSafe: Cruisebox - Heard it on a Podcast [Site]

 Hit Test #53 [Site]

sllloooowwww
I'm in the hotel, my makeshift studio is all set up. I just finishedsome Sirius shows, but the hotel connectivity is really slow. PerhapsI'll do DSC tonite, hit the upload and go to bed...

2005-09-08T01:08:00.000-07:00

IBM Ships Lotus Notes/Domino 7 (PC World)
PC World - New version of collaboration platform moves closer to a blend with IBM's Workplace.

TI eyes video markets with all-in-one chip (Reuters)
Reuters - Texas Instruments Inc. isusing the strategy that made it the world's biggest mobilephone circuit supplier to try to dominate the faster growingvideo market, the company said late on Wednesday.

Macromedia makes streaming media push (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - Macromedia will raise the stakes in streaming media software Thursday with a product that eliminates the need for a supplemental application server for tracking content.

USA Today's Top 25 U.S. Bestsellers (Reuters)
Reuters - The top 25 U.S.bestsellers, based on sales through Sunday, September 4, asreported by USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com).

2005-09-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

Microsoft Files Appeal Against EU Ruling (AP)

AP - Microsoft Corp. has filed a second appeal against a European Union ruling ordering it to share code with software rivals, the European Court of Justice said Wednesday.

2005-09-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

Led Into Temptation? Who Wasn't?
Before he became the embodiment of Wall Street wrongdoing during the Internet bubble, Henry Blodget wanted to be a writer. And now he is doing exactly that.

Australian Court Rules Kazaa Has Violated Copyrights
An Australian court ruled on Monday that the file-sharing network Kazaa violated music copyrights and ordered the company to modify its software to help prevent it.
WAYNE ARNOLD

When Your PC Is on the Fritz, Who You Gonna Call?
I was having commitment problems. Not with a relationship. This was more serious - this was with my computer.
ALINA TUGEND

Why the Internet Isn't the Death of the Post Office
Even in this age of technology many Americans still look forward to discovering what each day's mail might hold.
JAMES FALLOWS

A Major Backfire in Japan Deflates Vodafone's One-Size-Fits-All Strategy
Service problems, a botched rollout of its third-generation phone network and a skimpy lineup of new handsets have driven away Vodafone's Japanese customers in droves.
MARTIN FACKLER and KEN BELSON

A'Weather Nerd'in Indiana Sent a Warning to the Mayor
A 23-year-old with no formal meteorological training has drawn widespread praise for his hurricane blog, which urged New Orleans residents to leave the city two days before the mayor issued an evacuation order.
ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

Paper or Online? Many Bank Customers Still Pick the Old Way
While millions of consumers swear by the simplicity of online banking, millions of others - often older and wealthy - are holding out.
ERIC DASH

When Corporate Relatives Play Hardball
A longtime relationship between Nextel Partners and Nextel is at loggerheads, and Wall Street is stoking the fire.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

2005-09-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

More Parents Going High-Tech to Track Kids (AP)
AP - In this case, it isn't Big Brother who's watching— it's Big Mother (or Father). Increasingly, parents are using high-tech methods to track everything from where their children are and how far they are driving to what they buy, what they eat and whether they've shown up for class.

Skype and Tom Online create Chinese joint venture (Reuters)
Reuters - Free Internet telephone software providerSkype has formed a joint venture with China-focused Internetportal Tom Online, in a bid to boost its subscriber base in thefast-growing Asian market.

Online Advertisers Turning to Pay-Per-Call (AP)
AP - Personal-injury lawyer Frank Frasier wants the world to know about his business but didn't think much of the search-based Internet advertising that's all the rage these days. Potential clients wouldn't learn much about him through it, he figured, and he really can't tell if they have a case without speaking with them directly.

British Music Retailers Begin Digital War (AP)
AP - In a clear sign the digital music revolution is here to stay, Britain's major music retailers are going head-to-head for a slice of the burgeoning— and potentially very lucrative— Internet downloading market.

Wireless carriers back in N. Orleans (Reuters)

Reuters - A number of wireless carriers saidthis weekend they are starting to restore service in the NewOrleans area in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in somecases with generators on the roofs of hotels.

Donations Pour in for Katrina Relief (AP)

AP - Americans are responding to Hurricane Katrina with a massive outpouring of giving, at times overwhelming call centers and computer servers set up by charities to field donations.

Court rules against Kazaa (Reuters)

Reuters - An Australian court ruled on Monday thatusers of the popular Internet file-sharing network Kazaa werebreaching copyright, and ordered its owners to modify thesoftware to prevent online music piracy.

Firms Offer Technology for Katrina Effort (AP)

AP - High-tech companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are offering money, equipment and expertise to help with the recovery effort and reconnect survivors in areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

Aussie Court: Kazaa File-Swapping Illegal (AP)

AP - A federal court ruled Monday that the popular file-swapping program Kazaa infringes on copyright and gave its purveyors two months to alter the system so its users can no longer engage in music piracy.

Operating Systems as Content Pushers (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Call it the widget revolution. Mac OS X, Windows and Linux all have widgets for pulling in available content from small software houses and other sources around the Internet.

2005-09-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

Apple Is Accused of Violating Software Patent
Creative Technology, a maker of portable music players, has accused Apple Computer of violating a software patent covering the way users navigate music selections.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

Billion-Dollar Baby Dot-Coms? Uh-Oh, Not Again
Some are pointing to the recent deal for Facebook, an online service popular with the college set, as proof that inflation is back in the venture world.
GARY RIVLIN

2005-09-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

2005-09-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Loved Ones Turn to Web for Searches in Flood Zone
People desperate for word from sons, daughters, parents or friends are turning to a different kind of lamppost.
MICHAEL WILSON

Apple Is Accused of Violating Software Patent
Creative Technology, a maker of portable music players, has accused Apple Computer of violating a software patent covering the way users navigate music selections.
LAURIE J. FLYNN

Hitachi to Introduce Tiny Drive
In the race to make ever-smaller disk drives for hand-held consumer appliances, Hitachi will announce that it has created the smallest drive on the market.
DAMON DARLIN

Google Dips Into the World of Print Advertising
Google is buying ad space in magazines and filling it with half a dozen ads from clients of its vast online system.
SAUL HANSELL

But, Ma, I Saw It on'The O.C.'
The new season of the Fox melodrama"The O.C."is days away, but teenagers needn't wait to shop a new line of bohemian Southern California fashions inspired by that hit show.
STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

2005-09-01T18:31:00.000-07:00

Verizon Wireless Cuts Price in Promotion
Verizon Wireless has cut the price of high-speed wireless service for laptop computer users by 25 percent in a promotion aimed at winning more customers.
REUTERS

First the Sticker Shock, Then On to the Shock Jock
The Sirius S50 allows users to store up to 50 hours of Sirius programming or a mix of radio shows and regular MP3 song files.
ANDREW ZIPERN

Missed Church? Download It to Your IPod.
Just as Christian organizations embraced radio and television, podcasting has quickly caught on with religious groups offering spiritual recordings.
TANIA RALLI

Sprint Nextel Buys Affiliates to Ease Conflicts
Sprint Nextel will buy two small wireless affiliates, resolving legal issues arising from Sprint's purchase of Nextel Communications.
REUTERS

Garage Rock Meets Garage Critics
Anybody who has a voice strong enough to stand out on the Web can have a real impact on the media business.

Britain to Ban Violent Sexual Images on Internet
The British government has announced plans to ban the downloading and possession of violent sexual images.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

New Era of Ticket Resales: Online and Aboveboard
Ticket scalpers have not been able to shake their reputation as hustlers, but with America Online joining them, can legitimacy be far behind?
BOB TEDESCHI

But, Ma, I Saw It on'The O.C.'
The new season of the Fox melodrama"The O.C."is days away, but teenagers needn't wait to shop a new line of bohemian Southern California fashions inspired by that hit show.
STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

2005-08-31T16:09:00.000-07:00

Flooding Stops Presses and Broadcasts, So Journalists Turn to the Web
With their offices and presses flooded, news media outlets in New Orleans mostly abandoned newsprint and television and set up shop online.
STEVE LOHR and FELICIA R. LEE

Britain to Ban Violent Sexual Images on Internet
The British government has announced plans to ban the downloading and possession of violent sexual images.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Early Look at Research Project to Re-engineer the Internet
The National Science Foundation is planning an effort to create a network more suited to the computerized world of the next decade.
JOHN MARKOFF

What Makes You Safer in a Crash May Pose Risks in the Rescue
Firefighters, paramedics and others who are among the first to respond to accidents are asking automakers for help in coping with the unexpected consequences of new safety equipment.
TIM MORAN

Do You MySpace?
Created in the fall of 2003, MySpace quickly caught on with millions of young adults as a place to maintain their home pages.
ALEX WILLIAMS

An IPod Cellphone Said to Be Imminent
Apple Computer and Motorola plan to unveil a long-awaited mobile phone and music player next week that will incorporate Apple's iTunes software.
MATT RICHTEL

The Claim: Violent Video Games Make Young People Aggressive
Studies generally show that violent video games can have short-term effects on children, but there is little evidence of long-term changes.
ANAHAD O'CONNOR

Garage Rock Meets Garage Critics
Anybody who has a voice strong enough to stand out on the Web can have a real impact on the media business.

Sprint Nextel Buys Affiliates to Ease Conflicts
Sprint Nextel will buy two small wireless affiliates, resolving legal issues arising from Sprint's purchase of Nextel Communications.
REUTERS

2005-08-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

home again
11am, arrived safely in the UK. It's good to be home!

Daily Source Code for August 25th 2005 #228

Daily Source Code for August 25th 2005 #228

From Curry Cottage, GuildfordUK
DirectLinkto the Show
Mashup: Toxic Shack - Jalad via[Site]
Promo:
The new Podcast Complex is operational!
JC Penney is starting too look sucky
Promo: The Bobby Bucket Show [Site]
Promo: Knightcast [Site]
The Zedcast [Site]
Jennifer Helane's brother'sSite
More GPS GPX Google Maps/Earth Geek Stuff

Are you a windows mobile developer?

Geepster

Mymost recentflight
Our USATrip

Promo: Shakespear upon iPod [Site]
Promo: Podcast Shuffle [Site]
Podsafe: Matthew Ebel - Sally went down [Site]
Promos are important!

submit[at]podshow.com

ID3 Tags are important!

PodsafeMusicNetwork [Site]

bloom on the geek
Ron Bloom isinterviewedon the Rock'n Roll Geek Show

Podshow Funding press release
I realized I hadn't yet posted the news about our funding. For therecord.

2005-08-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Katrina: 'Do Not Call 911'
LiveJournal business managerMark Kraftis gathering information for Gulf Coast residents bracing for Hurricane Katrina, collecting reports from several LiveJournal diarists who are fleeing or preparing to ride out the storm.

Kraft passes along agrim predictionfrom meteorologist Jeff Masters:

I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70 percent. This scenario, which has been discussed extensively in literature I have read, could result in a death toll in the thousands, since many people will be unable or unwilling to get out of the city. I recommend that if you are trapped in New Orleans tomorrow, that you wear a life jacket and a helmet if you have them. High rise buildings may offer good refuge, but Katrina has the potential to knock down a high-rise building.

The4 p.m. National Weather Service warningfor New Orleans was equally foreboding:

Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks ... perhaps longer. At least one half of well constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail ... leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.
The majority of industrial buildings will become non functional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rising apartments will be destroyed. Concrete block low rise apartments will sustain major damage ... including some wall and roof failure.
High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously ... a few to the point of total collapse.

Government officials did their best to scare the hell out of residents all Sunday morning, hoping they'd leave by any means possible. One told holdouts to make sure they had a hammer or some other tool that's strong enough to break through an attic roof."You don't want to drown in there when the water comes,"he said.

Several parishes in Louisiana have closed emergency services, giving their residents a discordant bit of advice: Do not call 911.

RSS 3.0: Please Pass the Fork
Jonathan Avidan has announcedRSS 3.0, a one-man attempt to forkRSS 2.0.

As far as I can tell, this is Avidan's first involvement in syndication. He's passing over three groups -- the developers of RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom -- without making an attempt to work with any of us.

RSS 3.0 is pitched as a better-specified version of RSS 2.0, but it drops a bunch of elements and makes changes to several others, so it's more than a spec rewrite.

Avidan also claims it willmake Atom better, which would be a neat trick, since that format just became aproposed Internet standardafter an arduous, two-year development process. I'm guessing that its creators would burst into tears at the slightest mention of a second version.

I don't know why RSS offers more forks than a picnic, but I wish I could use theRSS Advisory Boardto simplify the situation. A new person trying to figure out syndication shouldn't have to learn three formats just to make an educated decision about which one to support. Correction: Four formats.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda thought RSS 3.0 wasfront-page newsyesterday, which gives me hope. I've been working on an incredible new format I call HTML 5.0.

Syndication is Still Simple
Every time RSS comes up for discussion, someone links to Mark Pilgrim'smisleading articleabout the version history of RSS, making acommentlike this:

RSS with its 9 [diveintomark.org] +1 [rss3.org] incompatible versions is hardly a standard for anything. It is a huge pain for a implementer to decide which versions to support.

There are only two significant versions of RSS:RSS 1.0andRSS 2.0. These formats have one major technical difference that prevents their merger: RSS 1.0 makes use ofRDF, a standard for data exchange, and RSS 2.0 does not, favoring a slightly simpler approach.

There's only one significant version of Atom:Atom 1.0, which recently became a proposed standard of theIETF.

The other seven versions of RSS identified by Pilgrim are older versions of either 1.0 or 2.0.

An implementor of syndication publishing software can support RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom 1.0 and ignore their older versions. All three formats are stable, and code that produces RSS can easily be adapted to produce Atom 1.0. I added Atom support to an RSS-feed PHP script in a half-hour.

Bloggers Run From Hurricane Katrina
Looking around New Orleans withGeoURL, I've yet to find a blogger sticking around for Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans TV station WWL is in24-hour hurricane news mode, which is incredibly unnerving to experience, as I learned in Palm Coast, Florida, during Hurricane Floyd. A direct hit of a category 4 storm would cause Old Testament flooding in New Orleans, which averageseight feet below sea leveland survives only because of levees. Residents have lived for years in dread of a storm that would demonstrate why this is terrible engineering, turning the city intoAtlantis:

New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers this was the wrong place to build a city. It is wedged precariously between the mighty Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and most of it was once swampland. Aggravating the problem is the fact that much of New Orleans is below sea level, so that after a good rain, the water just settles in. There is now a decent pumping system, which helps. Old-timers, however, still talk of the days when, after a bad storm, bodies washed out of the cemeteries.

Jeffrey Masters, a meteorologist who was on a plane that nearlycrashed in the eye of Hurricane Hugo, is covering the storm for Weather Underground:

A stretch of coast 170 miles long will experience hurricane force winds, given the current radius of hurricane force winds around the storm. A direct hit on New Orleans in this best-case scenario may still be enough to flood the city, resulting in heavy loss of life and $30 billion or more in damage.

The closest blogger who's sticking around appears to be T.C. Byrd, providing updates on the storm's approach fromHattiesburg, Mississippi:

On the Coast, if you are not following the mandatory evacuations, they are coming around and making you sign a waiver stating your vital stats and that the city can dispose of your body. There's already some flooding. Katrina ain't playing.

Update: An episode of Nova on PBS described New Orleans'nightmare scenario.

Fixing a Pending Urchin Task
I check web stats withUrchin 5.6, a server log reporting program that'savailablefor Windows, Linux, MacOS, and other systems.

Urchin does the job reasonably well, but at least once a month the program's scheduler gets stuck reading a site's log, hanging forever as a"pending"or"running"task.

I found the solution to the problem on anUrchin support page: Stop the scheduler, use theuconf-driverutility program to set several values that reset the stuck site, then restart the scheduler.

Update: Spoke too soon. I also had to open the Storage/DB configuration tab for the profile, delete all data associated with it, and delete its server logs for recent days. Something in the database or the log caused the pending problem to come back each time I ran Urchin.

Casting a Dark Horse as the Sixth 007
James Bond producers are searching for a new actor to play the role afterdumping Pierce Brosnanthis week.

Media favorites for the next 007 include Hugh Jackman, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, and Clive Owen. I imagine they'll pick someone from this demographic: Top-of-the-marquee actors under 40 from the U.K. or Australia who can handle a black-tie dress code.

British bookmakers have Owen as a4/5 favorite, but some of their other choices are so odd you have to wonder at the collective intelligence of the gamblers placing the bets. Goren Visjnic?

As someone who became bored with the Bond movies around the time Timothy Dalton took over, I'd love to see them do something bold with the franchise, casting a black actor in the role.

A color-blind casting call opens up some interesting possibilities. Black actors can lead blockbuster action movies, as proven repeatedly by Will Smith, but he was born in the wrong country to be considered for the role. An American Bond would go over as well as an AmericanRobin Hood.

Brosnan's choice for successor is reportedlyColin Salmon, the actor who played MI6 operative Charles Robinson in the last three Bond films.

2005-08-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

2005-08-27T20:04:00.000-07:00

A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion
A new doll with speech-recognition, memory chips, radio frequency tags, scanners and facial robotics will test the appeal of high-tech toys marketed to girls.
MICHEL MARRIOTT

Google Gets Better. What's Up With That?
Google announced a new version of Google Desktop Search and a free instant-messaging program, called Google Talk. How good are they?

Drones Will Be Used to Help Fight Wildfires
Firefighters are planning for a new ally in fighting wildfires, a remote-controlled spy plane that does not mind smoke and can see in the dark.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

2005-08-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

Eugene Volokh Considers Gay Sex
Yesterday, UCLA law professorEugene Volokhthrust into the public debate a very long post of turgid prose which rams the argument down our throats thatgays are converting people:

If you persuade someone to become a vegetarian, you can be said to have converted him to vegetarianism. He's still biologically an omnivore, but his practices are now different. Likewise, changing someone from (a) being an orientational bisexual who engages solely in heterosexual relationships to (b) someone who is an orientational bisexual who engages solely in homosexual relationships, or to (c) someone who is bisexual both by orientation and practice strikes me as quite rightly called a"conversion."

I am too juvenile a person not to snicker about Volokh's comparison between eating meat and sexuality.

Volokh, a former computer programmer who became a UCLA freshman at age 12 and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, is like the anti-John Roberts.

Unlike Roberts, who has been taking the fifth his entire adulthood, Volokh makes regular practice of sharing controversial opinions like this bizarre riff on homosexual conversion, which values a Humpty Dumpty-like fixity of the definition of the word"conversion"over the anti-gay persecution that results from the irrational fear of gay recruitment.

His contrarian outspokenness is a great trait for bloggers (or Internet trolls), but will forever disqualify him from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Pimping Your Pagerank for Profit
The tech blogger Phil Ringnalda istaking heatover criticizing O'Reilly about some questionable link ads on the company's web sites. Tim O'Reilly posted athoughtful responsethat shows he's not entirely comfortable with selling ads that trade on a site's Google pagerank, rather than visitor eyeballs.

This is a good discussion for web publishers to be having, because the practice ofpimping pagerankis becoming more pervasive. I've received numerous offers to put such links onSportsFilter, a booming sports weblog that recently received a pagerank of 7, but I've ignored them. Most seek to promote junk sites for mortgage refinancing, phentermine, and the like -- the same kind of shady marketers who are hammering my servers with comment spam -- and I don't want to damage the site's well-earned good reputation.

There's also the risk of linking to a site that Google demotes to pagerank 0, which some pagerank kremlinologists believe will adversely affect your own pagerank.

In response to Ringnalda,Andy Baio askswhether he should have discussed his concerns privately:

Did you try to contact anyone at O'Reilly before posting this? It would've taken very little effort to get a response from them before you released the rest of the world on them. Like Anil said,"the blog world likes nothing more than a good old-fashioned pile-on."

I received a similarchallengeto mypost on Bram Cohen, coincidentally from Anil Dash.

I think Baio and Dash are being excessively reasonable. A personal weblog's a place to think out loud. You can't let fear of being wrong or fear of how others might respond stop you from voicing an honest criticism. If I was afraid of looking stupid, I'd never leave the house.

Nobody likes being called out in public -- just look at how fast O'Reilly responded to Ringnalda. But this is a strength of blogging, not a weakness.

USA Todayis running acover storyonPatrick Cobbs and Jamario Thomasof the University of North Texas Mean Green, the NCAA-leading rushers in 2003 and 2004.

They'll become the first season leaders to ever share the same backfield when my alma mater loses by several touchdowns to LSU on Sept. 3.

2005-08-25T18:55:00.000-07:00

Text messaging taps youth (USATODAY.com)
USATODAY.com - Parents wringing their hands over their teens'incessant cell phone use should chill - they might be interacting with authors. Publishers are plugging into the technology to promote books for the teen girl audience. Teens who sign up get cell messages from the author and text messages about the books.

Apple Plans New Flash-Based iPod Mini (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - With plans to introduce a new version of the iPod Mini, Apple Computer (Nasdaq: AAPL) will buy 40 percent of Samsung's flash-memory output.

2005-08-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

If you persuade someone to become a vegetarian, you can be said to have converted him to vegetarianism. He's still biologically an omnivore, but his practices are now different. Likewise, changing someone from (a) being an orientational bisexual who engages solely in heterosexual relationships to (b) someone who is an orientational bisexual who engages solely in homosexual relationships, or to (c) someone who is bisexual both by orientation and practice strikes me as quite rightly called a"conversion."

I am too juvenile a person not to snicker about Volokh's comparison between eating meat and sexuality.

Volokh, a former computer programmer who became a UCLA freshman at age 12 and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, is like the anti-John Roberts.

His contrarian outspokenness is a great trait for bloggers (or Internet trolls), but will forever disqualify him from consideration for the Supreme Court.

Buzzword.Com Runs Manila 9.5
I've upgraded toManila 9.5onBuzzword.Com, the free weblog service I'm running for Manila and Radio UserLand users.

The server's having problems staying online lately, to the chagrin of Craig Jensen ofBookNotesand other bloggers trying to publish there.

I think the problems are caused by the huge number of weblogs on the server -- somewhere around 5,000 at the moment. I'm going to move every weblog that hasn't been updated in 2005 out of Manila, which should leave fewer than 500 sites on Frontier.

Casting a Dark Horse as the Sixth 007
James Bond producers are searching for a new actor to play the role afterdumping Pierce Brosnanthis week.

British bookmakers have Owen as a4/5 favorite, but some of their other choices are so odd you have to wonder at the collective intelligence of the gamblers placing the bets. Goren Visjnic?

As someone who became bored with the Bond movies around the time Timothy Dalton took over, I'd love to see them do something bold with the franchise, casting a black actor in the role.

Brosnan's choice for successor is reportedlyColin Salmon, the actor who played MI6 operative Charles Robinson in the last three Bond films.

My pick: Idris Elba, the 32-year-old actor who playedStringer BellonThe Wire. Born in London to parents from Ghana and Sierre Leone, Elba was incredible in an odd role -- an erudite Baltimore drug dealer trying to turn dirty money into clean businesses -- and he wears a suit like he was born in one.

Air America Addresses Loan Issue
TheNew York Timesreported today on thequestionable loansthat Air America Radio's former director Evan Cohen gave to the network from a New York children's charity.

A spokesman for the charity told theTimesthat Air America has placed $875,000 in escrow as part of a repayment agreement. Al Franken addressed the subject in detail on his program earlier this week.

This should take the wind out of the sails of the conservative bloggers who have been riding this story for weeks, inflating its importance with grandiose names like"Air Enron."But a quote fromBrian Maloney's analysis of Franken's programshows they plan to keep right on rowing:

The Radio Equalizer analyzed this audio in great detail.
After repeated listening ... the laughter seems nervous in nature, coming at odd times. It's used to cover up the particularly touchy aspects of this, toward the end.

This isn't the first time that Maloney's finely tuned hearing has picked up the sound of a conspiracy. In 2004, when his weekly Sunday afternoon radio show wascancelledby Seattle station KIRO because of Seahawks coverage, he claimed the real reason was his on-air criticism of Dan Rather.

RSS 3.0: Please Pass the Fork
Jonathan Avidan has announcedRSS 3.0, a one-man attempt to forkRSS 2.0.

RSS 3.0 is pitched as a better-specified version of RSS 2.0, but it drops a bunch of elements and makes changes to several others, so it's more than a spec rewrite.

Slashdot founder Rob Malda thought RSS 3.0 wasfront-page newsyesterday, which gives me hope. I've been working on an incredible new format I call HTML 5.0.

Turn Your AM Dial to the Left
I'm putting together a talk radio station lineup, in case I win the lottery and can bring liberal radio to Jacksonville. North Florida could use the variety -- I live within listening range of three stations that carry Rush Limbaugh live. I can only assume that the right wingers in this area are concerned that one or two stations might lose their towers to a hurricane or nuclear attack, so they've build some redundancies into the system.

My rules: All hosts have to air live, should run in their entirety, and be a liberal alternative to the conservatives hogging AM radio. Here's what I've got so far:

5 a.m. to 6 a.m.:Rachel Maddow
10 a.m. to Noon:Diane Rehm
Noon to 3 p.m.:Al Franken
3 p.m. to 6 p.m.:Ed Schultz
10 p.m. to 1 a.m.: TheAlan Colmes

I don't know what to do with 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., or 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. Air America offers Jerry Springer in the morning, but I think I'd prefer three hours of dead air, and I've yet to hear a broadcast of Janeane Garofalo and Sam Seder's evening show that I liked. I may try again this evening to hear guestDuncan Blackraise some hell.

There's nothing on in the middle of the night but George Noory, the creepy successor to Art Bell. Maybe I'll just broadcast live audio of Al Franken sleeping.

In the early '90s I was an editor ofStarText, the pre-web online edition of theFort Worth Star-Telegram.

One of the most popular features I introduced on StarText wasgoodnews, a keyword where readers were always guaranteed to find a non-depressing news story.

A wire story today reminded me of that keyword -- a400-foot tall waterfallhas been discovered in a northern California recreational area:

Until recently, very few had seen the roaring water that tumbles three tiers before pouring neatly into Crystal Creek. That such a spectacle should evade even park officials for nearly 40 years is remarkable, said park superintendent Jim Milestone.
"It wasn't on a map, no one on the trail crew knew about it. People who been here 27 years had never seen it,"said Milestone, who is leading an effort to clear a trail to the newly named Whiskeytown Falls.

USA Todayis running acover storyonPatrick Cobbs and Jamario Thomasof the University of North Texas Mean Green, the NCAA-leading rushers in 2003 and 2004.

They'll become the first season leaders to ever share the same backfield when my alma mater loses by several touchdowns to LSU on Sept. 3.

Redirecting Sites off a Manila Server
A fewBuzzword.Comusers set up weblogs on other servers during theextended downtimethis month. Ralf resumed his German- and English-language weblog Moorbek on anew sitethat runs the Antville weblog software, keeping theold versionaround until he can move the data over, and Julian Harris is now publishingJulian on SoftwarewithWordPress.

Manila can easily redirect weblogs to a new address on another server: All I have to do is edit a line in theconfig.mainresponder.domainstable.

The primary disadvantage to moving is that Manila implements a redirect with an HTTP status code of"302 found,"which could indicate a temporary move, rather than"301 moved permanently."A site's Google pagerank isn't transferred with a 302 redirect. I'm hoping that UserLand updates Manila to address this issue.

If you had an old weblog on Buzzword and it's now published elsewhere, let me know and I'll redirect visitors to your new site.

2005-08-23T18:38:00.000-07:00

Casting a Dark Horse as the Sixth 007
James Bond producers are searching for a new actor to play the role afterdumping Pierce Brosnanthis week.

British bookmakers have Owen as a4/5 favorite, but some of their other choices are so odd you have to wonder at the collective intelligence of the gamblers placing the bets. Goren Visjnic?

As someone who became bored with the Bond movies around the time Timothy Dalton took over, I'd love to see them do something bold with the franchise, casting a black actor in the role.

Brosnan's choice for successor is reportedlyColin Salmon, the actor who played MI6 operative Charles Robinson in the last three Bond films.

My pick: Idris Elba, the 32-year-old actor who playedStringer BellonThe Wire. Born in London to parents from Ghana and Sierre Leone, Elba was incredible in an odd role -- an erudite Baltimore drug dealer trying to turn dirty money into clean businesses -- and he wears a suit like he was born in one.

Never Wrestle with a Pig
One of my friends is looking for archived versions of Rush Limbaugh's show from the years he was abusing Oxycontin. He figures there has to be comedy gold in the shows where Limbaugh was pontificating under the influence.

Earlier this week, Limbaugh made a statement about Cindy Sheehan that's so bizarre we should be talking relapse:

Cindy Sheehan is just Bill Burkett. Her story is nothing more than forged documents. There's nothing about it that's real, including the mainstream media's glomming onto it. It's not real.

He subsequently denied calling her a liar, in audio thatRachel Maddowgleefully broadcast on her Air America show this morning (two-minute clip attached). Jerry Springer broadcast it also, Media Matters isdoing the same, and Al Franken will undoubtedly air the same clip at noon.

Liberals spend a lot of time debunking false statements by over-the-top conservatives like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, and I sometimes worry that we're just making them stronger. Anyone who cares already knows that they have an estranged relationship with the truth.

Whenever someone on television angrily denounces Coulter, she visibly brightens. Check out herreaction to Alan Colmeson Crooks&Liars. It's theSeinfelddirty-talking episode all over again, prior to the point where Jerry kills the mood by asking,"you mean the panties your mother laid out for you?"

The laboriously detailed corrections that Franken devotes to Limbaugh remind me of the days when I would get into flamewars onUsenet. I can recall spending hours drafting a point-by-point rebuttal to someone's post, believing that the information I had gathered, coupled with the strength of my reasoning, would prove to everyone that my antagonist was a total stupidhead who sucks big rocks.

Eugene Volokh Considers Gay Sex
Yesterday, UCLA law professorEugene Volokhthrust into the public debate a very long post of turgid prose which rams the argument down our throats thatgays are converting people:

If you persuade someone to become a vegetarian, you can be said to have converted him to vegetarianism. He's still biologically an omnivore, but his practices are now different. Likewise, changing someone from (a) being an orientational bisexual who engages solely in heterosexual relationships to (b) someone who is an orientational bisexual who engages solely in homosexual relationships, or to (c) someone who is bisexual both by orientation and practice strikes me as quite rightly called a"conversion."

I am too juvenile a person not to snicker about Volokh's comparison between eating meat and sexuality.

Volokh, a former computer programmer who became a UCLA freshman at age 12 and clerked for Sandra Day O'Connor, is like the anti-John Roberts.

His contrarian outspokenness is a great trait for bloggers (or Internet trolls), but will forever disqualify him from consideration for the Supreme Court.

AOL's web site redesign includesBlogZone, a blog digest similar to theDaou Reporton Salon.Com.

I found it because of the traffic it's sending to theCindy Sheehan interviewbroadcast by Alan Colmes.

2005-08-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

2005-08-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for August 13th 2005 #222

From Berkeley California
Reposted due to dns problems that dropped the enclosure
Directlinkto file
Today marks the first anniversary of my Podcast.

We celebrate as we are almost recovered from the flu and in SF

flu in ny
Both Patricia and I have been wheezing, coughing and aching for the past 48 hours.

I'm rarely ill, but when I catch a bug, I really have a melt-down. This sucks.

My Podcast Table
Aflickr-setof the construction of my Podcast Table

home again
11am, arrived safely in the UK. It's good to be home!

bloom on the geek
Ron Bloom isinterviewedon the Rock'n Roll Geek Show

PMN is kicking ass
Whiletheyare still bickering, we are kicking ass. We don't need yer stankin'transmitters or music. We gotour own!

in ny

We arrived safely in NY last night, flight was great, although I do appear to have some kind of flu-bug. Typical. I recorded most of the trip on the GPS, though it was hard getting a signal in the plane until we reached altitude. I’ll probably release the gpx file sometime today for you to play with in Google Earth or Google Maps.

It’s great to be back in this city with my bride of 18 years. We started our life together in Manhattan, and still feel very much New Yorkers. We took a stroll last night before bed, on a mission to find flu-medicine really, but it was perfect. The heat had dissapaited, folks were standing outside talking, smoking and drinking. There’s no place in the world like it. Prime for a sound-seeing tour, with gpx data.

Daily Source Code for August 8th 2005 #221

From New York City
Directlinkto file
The Curry's poke their heads above the covers for an update from their vacation
Christina is very 15 in this episode :)

prepping 222
Sitting here in our suite prepping the 1 year anniversary DSC while listening to a brand newDigital Flotsam, which rocks as always.

2005-08-20T11:28:00.000-07:00

Diversification Helped Spammer Make Money (AP)
AP - Christopher Smith's neighbors didn't know exactly what he did for a living. But they knew well that he liked to collect expensive cars and set off fireworks at all hours.

Microsoft Working to Fix Browser Flaw (AP)

AP - Microsoft Corp. was working Friday to come up with a fix for a flaw in its Internet Explorer browser that could let hackers gain remote access to computer systems through malicious Web sites.

Security Firm: Oracle Opatch Leaves Firms Uncovered (Ziff Davis)
Ziff Davis - A security company reports that users may find that their Oracle database servers are not as well protected and compliant with regulations as they believe.

Google Techs, Entrepreneurs Match Wits (AP)

AP - Free-flowing beer, live music, karaoke and arcade games kept the party raging at the Googleplex the other night, but the real action was unfolding inside a sterile conference room at Google Inc.'s headquarters.

Apple Extends iMac Warranty To Handle Video, Power Problems (TechWeb)
TechWeb - Apple Computer is extending the warranty of its first-run iMac G5 desktop computers for a full year because of ongoing power and video problems.

EMC Acquires NAS Virtualization Specialist Rainfinity (TechWeb)
TechWeb - EMC has acquired Rainfinity, whose technology delivers read/write access to Windows, Linux and Unix-based files.

Reports: Nokia Nixes Exclusive Deal For Apple (TechWeb)
TechWeb - The cell phone firm indicates it will not forge exclusive arrangements with any online music store including Apple.

File-Sharing Continues at Colleges (AP)
AP - As a college freshman, Will Mount feasted on the free but mostly illegal music available through online file-sharing software such as Kazaa. Now a senior, Mount has seen his free music fix become legal, thanks to an initiative by American University in Washington, D.C., to dissuade students from using its computer network to illegally swap music online.

2005-08-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

2005-08-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

Comics Escape a Paper Box, and Electronic Questions Pop Out
If it's on the Web and takes advantage of digital technology, is it still a comic?
SARAH BOXER

Lions Gate Is Expected to Support Blu-ray Discs
Lions Gate Home Entertainment is expected to announce that it plans to produce next-generation digital video discs using Blu-ray technology developed by Sony and others.
KEN BELSON

Even in Vain, Swatting Spammers Feels Good
For every spammer who is sued into submission, legions of spam rings generate billions of spam messages every year. That is why some people say filters are a better way to fight spam.
TOM ZELLER Jr.

Scientists Find a Touch of Sophistication in the Genes of a Simple Sponge
Marine sponges, long considered some of the most primitive creatures on the planet, carry a sophisticated gene that in other animals controls the growth of eyes, brains and the central nervous system.
JON NORDHEIMER

At Hewlett-Packard, Quarterly Revenues Rise Almost Across the Board
Hewlett-Packard continued its turnaround in the third quarter, with the giant computer and printer maker announcing that its revenue rose 10 percent.
GARY RIVLIN

A.M.D.-I.B.M. Agreement
Advanced Micro Devices and I.B.M. have broadened a three-year-old technology development agreement to cover new research areas and have extended it through 2011.
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Play'I Spy'From Anywhere With a Home Network Camera
Protective parents and budding Big Brothers may find a use for the Hawking HNC230G Wireless-G network camera, which enables remote monitoring of a room from anywhere in the world.
ANDREW ZIPERN

When Companies Adopt Online Booking, Are Their Jobs Necessary?
Many dot-coms selling leisure travel are moving to grab a piece of the$91 billion market for managed business travel.
CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT

Putting Jesus in Every Mailbox
The movie"Jesus"is viewed by many evangelical Christians as a singularly modern tool for spreading the Gospel.
SHAILA DEWAN

2005-08-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

In Brief: First companies pass SAML 2.0 interoperability testing (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - The Liberty Alliance Project announced that products from eight companies have completed testing at Liberty's recent interoperability conformance event hosted by the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization (IEEE-ISTO). The event marked the first time Liberty has tested for SAML 2.0 interoperability. The organizations demonstrated interoperability of products that incorporate Liberty's Identity Web Services (1.1) and SAML 2.0 OASIS Standards specifications. Passing marks for SAML 2.0 interoperability were awarded to the Electronics& Telecommunications Research Institute, Ericsson, Novell, Oracle, Reactivity, Sun Microsystems, Symlabs, and Trustgenix. A list of all products and services that have passed testing procedures is available at http://projectliberty.org/activities/conformant_products.php.

Internet body postpones decision on sex domain (Reuters)

Reuters - The group that oversees Internetdomain names said on Wednesday it had postponed a decision toset up a special .xxx domain for sex sites that has drawnopposition from conservative activists.

Apple, Microsoft Duel Over IPod Patent (AP)

AP - Given the intense rivalry between Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corp., this recent revelation had a comedic tinge: Apple took too long to file a patent on part of its blockbuster iPod music players, so Microsoft beat Apple to it.

Rival hacker groups spreading worm using Windows flaw (AFP)

AFP - Rival hacker groups were spreading variants of a new computer worm exploiting a flaw in the Windows 2000 operating system, with networks of several media organizations already hit, experts said.

2005-08-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Copy-protection gear sneaks into products (USATODAY.com)
USATODAY.com - Controversial copy-protection technology is quietly being added to e-books, CDs, DVDs and other products. This fall, students can buy electronic textbooks. Once students download a book, software permits them just one back-up copy - and causes the books to expire after a year or more.

Nintendo cuts price of DS video game device (Reuters)

Reuters - Nintendo Co. Ltd. (7974.OS) on Tuesdaysaid it cut the U.S. price of its Nintendo DS portable videogame device by 13 percent to about $130 from about $150.

Kodak Lead Grows in Digital-Camera Market (AP)

AP - Eastman Kodak Co. is stretching its lead over Japanese rivals Canon Inc. and SonyCorp. in the U.S. digital-camera market.

Shopping maul: lions for sale on the Internet (AFP)

AFP - Lions are doing a roaring trade, with baboons, giraffes, zebras and chimps also on sale on the Internet, a report said.

McAfee Boosts Wi-Fi Security (PC World)
PC World - New software is designed to ease security setup on home wireless networks.

Apple, Microsoft Duel Over iPod Patent (AP)

The State's Long Apron Strings (BusinessWeek Online)
BusinessWeek Online - The age of the Chinese multinational is upon us. Companies few Westerners had heard of two years ago now make the headlines almost every day. TCL Corp., a Chinese consumer-electronics manufacturer, controls the venerable RCA brand. Lenovo Group Ltd., China's No. 1 computer maker, owns IBM's PC business. Haier, a white-goods maker, roiled the waters with its ultimately failed bid for Maytag Corp. CNOOC Ltd. riled Washington before withdrawing its$18.5 billion offer for Unocal Corp. ...

Amazon.com Unveils Photo-Mapping Service (AP)
AP - Hoping to become a more popular Internet destination, a small search engine owned by Web retailer Amazon.com Inc. is testing a mapping service that will display street-level photos of the city blocks surrounding a requested address.

Study: Dell customer rating plunges, Apple leads pack (MacCentral)
MacCentral - U.S. consumers lambasted Dell Inc. for poor customer service in a surveyconducted last quarter, sending the world’s largest PC vendor into avirtual tie with the rest of the PC market behind the industry-leadingefforts of Apple.

Feds Urge Delay in'.xxx'Domain for Porn (AP)
AP - Acknowledging"unprecedented"opposition, the U.S. government has asked the Internet's key oversight agency to delay approval of a new".xxx"domain name designed as a virtual red-light district.

2005-08-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

A Look Ahead at HDTV, Shot by You
Sony has released the smallest high-definition video camera yet - and at$1,750 or less, the least expensive.

Luxuries Online, and They're Real
Some luxury goods companies have begun to certify preowned fashion and accessories for resale on secondary markets.
ERIC WILSON

A Search to Replace an Old Amigo
You no longer need to go to Mexico to buy a guayabera shirt. The style flourishes on the Internet like some kind of rash.
MICHELLE SLATALLA

Electronica From the 1920's, Ready for Sampling
It is easy to see the theremin as a relic caught in an evolutionary time warp: at best a curiosity, at worst a kind of monstrosity with a hideous sound.
MICHAEL BECKERMAN

To Buy a Mac or Wait for Intel
Q. I want to buy a new iMac now, but was wondering if I should wait until the new Intel-based versions appear. Is there any reason to wait?
J.D. BIERSDORFER

2005-08-13T08:44:00.000-07:00

ClickCommerce Updates Supply-Chain Suite (NewsFactor)
NewsFactor - Supply-chain software vendor ClickCommerce announced the availability of version 5.0 of its supply-chain-management suite, called Tradestream. The upgrade includes predictive event-management functions along with multitier process-coordination tools.

Computer Theft Case Shows Database Perils (AP)

AP - On the hunt for a hacker two years ago, security officials at data management company Acxiom Corp. discovered that an Internet address at one of its clients' contractors was taking far more data than it should have.

Digital service BurnLounge makes anyone a retailer (Reuters)
Reuters - Startup digital music companyBurnLounge wants to democratize the music retail business.

IBM, Smart Tags Helping Toyota Customize Its Cars (Investor's Business Daily)
Investor's Business Daily - The company is using radio frequency identification transmitters, also known as smart tags, to help the automaker add custom accessories to its vehicles.

TiVo Tests Internet Download Service (AP)
AP - Add TiVo Inc. to the list of companies trying to wed the Internet to television. The digital recording company will soon allow customers to download TV shows to their set-top boxes via the Internet— even before the shows air on TV.

Pirated Version of Mac OS for PCs Available (PC World)
PC World - An unauthorized version of Mac OS X for Intel or AMD-powered PCs is floating around the Net.

German Firm Eyes U.S. Linux Server Market (TechWeb)
TechWeb - Collax, a German company with new venture capital to back its Linux server technology, is planning to expand in the U.S.

Sprint, Nextel Complete$35 Billion Merger (AP)

AP - Sprint Corp.'s long awaited takeover of Nextel Communications Corp. was completed Friday, with executives from the wireless leaders now preparing for the unified company's introduction to some 40 million customers.

Huge Computer-Theft Case Gets Conviction (AP)

AP - A Florida man was convicted Friday of stealing information from data-management company Acxiom Corp. in what prosecutors said was the largest federal computer theft trial ever.

2005-08-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

2005-08-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

An Hour with Cindy Sheehan
Matt Drudge ran anewsflashtoday on Cindy Sheehan, the military mom whose 24-year-old son's death in Iraq spurred her to protest the war.

Sheehan made international news last week when shevisited Crawford, Texaswith members ofGold Star Families for Peace. She wanted to ask him"why did my son die?"

In June, Alan Colmes interviewed Sheehan on his syndicated radio show, which I've enclosed as a 50-minute podcast. She takes several calls from irate members of the public, including an incredible exchange with a mother who supports the war.

This morning, Drudge ran excerpts of a 2004 interview she gave her local newspaper, cherry-picking quotes that made her sound effusive in praise for the president after her son's April 2004 death.

The full story, which wasbrought back onlinetoday, contains a quote omitted by Drudge that makes her feelings more clear:

"We haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled,"Cindy said."The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached."

All Cheer the SuperJews
Jerry Springer has a fill-in host on Air America Radio, a Colorado talk show host namedJay Marvinwho's vastly more listenable than the mumbly panderer.

Today, a caller told Marvin about a bit of sports trivia that floored me: A European soccer team goes by the monicker"the Jews,"which inspires some horrible taunts by rival fans.

I dug up the details for a post today onSportsFilter:

Cheering on the SuperJewsWonder what it would be like if a sports team used a Jewish mascot? For years, fans of Ajax Amsterdam, Holland's most popular football team, havecalled themselvessuper-Joden(super Jews), wearing Star of David tattoos and flying Israeli flags at matches, but not because of their religion -- the team's home pitch is nearAmsterdam's Jewish neighborhood. Says one Holocaust survivor:"When other teams' supporters chant 'Hamas, Hamas, the Jews to the gas', the Ajax fans are not hurt, because they're not real Jews. But my family was murdered in the gas chambers, so I am very insulted.'"

Finding Latoyia Figueroa
Latoyia Figueroa, a 24-year-old woman five months' pregnant with her second child,disappeared in PhiladelphiaJuly 18. She has a seven-year-old daughter and never missed a shift at the restaurant where she worked, so her loved ones are fearing the worst.

The Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley has offered a $10,000 reward for information about her whereabouts.

Richard Blair, a Philly blogger, is trying to get her case on the same television news programs that have covered Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, and the Runaway Bride. He's already managed to attract the attention of CNN.Com, based on coverage Figueroa has received on blogs, and has been invited by several networks to talk about the blog angle:

Latoyia's story has moved from CNN to MSNBC and Fox this evening. So it's getting some exposure. Still nothing on Nancy Grace. I've been answering email and on the phone all evening, so I apologize in advance for not having a whole lot more to offer today. Just to give you an idea, I've turned down on-air interview requests now from all"big three"cable news nets, as well as ABC'sGood Morning America. This isn't about how we collectively pushed Latoyia's story out there (yet, anyway) -- it's about finding a missing young pregnant woman who needs to be found.

Figueroa's an unlikely subject for round-the-clock treatment, for reasons you might have surmised. Wrong color, wrong class, wrong background. Sadly, she lost her own mother at age 2 to aviolent death.

Blair's desire to make the broadcast media address the substance of this story, rather than covering the novelty of the blogosphere's outrage-motivated adoption of a missing person, may greatly limit the exposure he could have gotten for her disappearance.

Speaking from personal experience, there's an extremely short window of time in which the national media cares about a no-name blogger's unusual media hack. Thursday may be the last day he gets any invites; no one outside of the fruit fly family has a shorter attention span than TV news producers.

2005-08-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

NEMA to Google Maps
There will be plenty of GPS talk on Monday's Source Code, I got a blue-tooth unit and have been playing with it all day. There’s a lot of possibilities for Sound Seeing Tours and I’m wondering if anyone knows of a web service that takes a file of NMEA data and creates a map through the Google Maps API.

Daily Source Code for July 27th 2005 #215

Daily Source Code for July 27th 2005 #215

Shownotes:

From Curry Cottage, UK
Directlinkto the show
The JetLagged edition
Podsafe: Cruisebox - Tell the FCC to stick it [Site]
Still loving the Virgin Atlantic service
TSA jacked my lock!
Still liking the MDA, although I need to reset a lot still
Biddiecast [Site]
Promo: American Cliche [Site]
Promo: You Are The Guest [Site]
Vacation plans
Rock'n Roll Geek Show with Tim Farris from INXS [Site]
Mashup: Big Ruckus - It takes a new sensation [Site]
Backtracks Podcast #4 [Site]
Cinecst reviews Willy Wonka [Site]
Promo: Tom Corven (a podcast novel) [Site]
Promo: Portland Jazz Jams [Site]
Hit Test #50 from Jan Polet [Site]

metropolitan

1.jpg
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

Nowthisis a SF view!

PMN is kicking ass
Whiletheyare still bickering, we are kicking ass. We don't need yer stankin'transmitters or music. We gotour own!

2005-08-09T01:41:00.000-07:00

An Hour with Cindy Sheehan
Matt Drudge ran anewsflashtoday on Cindy Sheehan, the military mom whose 24-year-old son's death in Iraq spurred her to protest the war.

Sheehan made international news last week when shevisited Crawford, Texaswith members ofGold Star Families for Peace. She wanted to ask him"why did my son die?"

This morning, Drudge ran excerpts of a 2004 interview she gave her local newspaper, cherry-picking quotes that made her sound effusive in praise for the president after her son's April 2004 death.

The full story, which wasbrought back onlinetoday, contains a quote omitted by Drudge that makes her feelings more clear:

"We haven't been happy with the way the war has been handled,"Cindy said."The president has changed his reasons for being over there every time a reason is proven false or an objective reached."

The Planet, the parent company of the ServerMatrix hosting company I'm using for my servers, is having acontest for female entrepreneurswho have a good idea for an online business. A winner will receive free web hosting for a year, $10,000, and other support:

Women with a great idea for an online business are encouraged to submit a brief proposal to equeen@theplanet.com. Contestants will be narrowed to five and Mark Cuban will select the final two during a live broadcast mid-August.
The two finalists will be charged with preparing their online business in just five days. The Planet will assist finalists with designing and hosting their websites, and set-up of merchant accounts and a database management system. Contestants will receive on-air mentions and promotions of their business on Kidd Kraddick in the Morning. At the end of seven days, the contestant with the most successful business will win the contest and prizes. The winner will be announced at the end of August.

Markos Moultisas ofDaily Kosis atraitor to this country, according to evidence uncovered on RedState about comedian Margaret Cho's dog:

A minor point, naming one's dog after a terrorist, and lauding those who do? Yes. But a helpful reminder nonetheless of a phrase worth remembering: they're not antiwar -- just on the other side.

Don't tell anyone, but I named a dog afterMolly Ivins.

With the impending release of Atom 1.0, its creators are taking the unusual step ofdisowning version 0.3, which has been widely implemented by Google, Six Apart, and other developers. Sam Ruby will revise theFeed Validatorto reject all 0.3 feeds with an error message later this year, even if they fully followed its spec.

Mark Pilgrim on themove:

Atom 0.3 was just some guys (and gals) dicking around on a wiki.

Mark Pilgrim during therelease of version 0.3:

Atom 0.3 is out. Mark Nottingham wrote the 0.3 spec. I wrote a Movable Type template. Rael Dornfest wrote a Blosxom plugin. I am now publishing a live 0.3 feed with both excerpts and full content. ... I've updated the Feed Validator to validate Atom 0.3 feeds. ... When developers update their applications to support Atom 0.3, they should support Atom autodiscovery too.

Catching Up with the Five of Hearts
I've begun readingHow America Lost Iraq, a book by Aaron Glantz, a war correspondent for the liberal Pacifica radio network.

Glantz's premise is that the Iraqi people were extremely receptive to the U.S. after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, but their support has been lost because of the imprisonment of innocent people, an inability to restore basic services like water and electricity, and widespread anarchy.

The first chapter takes satisfaction in the downfall ofHuda Amash, a Saddam loyalist who was the five of hearts on the U.S. most-wanted card deck and the highest ranking woman in Iraq. She was arrested in Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in custody, where she's reportedly suffering from breast cancer.

One of Glantz's friends, a documentary filmmaker, described how she ran a youth conference he was permitted to attend:

"Under her guidance,"James [Longley] explained,"the conference was turned into a series of Stalinist rallies for the Great Leader. Attendance was mandatory. In the great hall of the convention palace children's choirs competed with dancing Japanese peace activists while odes to Saddam were screamed out in fake spontaneous outbursts from the crowd. A large number of doves were released in the hall and flew madly around the edges of the room, searching frantically for a way out. I sympathized with them entirely."

Today'sWashington Postincludes acommentaryfrom a childhood friend of Amash, who grew up in D.C., asking for her release.

Her friend reveals an unusual aspect of Amash's background -- she was in the inner circle of the man who ordered her father's death:

The family soon returned to Iraq, and we lost all contact with them. Maj. Ammash's career prospered; he rose to be defense minister. In 1981, however, Saddam Hussein convened a meeting of party leaders and tearfully read out the names of those of his old comrades who were to be led from the hall and shot on the spot. Salih Madhi Ammash was among them.

Air America Received Questionable Loans
A co-founder of Air America Radio reportedlyloaned the network and himselfmore than $800,000 from a non-profit charity in New York while serving as its development director.

Evan Cohen made the highly questionable loans while a director of theGloria Wise Boys&Girls Club, which serves 20,000 children, elderly residents, and people with disabilities. Some loans were directed to Air America as the fledgling liberal talk radio network was launched in March 2004; others went personally to Cohen, who claimed"he needed the money to pay for chemotherapy for himself and other medical expenses for his ill father,"according to theNew York Sun.

Air America broke its ties to Cohen several weeks after its March 31, 2004, launch and the network was sold by parent company Progress Media to Piquant LLC, a new company formed by some of the original investors. In astatementpublished last week, the network acknowledged the receipt of the funds, calling the allegations of corruption at the charity"absolutely disgraceful":

The current owners of Air America Radio have no obligation to Progress Media's business activities. We are very disturbed that Air America Radio's good name could be associated with a reduction in services for young people, which is why we agreed months ago to fully compensate the Gloria Wise Boys&Girls Club as a result of this transaction.

This story, which is starting to get mainstream coverage after percolating for days on conservative blogs, was sparked by a July 27 item fromtalk show host Brian Maloney, a frequent critic of the network who writes today that"Air America hosts are still pretending on-air as though nothing is happening."

Air America host Al Franken told theSunhe wasunawareof the issue until last week. Few liberal blogs have covered the controversy to date, aside from aJuly 27 postingfrom a Daily Kos contributor skeptical of the story when its primary source was a small community newspaper.

In June, the Department of Investigation of New Yorksuspended city grants and contractswith Gloria Wise, which amount to millions of dollars, while it investigates"inappropriate transactions and falsified documents that were submitted to various city agencies."

Grading the War in Iraq
Frontpage Magazine, the right-wing publication founded by David Horowitz, has been conducting asymposiumwith several experts on how well the Iraq War is going.

The discussion, which presumably was staged via e-mail, began with several panelists taking umbrage at Steven Vincent, a war correspondent working in Basra, Iraq, because he gave the war a letter grade of B-minus and Iraqi quality of life an F:

Judging the conflict by Saddam's removal -- and thank Allah the monster is gone -- is setting a pretty low bar. I mean, let's face it: military-wise Iraq was not Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Then you have to factor in U.S failures, such as not sealing the borders or halting the looting -- not to mention the fact that American military tactics have widely alienated the very people we liberated. Something's not working right.

Frontpagemanaging editor Jamie Glazov berated Vincent for not giving the war an A:

You blame America that you can't leave your hotel. But Mr. Vincent, sorry, you can't leave your hotel because the terrorists are a threat to you. Blame the terrorists, not America. ...
An F to America for the quality of Iraqis' lives? The terrorists are waging war on the country and doing everything in their power to destroy the quality of life. We need to blame the terrorists for that, not the side that is sacrificing its young boys and girls to give Iraq liberty and to nurture and protect its growth. The premise here is the height of the pathology of anti-Americanism -- blaming America for what the terrorists are doing.

The symposium was abruptly cancelled when word arrived that Vincent had beenkidnapped and executedin Basra.

His last exchange with Glazov:

Vincent: You can blame terrorists all you want for ruining Iraq, but at the end of the day, it's our responsibility to make things right -- or at least get Iraqis to do the job themselves. Oh, and Jamie? You damn well better feel sorry I can't leave my Basra hotel without Iraqi protection -- because last year I could. Six months after the January 30th elections, lawlessness in this city is on the rise, whether by Iranian agents, rogue policemen or opportunistic tribal gangs. Hmmm, considering the bang-up job the Brits are doing here, I think I'll lower my estimation of the war effort to a C+.
Glazov: Sheesh. Okay Steven, I'm almost afraid what will happen in the next round of this discussion.

To get around Bayesian filters, some spammers have resorted toASCII art, spelling out words with characters and really small text.

I've been online long enough to remember when people used to createASCII babesyou had to print to view. Back in the late '80s, whenever I retrieved a printout from theUniversity of North Texascomputer science lab, there were always a bunch of suggestive or even explicit ASCII trollops waiting to be picked up.

It wasn't easy for the object of your affection to be vulnerable to smudging.

2005-08-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

Yahoo rolls out digital music search engine (Reuters)
Reuters - First it was photos, thenvideo, now music.

News Corp. eyed Skype for$3 bln takeover - report (Reuters)
Reuters - Media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.is understood to have held talks with Skype to buy theInternet telecoms software provider for around$3 billion, butthe talks broke down, the Independent on Sunday reported.

Nokia shares gain on report of Cisco interest (Reuters)
Reuters - Nokia shares opened more than 2percent higher on the Helsinki bourse on Monday following anewspaper report that Cisco Systems Inc. is considering makinga bid for the top mobile handset maker.

Daylight-Saving Switch May Cause Tech Woes (AP)
AP - When daylight-saving time starts earlier than usual in the United States come 2007, your VCR or DVD recorder could start recording shows an hour late.

Virtual Reality Helps Calm 9/11 Anxiety (AP)
AP - For months after Sept. 11, 2001, Fire Chief Stephen King had the same haunting dream: an endless wooden staircase spiraling into the clouds, his friends climbing ever skyward, always beyond his reach.

AOL purchases wireless company Wildseed Ltd. (Reuters)
Reuters - America Online, the world's largestInternet provider, has purchased a privately held wirelesstechnology company as part of its initiative to more quicklyget AOL service onto phones and other wireless devices, thecompany plans to announce Monday.

Downloads for Japan ITunes Hit a Million (AP)
AP - In just four days, 1 million songs have been downloaded at Apple's new iTunes Music Store in Japan, the fastest pace for the service's launch in any of the 20 nations it's now available, including the U.S., a senior executive said Monday.

Business Trumps Technology at LinuxWorld (Ziff Davis)
Ziff Davis - Analysis: This summer's LinuxWorld will feature more in the way of wheeling and dealing than technical breakthroughs and changes.

Internet Scammers Keep Working in Nigeria (AP)
AP - In Festac Town, an entire community of scammers overnights on the Internet. By day they flaunt their smart clothes and cars and hang around the Internet cafes, trading stories about successful cons and near misses, and hatching new plots.

2005-08-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

Daily Source Code for July 18th 2005 #210

Shownotes:

From The Cottage in Guildford, UK
Directlinkto the show
A great and relaxing weekend with beautiful weather
Mashup: Bangers&Mash - Callin'it back, via Mashuptown [Site]
Configuring my MDA III pocket pc
Promo: Matt's Today in History [Site]
Promo: Jack's brand new podcast [Site]
Wednesday travelling to SF again, damn announcements coming soon!
Brendan comments on CCM, the Christian Music scene [CCM Magazinesite]
CastBlaster podcast creation software [Site]
New servers coming online soon
Podsafe Music Network [Site]
A Nonny Mouse comments on the David Coursey interview
Promo: The Financial Aid podcast [Site]
Promo: Podshow on Sirius [Site]
Promo: Audio 2 U [Site]
Promo: Media Artists Secrets [Site]
Podsafe: Brother Love - Summertime [Info]
BackTracksPodcast [Site]
On tuesday look for the Spike Lee podcast and a new PodFinder Podcast on iTunes!

Daily Source Code for July 29th 2005 #217

Shownotes:

From Curry Cottage, UK
Directlinkto the show
Podsafe: De La Vega - Let it burn [Site]
TSA Lockinfo
Podsafe: Cruisebox - Tell the FCC to stick it [Site]
Podsafe: Her - Get Away [Site]
Promo: iPodcast [Site]
More thoughts on bandwidth usage for podcasting

mobile bliss
After a couple days of hard-core geeking out, I've pretty much figured out my MDA-III. I even have it synching to GMail!

The platform certainly has matured since I last tried it out 6 years ago on an HP Palmtop.

indiecaster t-shirt
IndieCaster

Daily Source Code for July 22nd 2005 #212

Daily Source Code for July 22nd 2005 #212

Shownotes:

From San Francisco, CA
Directlinkto the show
Afer a 2 day radio silence we're back!
Mashup: Owner of a lonely butt, via Mashuptown [Site]
Still loving the Virgin Atlantic service
Virgin Mobile still blows
Shoulder status
Spike Lee ShadowCast [iTunes link]
Ray the movie
Hitch with Will Smith
PodcastAlley Top 10 premiered on Sirius today
More London Bombings yesterday
No Damned Announcements, but give me two more weeks...
I love this stuff!
Meetings at Apple with the iTunes Podcast team
Fiji Water is'only'$5 a bottle
How the iTunes Top 10 lists are compiled
The PodFiner Podcast II [iTunes Link]
Podsafe: Adrina Thorpe [PMN Page]
PMN is now accessible for the blind and getting better
Temperature conversion trick C<-->F
Christina's year-end report card was fantastic!
Playboy UK Party Soundseeing tour
Hit Test #49 from Jan Polet [Site]

Daily Source Code for July 27th 2005 #215

Shownotes:

From Curry Cottage, UK
Directlinkto the show
The JetLagged edition
Podsafe: Cruisebox - Tell the FCC to stick it [Site]
Still loving the Virgin Atlantic service
TSA jacked my lock!
Still liking the MDA, although I need to reset a lot still
Biddiecast [Site]
Promo: American Cliche [Site]
Promo: You Are The Guest [Site]
Vacation plans
Rock'n Roll Geek Show with Tim Farris from INXS [Site]
Mashup: Big Ruckus - It takes a new sensation [Site]
Backtracks Podcast #4 [Site]
Cinecst reviews Willy Wonka [Site]
Promo: Tom Corven (a podcast novel) [Site]
Promo: Portland Jazz Jams [Site]
Hit Test #50 from Jan Polet [Site]

sunset on the downs

image_00013
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

It truly was a beautiful day in Guildford. This photo was taken at sunset on the downs.

my podcast setup
People are always asking me to post a picture of my podcast setup, no need to asKatjaalready did it for me :)

metropolitan

1.jpg
Originally uploaded byadamcurry.

Nowthisis a SF view!

2005-07-06T03:17:00.000-07:00

Bad Fruit smells fishy
SF Chronicle:"At this point, there is no official indication of BadFruit's origin. Buta handful of signs seem to link the site to MP3Tunes.com, the online songstore opened a few months ago by MP3.com founder Michael Robertson."

PodFather meme
Hee hee, thememecontinues in photoshop land...

Arrival in South Beach
Sunday morning, I arrived safely in Miami last night, just waking up and shaking the cobwebs free from the ole noggin'

Man it's hot here! Look for a catch-up podcast today as I am doing just that, catching up on email, podcasts and processing the past week's activities.

Daily Source Code for June 28th 2005 #201

Daily Source Code for June 28th 2005 #201

Shownotes:

From Portland Oregon, USA
Direclinkto the show
The post-iTunes launch quickie update

Check ride tomorrow!
Apologies for the radio silence, I've been pulling 12 hour days of nonstop flight training. tomorrow morning is the big day, the final checkride. Wish me luck!

Daily Source Code for June 21st 2005 #197

Daily Source Code for June 21st 2005 #197

Shownotes

From Curry Cottage in Guildford UK
Directlinkto the show
Portions of this show not work safe
Mashup: PartyBen>>Tegan Sara vs. Mylo - Walking with a ghost in Paris [Site]
Promo: Sushi Radio [Site]
Promo: More hip than hippie [Site]
Promo: Keith and the Girl [Site]
Podsafe: Feet of Clay - She said [Site]
Submit yer stuff:

Promos and podcasts

submit[at]podshow.com

Podsafe Music

podsafe[at]podshow.com

Mashups

mashup[at]podshow.com

Daily Source Code for June 24th 2005 #199

Shownotes:

From Seattle, USA
Directlinkto the show
A short Update from Gnomedex
Pre-Keynote Thoughts and observations

2005-07-02T03:28:00.000-07:00

Parents Can Sign Up Kids to Not Get E-Mail (AP)
AP - Starting Friday, parents can sign up for what Michigan officials say is the nation's first registry aimed at keeping spammers from sending children inappropriate e-mail. The new law bans sending messages to children related to such things as pornography, illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms or fireworks. Parents and schools will be able to register children's e-mail addresses.

Desktop search finds the enterprise (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld - This week X1 Technologies threw its hat in the ring for enterprise desktop search, joining big name vendors such as Google, Verity, Autonomy, and a host of smaller players all chasing the red-hot market for PC search.

HP Starts Selling The iPod Shuffle (TechWeb)
TechWeb - Hewlett-Packard starts selling the iPod Shuffle, the low-end version of Apple Computer Inc.'s popular digital music player

U.S. to Retain Oversight of Web Traffic (AP)
AP - A unilateral decision by the United States to indefinitely retain oversight of the Internet's main traffic-directing computers prompted concerns Friday that the global telecommunications network could eventually splinter.

IBM Wins$850M Settlement vs. Microsoft (AP)
AP - IBM Corp. will get$775 million in cash and$75 million worth of software from Microsoft Corp. to settle claims still lingering from the federal government's antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, the companies announced Friday.

Carriers seek U.S. mobile e911 deadline suspension (Reuters)
Reuters - Some of the biggest U.S. wirelessproviders have asked regulators to suspend a Decemberrequirement for 95 percent of their phones to support e911technology that allows emergency workers to pinpoint callers'locations, according to the CTIA mobile industry group onFriday.

Moving Beyond Ringtones (washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com - First, there were musical ringtones. Then came"ring-back"tones -- tunes that play while a caller waits for someone to pick up a mobile phone. Now cell phones are offering streaming music, with access to online music stores on the way.

Red-Hot Red Hat (The Motley Fool)
The Motley Fool - Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - News), a leading provider of the Linux-based operating system, continues to see increasing acceptance of the open source technology. While the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - News) faithful may be yawning at the latest results from its competitor, they nonetheless would have to grudgingly admit that the first quarter showed impressive growth.

Swedes Undeterred by Online Piracy Ban (AP)
AP - Unless Swedes have suddenly changed their habits, about one in 10 became a criminal on Friday when a ban on sharing copyrighted music and movies over the Internet took effect at midnight.

2005-06-25T00:39:00.000-07:00

GMail Wireless
I just enabled my Sony Ericsson wap based phone to access my gmail account(s) through a fantastic (free) service:Gmail Wireless.Treo? We don't need no stinkin'Treo!

20th century sweatshop
Writers Guild of America:"The secret about reality TV isn't that it's scripted, which it is,"Mr. Petrie said in a statement."The secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop."

quickie update
Wow, hasn't happened in a long time that I didn't have the opportunityto even post on my blog, let alone do a source code.... Lots going onhere in Podshow land, we'll be back tomorrow!

Daily Source Code for June 21st 2005 #197

Daily Source Code for June 21st 2005 #197

Shownotes

From Curry Cottage in Guildford UK
Directlinkto the show
Portions of this show not work safe
Mashup: PartyBen>>Tegan Sara vs. Mylo - Walking with a ghost in Paris [Site]
Promo: Sushi Radio [Site]
Promo: More hip than hippie [Site]
Promo: Keith and the Girl [Site]
Podsafe: Feet of Clay - She said [Site]
Submit yer stuff:

Promos and podcasts

submit[at]podshow.com

Podsafe Music

podsafe[at]podshow.com

Mashups

mashup[at]podshow.com

Bad Fruit smells fishy
SF Chronicle:"At this point, there is no official indication of BadFruit's origin. Buta handful of signs seem to link the site to MP3Tunes.com, the online songstore opened a few months ago by MP3.com founder Michael Robertson."

Father's Day
I awoke around 9:45 today, my daughter, fully dressed and made up(she's almost 15 remember) with a tray of breakfast and a single longstemmed rose. Was I dreaming? Most parents of teenagers know they don'temerge from their hibernation before 11am on weekends! Ah yes, father'sday. I don't care how hokey or commercial this event has become,nothing beats seeing the twinkle in the eyes of your child when they dotheir utmost to say'I love you'.

I love you too baby!

Speaking of love, a lot of it is flowing from the MommyCasters today as they roll out their Father's Dayeditionof the podcast.

And as I write this, under the shade of our back porch overlooking the downs, I'm listening to P-Dubs latestincarnationof Digital Flotsam, the'God Bless the Child'edition. Dad's everywhere will love it.

Microsoft works on own BitTorrent
BBC:"Microsoft works on own BitTorrent"

Daily Source Code for June 16th 2005 #195

Daily Source Code for June 16th 2005 #195

Shownotes

From Curry Cottage in Guildford UK
Directlinkto the show
Mashup: Rock it like it's lobster - B52's vs. Snoop Dogg [Site]
Using a new beta ofMegaSeg
MegathankstoAronfor the Weezer experience!
Podsafe: Chrissy - Gonna be [Site]
Promo: MXL Podcast [Site]
Promo: Life By The Drop [Site]
A mesage from Don Katz, CEO ofAudible
Mashup: I ain't got daughters - c.h.a.o.s. productions [Site]
Promo: Frat Pack Podcast [Site]
Promo: My Life Bytes [Site]
Podsafe: Jimmy Griswold - I hate this business [Site]
Jan Polet's HitTest #44 [Site]
Lacivious Biddies - Headed South [Site]
Submit yer stuff:

Promos and podcasts

submit[at]podshow.com

Podsafe Music

podsafe[at]podshow.com

Mashups

mashup[at]podshow.com

Google Maps Crap
here's agoogle mapthat is making the rounds in the Benelux. It shows Belgium and The Netherlands in the wrong spots. Belgium, isbelowHolland. Interestingly, when you zoom in a bit, the names are placed correctly.

2005-06-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

GMail Wireless
I just enabled my Sony Ericsson wap based phone to access my gmail account(s) through a fantastic (free) service:Gmail Wireless.Treo? We don't need no stinkin'Treo!