House of the Hanged Man

As I expected

2005-03-16T05:10:00.000-06:00

As expected, once I got the next destination of this log up and running I would be too lazy to continue updating both, so recent posts I've posted in that location haven't made it across to here. Even though the look/feel of the blog over there isn't completely done, I'm going to go ahead and officially switch the content over there, so somewhere around noon today I'll be redirecting this site over there.

Since there are a few posts with comments that won't get migrated, I'll probably leave those posts together and link to them from the migrated posts, but we'll see how ambitious I get.

In any case, if you've been checking in on my rantings here, I'll hope you'll join me at the new home of House of the Hanged Man.

You can also get the feeds for the new location:
RSS 2.0
RSS 1.0
Atom

Thanks!

Google Blog: Man vs. mini-kitchen

2005-03-12T06:08:00.000-06:00

Well I don't know if Google's just loosening up their external image or if they're actually listening to their employees and the blogoshpere's reaction, but this post is definitely a step in the right direction.

I think they have to be careful though - the blog will lose some interest if they don't post some relevant and informational content in addition to the human side.

Micro Persuasion: Chris Pirillo is Brilliant

2005-03-11T14:59:00.000-06:00

"Check out how he optimized the title of a recent blog post to drive traffic to his site."

Thanks for the tip, Steve and Chris.

I'd like to think that I would have thought of this. But I'd be deluding myself. I'll be lucky if I can just keep from forgetting it!

Update: I assumed as much as what Chris says here when I saw Steve's post.

Time for another move...

2005-03-11T13:52:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned in a post on my deceased linkblog, I am rearranging my blog- and web-like. Part of this has to do with new and continuing frustrations with Blogger.

I have long been frustrated that Blogger doesn;t allow for categorization. In fact, that was one of the reasons why I moved the podcast reviews to The New, New Podcast Review (the other being a more professional impression). Well that frustration has led me to leave Blogger behind for this blog as well, especially when you add in the fact that I am starting to take this sort of blogging as seriously as I have the podcast reviews (although those have been lax lately). Add to that the level of frustration I had yesterday when I lost several posts due to Blogger being intermittently down.

The contents of this blog will persist, and while I am in transition I will try to post both here and at my new location, House of the Hanged Man. Please note that for now the root domain itself, http://kinrowan.net, will also resolve to the blog, but that may change if several other things I have in the works come together. If that happens then there will be a more static web-page at that location, so better to use the blog address if you're looking to find the continuation of this idiocy. In addition, the new feeds available will be at RSS 2.0, RSS .92, and Atom. Since I don't have any control over the contents of the Atom feed that Blogger generates I can't redirect it to the new locations. Plus in the off-chance that any of you have a strong preference for some other format, you can now take your pick.

I will post a reminder to this effect when I finish tooling with the look of the new site, which is a WordPress blog, a new adventure for me.

Micro Persuasion: Chris Pirillo is Brilliant

2005-03-11T11:02:00.000-06:00

Any Bloglines developers listening?

2005-03-11T08:42:00.000-06:00

I asked the following question of Bloglines via their comment form. I've looked in their forums with no joy - I'll put the question in there as well, but I'm curious in anyone else can answer my question.

...[W]hat elements of a feed makes bloglines display a feed to indicate that it has new entries. I thought it might be the of the feed itself, or maybe . Or maybe it's or of the s in the feed. I thought I had a handle becuase I had several feeds that son't show changes when they are changed and they have similar elements of the RSS missing. However I've found a few more that aren't missing the same elements that are still not showing changes to the feed.

This blog post may come as a suprise to you but I am very glad to make your acquaintance.

2005-03-10T12:10:00.000-06:00

copyrighteous:

"...the impact that these 419 scams must be having on legitimate Nigerian mail."

Benjamin Mako Hill makes an interesting point here. I know that I'm guilty of the kind of immediate response that he's mentions - as soon as I see the particular style of email that represents most "419" scams, I delete it without reading further. And this is on top of my machine-based spam filters, the presense of which led Benjamin to look twice at the legitimate email he received. The chances of a Nigerian email being legitimate in my case are probably much less than in Benjamin's, but what really interests me are the implications of cultural difference in electronic communication.

I think that we, in the US at least, are trained to expect a level of homogeniety in electronic communication. There's a certain sanitized style of communication that we've come to expect from the internet and perhaps voices that speak in other styles are paid less attention to. What sorts of communication and input are we missing when both the popular / mainstream media and electronic communications are filtered by this prejudice? Does this filter have as much or more impact on the information we receive as the many language barriers that stand in our way?

MSN has an RSS reader

2005-03-10T11:11:00.000-06:00

Scripting News: 3/10/2005

See also SiliconBeat: Microsoft's RSS aggregator via Read/Write Web: Microsoft's Web-based RSS Aggregator?.

Doesn't work in FireFox. Also isn't working in IE right now, but I'll be checking back. I'm very interested to see what features Microsoft feels they can bring to this space that will make their tool more than a catchup game against the entrenched leaders.

Of similar interest is this. Don't tell me that I'm the only person who thought to hack the url, after all the hype about the Harvard Business School application disaster (Feedster RSS Search : "harvard business school"). Probably not, just the only person silly enough to think it worth commenting on. Looks like Microsoft's version of LookSmart's Furl - a site I've been using heavily since Dave Winer pointed it out.

Interesting....

This is hilarious!

2005-03-09T11:32:00.000-06:00

Moonwatcher Off Topic: Feed Changes

I was just reading a backlog of posts from Moonwatcher and had noticed that not long after posting about The Economic Case for Full Feeds, Charlie had switched to summaries only. I had even taken a snapshot of my bloglines screen showing the difference in feeds and was writing the post when, as I double-checked my facts, Charlie adds the post linked to above, mentioning his switching back to full content.

What timing!

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map - Engadget - www.engadget.com

2005-03-09T10:53:00.000-06:00

This is really cool! (and Jon Udell rocks! - just between Jon Udell: A Google Maps walking tour of Keene, NH and associated posts and his work on the IT Conversations AudioClips function [more info here and here, implementation details here] he's a web-interconnectivity powerhouse, and that's not to mention any of his other work).

However, getting into the details uncovers that you have to have a special tool and specifically the Firefox browser (which you should have, but that's another story). That's much more complicated than what I hoped for.

I was thinking of hacking together a customized Google map of my rather byzantine route to work this morning, and I may still do so using this process. I'll also look and see if I can find a way to do this without ignoring those other browsers.

Microsoft's Anti-Spyware as an argument against Google's Auto-link

2005-03-08T13:38:00.000-06:00

So far I've stayed out of the fray surrounding Google's Auto-link functionality. I can see both sides of the issue, and think that Dave Winer's comments (starting, I think, here) and Robert Scoble's comments (starting, I think, here) have some good points - especially when it comes to what Google could do to make the functionality of the toolbar a little less distasteful to content publishers.

It also doesn't help much that Google's not talking (in the blogosphere) about this. There's no "official" Google commentary about what their plans are for the toolbar and how they respond to the concerns brought up by bloggers. I know individuals have said things in other venues, but nothing really meaningful, and nothing direct to the users that I've seen (if you know otherwise, please, please let me know).

All of that said, I've found Cory Doctorow's comments, and those of Yoz Grahame and most recently Jason Kottke's to be more compelling (even though Yoz's are a little, um, sarcastic, in the "tearing of flesh" meaning). I further think that the slippery slope argument used by many of Google's detractors in this discussion borders on the fallacious.

Actually, I encountered the most compelling argument against the auto-link feature on my own computer this morning.

I had been in the habit of running both the free version of Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot-S&D on a daily basis. Mostly they didn;t catch much, but every few days I'd get a tracking cookie hit or something of the like. That was until I installed Microsoft's Windows AntiSpyware. Then, somehow, they presence of that comforting window every morning telling me that Microsoft had run through the files on my machine while I was sleeping and hadn't found anything lulled me into a false sense of security and I hadn't been running my other spyware tools. This morning I opened up Spybot S&D to use a different tool int he package and ran the spyware check just for kicks. Guess what? It found a few things that Microsoft's tool hadn't found. I ran AdAware and found a few more.

Shocking you say?
Hardly.

In fact, the things these two tools found were tracking cookies, which I'm not even sure Microsoft's tool finds. The point of the whole experience is that somehow I had lulled myself into this sense of security based upon the activities of a less-trusted software vendor than Google. I'm a fairly sophisticated technology consumer, yet I allowed myself to be led down the garden path unwittingly. Other users are even more likely to trust the defaults of a tool released by a company that's got Google's reputation.

All of that said, I still come down on Google's side of this issue for these reasons:

The user has to download and install the tool, taking some responsibility for their actions
When the Toolbar Beta does its work on a page, the page is already on the user's machine, where they should have a lot of control over the page
The user has to click the button for every single page to have the auto-links display
The links are shown to be artificial in a way that many users will notice
Even setting aside the multiple Javascript code-snippets already available to disable auto-link, you can also disable it by creating the links you'd like to see there yourself.

So while I don't think the first step down the infamous slippery slope has been taken, yet, I do think we all need to watch out for it. If Google (or anyone else) does step across the line they our work to convince that company to turn back from the slope will be all the harder.

Update: Techdirt talks intelligently about the autolink slippery slope (an old post, but a new one to me).

At the Wisconsin .NET user's Deeper in .NET event today

2005-03-05T13:23:00.000-06:00

No wi-fi, so no live blogging, but I thought I'd post a little about it.

Scott Guthrie (feed) spoke about ASP.NET 2.0. Beta 2 out soon and some really powerful features. I'm interested in looking at some ASP.NET 2.0 html/css source code and seeing how well they live up to their claim of XHTML compliance.

Spencers Magic :: Theatre of Illusion

2005-03-04T13:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I spent the day with Kevin and Cindy Spencer, and their crew (and fellow magic team), David and Kylie Knight setting up and running their Theatre of Illusion show at my other job.

As an audience member (which I can pretend that I was, at least a little), this was a great show. They managed to fit a goodly amount of gear onto our small stage, and performed several wonderful large-scale illusions (you know, the really impressive ones). Intermixed with these was a Kevin's banter and some less spectacular (but no less well-executed) tricks. Kevin has a wonderful rapport with the audience and the intimate space mixed with the Spencers' high degree of audience interaction created a very close and involved feeling among the audience members (so much so that it was somewhat difficult to get them all to leave!). As I mentioned the illusions were very well-executed and quite convincing, and this from someone who saw the mechanisms up-close (though not close enough to figure any of them out).

As a tech director, my praise for the Spencers is, if anything, even more glowing. Above I called David and Kylie the crew, but that's totally inaccurate and insufficient. In fact, they were all both performer and crew; Cindy and Kevin did as much of the load in as anyone else. Had I not jumped on the scaffolding before Kevin climbed it he would have focused all the lights himself, not to mention writing all the cues (which he did). Cindy set up their sound and at one point had a hazer (fog) machine taken to bits on the stage, and exercise at which even my stout heart would quail. The entire group was extremely friendly and easy-going, and they were flexible beyond any expectation, even in the face of our less-than-experienced (or organized) crew. They were tremendously well-organized and an utter joy to work with; far beyond what one would expect.

In short, if you have the opportunity to see the Spencers perform, do so - I heard someone say that he thought their shows were better than Copperfield. I've never seen Copperfield live, but what I have seen tells me that the Spencers' show is much more accessible and they would be well worth a hour's drive to see, in my opinion. And if your venue is looking for a great show for your audience and a great experience for your crew, these are the folks to invite into your space.

The Spencers are on tour right now and are visiting many cities throughout the midwest and west of the United States. Take a look at their tour schedule.

Getting there....

2005-03-02T14:05:00.000-06:00

Well, I like this look a lot better than the one I was getting tired of.

I was thinking about changing the name of the blog, actually, and had decided to wait until inspiration struck. I was planning on waiting until said inspiration revealed itself to make any changes to the look of the page.

However, the more I thought about it, (and especially after reviewing the meaning of the Tarot card) the more comfortable I became with the title, especially the aspect of "looking at things in new and different ways". So in short, I think I;ve decided to go with the title as it stands.

However, that left me pondering a change in the look of the site. And since I anticipate a temporary small increase in juice from some help I gave Steve Holden for a TechNewsRadio podcast inspired in part by this entry I thought it was time.

I didn't spend a whole lot of design or coding time on this look, and I'm not terribly married to it, but if any of you all have opinions I'd be happy to hear them!

"You can google my name...."

2005-02-28T11:52:00.000-06:00

I just received a submission for a podcast to review at The New, New Podcast Review that contained an interesting phrase. The fellow who was emailing me said:

You can Google my name for some history if you wish.

Now I know he was probably only suggesting this as a means to get some background on him and his phrasing was intended more in that vein than in the vein of permission, but it was interesting to me nevertheless. The idea of giving someone permission to google your name is almost amusing in this day and age. If I contacted someone out of the blue, I would fully expect that they would google my name. In fact, it wouldn't even occur to me to suggest it, let alone give permission.

Like I said, I doubt this fellow was really intending to express his approval of googling him, but my small mind got some small amusement out of it nonetheless.

Bait and switch

2005-02-28T10:14:00.000-06:00

Well if this isn't a nice little bit of underhanded marketing tactics I don't know what is.

The folks at PodKeywords were at one point providing a potentially nice service of providing sub-domains to podkeyword.com that would reference your site or feed. Many early podcasters made use of it (Eric Rice, Matthew Bischoff, Geek News Central, and others). Whether it had any adoption is open to debate.

Regardless of how useful or well-used it ever was, the point is now moot. It appears that every sub-domain of podkeyword.com now points to Golden Hawk Technology. Even ones that I suspect were never registered (like http://f*ck.podkeyword.com/) resolve to the Golden Hawk Technology webpage.

You know, I really don;t care that they stopped providing the keyword service, but to use this kind of bait-and-switch tactic is underhanded and dishonest. Even if I were in the market for the sort of software they're providing I'd certainly not be buying it here.

It is, of course, conceivable that this fellow marchon has been hacked. If that's so I'll happily apologize and retrack my statements about the podkeywords page (although certainly not about Golden Hawk Technologies).

Open Letter to Bloglines

2005-02-26T05:49:00.000-06:00

Dear Bloglines-
Congratulations on being purchased. I hope that it works out to be everything you've hoped for as well as everything it can be for your users. You folks have produced a really quality product here and deserve the best.

I'm also writing to mention my concern about something I read in the most recent edition of Wired (issue 13.03, March 2003, p. 026) where Mark Fletcher is quoted as saying that Bloglines will introduce ads to the service this spring.

I'm a realist here, and have been resigned to advertising in RSS content for some time. Much as I hate the idea, many blogs and other syndication-based businesses (like Bloglines) need to have a viable business model and that advertising is often part of that model. I'm not a radical; I believe it's OK to make a profit for work that you've done, so as much as I dislike the idea of seeing ads in my feeds (or rather, other people's feeds that I subscribe to) I don't feel betrayed by the idea. You have offered a wonderful service for free for a long time, and I knew the honeymoon would have to end. I expect that Ask Jeeves's purchase of Bloglines will do nothing but expedite the need for a viable business model.

I am, however, a savvy consumer with high standards and strong opinions. And I don't hesitate to act on my opinions by taking my business elsewhere when displeased. So I'm writing you a note in the hope that some early commentary by your users will prevent a degradation of the service you offer that will end up seeing me search for a replacement.

Please make a concerted and concentrated effort to get the advertising-in-syndication model right. Ask some Really Smart Folks for help if you need to. Talk to Dave Winer or Doc Searls or Robert Scoble or any of a hundred other bloggers who have written about the subject. Blog about it yourselves, post it in your forum and ask for comments. In short, do everything you can to make sure that your able to add these ads without alienating your users. I really want you to do well with this, both for your sake and mine.

Thanks for all you do;
kinrowan

Related Links
Why Bloglines sold: It’s not a business. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog - calacanis.weblogsinc.com

Jack Chalker dies

2005-02-25T09:04:00.000-06:00

Sci Fi Wire -- Jack Chalker dies

I know that Hunter S Thompson's death a few weeks ago should be more worthy of comment; he was probably a more influential voice in American society than Jack Chalker.

But realistically, Jack Chalker has had a much more direct and profound impact on my life than Hunter S Thompson had. Chalker's novels have colored my view of the world since I was a young teen, and along with other SciFi/Fantasy writers (Tolkien, Piers Anthony, Anne McCaffrey, Robert A. Heinlein, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Charles de Lint come immediately to mind) have defined my personality and opinions more than almost any other factor (parents, kids, and marriage excluded).

I've left Chalker's work largely behind in recent years, as my personal growth has left me less time for reading SciFi ("shit lit" as my father calls it) and I devote most of my reading time to various thick computer programming tomes, but recently I was culling my bookshelves to find books to take to the local used book store, Frugal Muse Books, to re-sell and I found a few of Chalker's more recent works that I hadn't gotten to reading yet. I put them back on the shelf instead of in the box destined for re-selling. Now I am doubly glad that I did.

RIP, Jack Chalker. your voice will be missed.

eBay - ipaq parts, PDAs Handheld PCs, Desktop PCs, Consumer Electronics items at low prices

2005-02-24T12:17:00.000-06:00

eBay - ipaq parts, PDAs Handheld PCs, Desktop PCs, Consumer Electronics items at low prices: ""

Why can't I subscribe to this eBay search via RSS?

Oh, I guess I can!

cool!

iPodder.org : Podcasts

2005-02-22T09:17:00.000-06:00

iPodder.org : Podcasts

I'm curious if any other FireFox users are having the same problem that I do with the OPML link from the iPodder.org directories. When I try to open them, either from the XML link on the page or by downloading the actual file and then opening it from within FireFox, FF opens blank windows (many of them). I haven't counted to be sure (I rush to close them as they open, because otherwise FF will crash) but I suspect that it opens as many windows as there are children of the current node.

I'm wondering if this is an FF bug or a problem with the iPodder.org OPML file. I do not have this problem with other OPML files, such as the one at TNN Podcast Review

GMail un-beta'd?

2005-02-19T07:42:00.000-06:00

Looks like Google's taking the next step towards making their beta e-mail offering GMail a public offering. Before I bought my first GMail account (yes, I was one of those - luckily I only paid $5 for it on eBay, mere days before the prices plunged to $1 each) I signed up to get updates n the GMail offering from Google. Well yesterday I received an update from the GMail team that included an invite to GMail. When seen in combination with the 50 invites that heavily used GMail accounts are receiving right now it seems that GMail's pretty much ready for public consumpion. Given the number of invites probably available now, I susect that Google's reached the saturation point of invites it vcan give away without making GMail available to the general public, like from the Google.com homepage.

Even knowing Google's tendency to keep features and offerings at beta for years (Google groups, anyone?), I'm still curious why they're still calling GMail a beta. They're not developing new features with any alacrity - I know I've submitted several feature requests that haven't been implmented and I'm sure others have as well. Not only that, but they've only fixed a smattering of bugs that I've seen (although since the app is completely hosted they could be fixing new ones every day and it'd be hard to tell). In adition, any growth of revenue for the offering can only come from additional users.

Anyway, as I've said before, I have 50 invites if there's anyone out there who wants one leave a comment here with your first and last name and current email address (wthout both names I'll have to make one up), or email me at kinrowan at kinrowan dot net (or the link above) and I'll get one out to you.

Really beginninng to hate this page

2005-02-03T11:01:00.000-06:00

the css is all screwy and I don't like the look any more. Haven't liked the look for a while, but now I'm really beginning to HATE it.

BTW, Looks like Google is opening up the flood-gates on gmail invites (the virus must not be spreading fast enough). I now have 50 invites, and while I'm a regular (daily) user, I haven't invited anyone in months.

If you want one, leave a comment.

NPR : Personal Radio Via Podcasting Grows More Popular

2005-02-01T15:07:00.000-06:00

Dear All Things Considered;

I only listened to the 1st 15 seconds of this segment before I knew that you guys missed the point.

From the first mention of podcasting it was clear that there was a negative slant on the article with the reference to podcasts as "online rants," and "the quality is low." They are no more encompassed by those comments than weblogs are.

Nathan gets a lot of the facts wrong. Adam is only know as "the father of podcasting" to some of the listeners - I personally don't even listen to the DSC on a daily basis. Adam also didn't develop the technology (which has existed for some time, and was championed in part by Dave Winer and evangelized by Adam), nor did he write iPodder as we know it today (Eric de Jonge, Perica Zivkovic, Andrew Grumet, Garth Kidd, and Martijn Venrooy did so). Many listeners to podcasts (Daily Source Code included) don't even own iPods - podcasting is not specific to the iPod platform. Where's the research? Hmm?

The focus on broadcast radio's ideas of professionalism and quality are equally misplaced. What those things miss is the honesty and humanity that goes in to a podcast, as Adam Curry alluded to in the clip you played from him. It's that honesty when contrasted with the preproduced slickness of broadcast radio that's so appealing and compelling. Quality means many different things, and those meanings that you measure in your piece are but a small part of the overall gestalt.

Lastly there's the idea that podcasting is free because the quality is low. That may be true for some shows, and undoubtedly some will go commercial to some greater or lesser extent, but going back to the blog you'll see some very high-quality writing going on in blogs, and they are all free. There's nothing to say that much of podcasting can't do the same.

All in all a very disappointing segment. It may interest you to know that I used to be a religious ATC listener on my eveing commute, but now listening to ATC is a rarity. Know what replaced it? Podcasts.

Editorial note: raster takes me to task in the comments for not being fair to Adam Curry , and he's right - content above revised to reflect his comments. Also I note that my own research is less than perfect - I spelled Perica's last name incorrectly and allowed a known spelling error in Andrew's name to slip through. Time to eat my own dog food.

Don't Steal My Focus!

2005-01-31T23:31:00.000-06:00

Garth Kidd (of iPodder development fame) has joined forces with Nicole Simon (that's zee-mohn to the USians out there) to begin the "Don't steal my focus" initiative.

Nicole has asked those of us who share their predilection to blog about it, so here I am, blogging it.

This issue has bothered me for a long time. I sometimes run 20+ different applications at the same time, and windows seems to think that it knows what I need to pay attention to better than I do. Almost more bothersome to me than the warning / alerts that pop up while I'm working away are the applications that try to take focus several times while they're starting up. I believe this aspect of the issue is just rude developement - those developers have chosen to bring their apps to the foreground. If I put it in the background, it's there for a frelling reason! Don't tell me what to look at. It's application SPAM!

OK, I know I was irritated about this, but I had no idea that I was quite so worked up. It never occurred to me that other people might be irritated, let alone to start a blog campaign - thank you Nicole and Garth for raising my consciousness.

They've also put out a hinted request for a button for signatories of the initiative. I'm no graphic designer, but I made 2 that might fit the bill:

I these are remotely to anyone's liking then I'd be happy to make some modifications to fit spec. I envision them linking to a page with the names of the bloggers who have signed on, but that's just me.

Let me know what you all think, both of the buttons and of Nicole and Garth's idea.

Robert Scoble, Bill Gates! Are you guys listening?

iPodder 2.0beta1

2005-01-28T06:50:00.000-06:00

I've been trying the new iPodder 2.0 beta for a few days now, and while I'm in rant mode I decided to rant a little bit about this here as well.

I never know whether to start rants like this with the stuff that I think is good or to end with the good stuff, but today I decided to start with the positive feedback:

Positive advances in iPodder Lemon 2.0 beta

The visuals - the new look of the lemon app is wonderful! I love it! The icons, the buttons, it's a very distinctive look and it's great!
Cleanup function - I haven't used it yet, but if it works as advertised (or at least as expected) it'll be a great help!
The directory tree - good way of navigating, and much better implemented that in previous versions - love the visual interface
The downloads tab - I really like being able to see what I've downloaded, and to be able to control each download individually - although much of this doesn't seem to work yet.
the feed properties function - much nicer to be able to change the url of a selected feed than to have to delete an old one and add a new one.
the listing out of the downloads available from a selected feed. This is really nice.

Disappointments

Download multiple selected feeds at once. I mean come on people, I can't be the only person who subscribes to more podcasts than I listen to on a daily basis. I need to be able to select multiple feeds and have iPodder check them simultaneously, not one at a time. I don't have the disk space (even with the nice clean-up function) to hold a bunch of stuff that I'm not going to listen to, which is what happens if I download every feed every time. This was the one thing I was desparately hoping would be in this release.
On a related note, where the frelling OPML support? I want to be able to organize my feeds into groups, and OPML is ther perfect way to do this; feeds could be grouped under outlines to the nth level, be expandable to whatever level you wanted to look at, and in concert with the function above, only a certain branch of the tree could be downloaded, either with or without its children. iPodder has opml parsing built in (reference the directory tab), so from a development standpoint it should be relatively easy to implement that here... Sometime in 2010 when I get around to learning enough python to do this I'll do it myself.... And why doesn't iPodder store its favorites in OPML natively?
the promise of the per download control is unrealized - this is the one thing that I think is a bug, and I need to check the bug list to make sure that's true, but telling iPodder that I want to stop a download doesn't seem to stop it. Further, I think you should be able to stop all downloads. In a context menu, or from the pop-up you get from the taskbar icon, or certainly a button. I mean it's not unimaginable at all that someone would click a button that sent iPodder off to faithfully do their bidding only to realize it was a mistake.
the cleanup tab doesn't refresh automatically to show you the current status of your last activity. You have to refresh it manually and then reselect the feed you were working on. Grr.
proxy support. I know that Garth has indicated that he's working on this, but it's a real buzz-kill with iPodder. It basically means that I can't use iPodder to manage my podcast content from the gate, because I have to manually download episodes from the site when at work. Bummer.

Additional Features suggested by this version

On another OPML-related note, why can't I add my own directories to the directory list?
The individual download lists should have better operations for handling them. Something as simple as "Select All" and "Select None" like in the cleanup tab would be helpful.
clean-up tools could be better realized - the ability on a feed-by-feed basis to set clean up options based on download age or folder size for the feed. The of course to automatically generate a list of items to be cleaned up to present to the user, who can then deselect items they want to keep.
date on the dowloads tab - it shows me the date I downloaded it, but not the date of the actual RSS item. Both would be helpful.

I guess that's all the ranting I can come up with for now. I hope the iPodder dev team doesn't take this the wrong way, either. I think this version's made some great advances, just not the exact ones I was hoping for. I really appreciate the work these guys put into this product and wish for the best for them and for iPodder and I know they're working hard at it for no pay and not much recognition. It really is appreciated!

Much better...

2005-01-27T23:41:00.000-06:00

So, apparently, I jumped the shark on my post about the Scientific American feed (and then, yesterday, I made it even worse by refering to the "shark-jumping post" again).

See, SciAm contacted me this morning and let me in on a little secret.

That wasn't their feed.

Shhh!

Seriously, though, what I linked to was the newsisfree version of the SciAm feed. I don't even know where I got that one, but the real SciAm feed is fine. It's not full text, in fact it's only headlines, but there are NO ads.

So I apologize to the Scientific American folks, and redirect my ire to the newsisfree people. Bulletin: If I have to deal with ads then the news isn't free. That is to say it might be free-as-in-beer (actually, a lot more like beer than I want my information to be), but not really free. And that's OK - it's just that I won't be listening to it from you all. Try a little harder to get the mix right, will ya?

On a separate but somewhat unrelated note, the Ars Technica feed is now back to its original state of no-adness. Still going through feedburner (and I don't recall if it was going through feedburner before I noticed the sudden onset of advertising), but my hope is that they misconfigured their feedburner feed and stuck too much commercial content in it. They certainly changed it back quickly!

So kudos to the folks at Scientific American for doing syndication (mostly) right and to the folks at Ars Technica for cleaning up their feed.

Incidentally - I've now created a feedburner feed for House of the Hanged Man at http://feeds.feedburner.com/HouseOfTheHangedMan. No commercial content there, either.

Ars Technica - powered by FeedBurner

2005-01-26T22:08:00.000-06:00

Ars Technica - powered by FeedBurner: " Ars Technica"

OK, maybe I'm wrong, but it suddenly seems that the Ars Technica feed has become overly ad-infested.

I've said it here before (recently) that I'm fine with text ads in my RSS feeds, but when they start getting in the way of the content then I start to have a problem. I blogged about this in my last post with respect to the Scientific America feed. Tis is another another example of a feed that took me to the web-site quite often for interesting content, but has (in my mind) substantially not gotten the advertising-in-rss mixture right. It's amazing how a little-bitty url:

changes into a big, ugly, ad:

It's even worse than that, because I can deal with big, ugly ads. But Ars Tech has them on 80%+ of it's posts. And it gets even worse (if you can believe that). They're crappy ads from places like "My Cash Now" and "Compare Mortgage Offers". I mean come on - these are the folks who are spamming my email inbox! Next thing I'll be seeing ads for Vic0din here.

The folks at Ars Technica should know better. If they can't control the content of density of the ads placed in their feed then they need to find someone other than FeedBurner to put the ads there.

Please folks, figure this stuff out. Rocket science it ain't.

I'm unsubscribing from the Scientific American feed...

2005-01-21T09:41:00.000-06:00

...and here's why (from an email to SciAm):

Just wanted to drop you a note to let you know that I am unsubscribing from your RSS feed and why.

1> Too many ads, too prominently placed and intrusive

I am not a big fan of ads in RSS feeds, but I am willing to accept them in the right mixture for the right content. Unfortunately you haven't got that mix. The content you provide is not compelling enough for me to wade through the ugly ads that your newsisfree feeds are placing, especially when the content is non-existant. It is common for me to open your feed and see a headline with an ad and nothing else - in fact they all look like that (the ones that have ads, that is).

Example Ad

2> Skimpy RSS items

I want more that a headline. The headline tells me whether the enclosed content is worth looking at, so then I read the content, and if it's compelling I'll go to the site for more info. Even on feeds that offer full text, if I see a post that really interests me I'll go to the site even though I've read the whole article; that way the site gets a little "visit-juice." The end result of a post that contains no text and just a headline is that I don't go there, I don't get anything at all out of it. I can't tell from just a headline if I want to read the story; even if you're not going to provide full text you have to provide something. And please, tell me what I'm supposed to do with a post that just says "more"?

Example "more" post

If you're interested in my reading your online content and visiting your site (and who knows, maybe even subscribing to your magazine if I like what I see) then give this some serious thought. I'm available to consult if you need some help with the whole RSS concept.

Thanks!
kinrowan

ongoing · Testing Backward

2005-01-20T05:35:00.000-06:00

ongoing · Testing Backward

I've never run into the particular problem that Tim encounters here, but that's not to say that I wouldn't - it seems a particularly easy mistake to make; once a method is stubbed out I think I as a developer tend to forget about it until I'm ready to fill it out, so it would be easy to rely on it to do something that it does in my brain but not yet in code.

The resolution discussed makes a great deal of sense, although I'm not sure that throwing an exception is necessary - one could just return the value "Method not implemented" - if that value is unacceptable you'll know soon enough.

Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit || kuro5hin.org

2005-01-19T14:45:00.000-06:00

Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit || kuro5hin.org

This is a really intersting and insightful article about procrastination and tools and habits that might make it better. Not a scientific study by any means, but a good primer and analysis of some practical thinking points about work and pleasure.

Interesting quote (no citation given):

Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00 am and begins to wind down around 3:30 pm.

I wonder if that's really true?

An interesting thing that I note after I read this is that the multi-tabbed interface in FireFox has increased my "go to the web" distraction time - although my increased usage of this tool has coincided with my increased usage of RSS technologies, which are a great distractor, so I'm not confident of a specific causality.

Anyway - quite an interesting read, and indicative of the best level of quality from kur0shin.

The original source can be found at Getting Back To Work: A Personal Productivity Toolkit :: MarkTAW.com

podcasting - a Whatis.com definition - see also: podcast, podcaster, podosphere

2005-01-18T08:53:00.000-06:00

podcasting - a Whatis.com definition - see also: podcast, podcaster, podosphere

Another "mainstream" hit for podcasting - it's the word of the day on WhatIs.com!

librarian.net : learn this word: folksonomy

2005-01-14T01:27:00.000-06:00

librarian.net : learn this word: folksonomy

This word is getting a lot of "press" these days. I'm curious to see where it goes, so I'm going to track its growth here. Here goes:

folksonomy at technorati - much easier to read than the RSS feed

2005-01-14: 232 posts matching folksonomy sorted by most recent. Query took 0.197 seconds
2005-01-28: 470 posts matching folksonomy sorted by most recent. Query took 0.721 seconds

Google Search: folksonomy

2005-01-14: Results 1 - 10 of about 17,200 for folksonomy. (0.20 seconds) - top of the stack, wikipedia
2005-01-28: Results 1 - 10 of about 40,600 for folksonomy. (0.10 seconds) - still wikipedia

folksonomy on pubsub - also much easier to read

2005-01-14: 0
2005-01-28: There are 32 messages in this digest.

Feedster RSS Search : folksonomy

2005-01-14: 6,612 results / Page 1 of 441
2005-01-28: 5,248 results / Page 1 of 350

more to come, I'm sure....
Update; 2005-01-28: I've got to think a little more about what these results mean; I'm not sure that he results from pubsub, technorati, or feedster mean much of anything yet. Need to ponder....

Too many subscription icons

2005-01-11T22:53:00.000-06:00

The "Yahoo" problem

It's probably just me, but after reading this post, I get the distinct impression that the only people who could possibly be thoughtful are one who agree with Dave Winer. Not only that, but they must agree both with Dave's solution and with the fact that there's a problem (surely a debateable premise).

I'm sure it's just me.

I am a Rave MP3 man now!

2004-12-03T12:25:00.000-06:00

Rave-MP SPORT: AMP256 – Flash based digital audio player 256MB, hi speed USB for fast music transfers

Just unpacked my new Rave Amp256 MP3 player, and I am no longer an RCA Lyra guy - I am a total Rave guy.

I played with the thing for, like, 10 minutes, and I'm already hooked!

Tons of info on the backlit screen
Tunes FM (though not too well, it seems)
records FM and voice
Plays by artist, album, genre
has the standard EQ presets as well as a 5-band
resumes from last position in track; I can't emphasize this enough. Even if it didn't have all the other stuff, this one thing would sell me. "You had me from 'Resume From Current Position'!"

By selling my soul and prostituting my ideals (i.e. buying from Walmart.com) I got it for less than my Lyra cost. Less than $50, in fact!. Thanks to Gizmodo and their pointer to CHAITGEAR MP3 Player "Deals of the Week” @ CHAITGEAR for turning me on to this - with persistence, (and a lovely, understanding, and supportive wife) I was able to get one while it was in stock.

This thingy rocks! Who needs an iPod?

MediaTalk discusses blogs

2004-12-03T10:49:00.000-06:00

Wisconsin Public Radio - Ideas Network Program Notes

Today at 5:00 PM in Wisconsin, USA, Dave Berkman of Wisconsin Public Radio will be talking with Professor Henry Farrell of the group blog Crooked Timber about how blogs are changing the face of journalism. The topic may be a little old, and has been in the media a lot over the last few months, but in my experience Dave is an insightful host and interviewer, so this may be worth a listen.

You can also listen to the archives via streaming - they're usually posted about an hour after the show is over. This one will be accessible at MediaTalk Audio Archives. Unfortunately they're only for RealPlayer (no podcasts yet).

I'll post some more information after I've had a chance to listen, next week.

Wisconsin Public Radio - Media Talk

MSN Spaces

2004-12-01T22:56:00.000-06:00

MSN Spaces

New blogosphere entry getting a lot of press. Apparently supposed to be supported by banner ads, but I didn't see any. Maybe they're only on the blogging tool?

I'll probably try this out sometime....

Dogfooding!

2004-11-30T13:41:00.000-06:00

Process.1

I absolutely love the idea of dogfooding; of having developers use the product their developing on a day-to-day basis. In fact, I can't see how any developer who's been through a tough roll-out to users can think otherwise - there are bugs you'll never find until you start to actually use the product.

That said, some of what Iain says here is easier said that done, especially in a corporate IT department. The developer's job functions are so far from the users that there's just no way you'll be able to use the software with anywhere even remotely approaching the intensity with which daily users use it. I suspect it's not even possible.

At my company we try to counter this by testing early and often, but even that's tough - the business leaders and subject-matter experts have their own full-time responsibilities and even getting a modicum of time from them is hard, let alone the kind of time that thorough testing requires. Extreme Programming offer some ideas of how to accomplish this, but those are not much of a solution at a company where there's not a high priority placed on testing.

My company also tries to work around this by assigning program managers and developers who have functional experience in the areas in question. This, however, has its own risks, as these folks are likely to make mistakes by making incorrect assumptions. This risk becomes ever greater as the work processes change in the functional areas and the IT workers become further and further removed from those processes.

Can this be overcome? I don't know. But I'd certainy like to find a way for the IT workers to use the software and components they're building.

Legalized marijuana case to the US Supreme Court

2004-11-29T08:48:00.000-06:00

News

Just another example of the current administration's hypocrisy regarding state's rights. The states can decide things for themselves as long as they follow the policies of the administration (either spoken or unspoken).

To be fair, past administrations pursued this form of drug war as well. They just weren't as hypocritical of the states rights side of things.

IT Conversations Wiki - Main.BusinessModel

2004-11-27T06:34:00.000-06:00

IT Conversations Wiki - Main.BusinessModel

Doug Kaye is requesting comments on models to make IT Conversations self-sustaining. If you have valuable input, please go there and give him some advice.

For myself, I hate the idea of ads in RSS content, including blogs. However, I do want Doug to be able to make a living doing what he's doing - he's obviously found something he loves to do and should be supported in his efforts. If the content is appealing enough for me I'll tolerate ads in RSS feeds of any kind. Ads have their own drawbacks from the providers side, though (like they probably aren't a viable business model yet).

As far as subscriptions go, for myself I don't like that idea at all. I listen to podcasts either on my work laptop or on a $50, 3-year old mp3 player. I can't afford a subscription, and there's no content out there that's necessary enough for me to stop feeding my cats to keep it. A micro-payment model might work for me - never tried it. That said, I still want Doug to make a living at this, and personally would rather lose the content for myself but have it still out there available and Doug making enough money to sustain himself than have it go away completely.

I say we just abolish money.

Textbook disclaimer stickers

2004-11-26T06:30:00.000-06:00

Textbook disclaimer stickers

These are pretty cool. A lot like the Downhill Battle CD Stickering Project. Sticker stuff to raise awareness.

Not that I'd suggest defacing property in order to prove a point. Seriously. Look, if you damage a product to prove your point then your point is easily dismissed. Remember those riots carried out be "peace activists" in protest of the 1st Gulf War? Those were pretty successful. Not.

Declaration of Independence banned at California school?

2004-11-25T07:57:00.000-06:00

memeorandum: Archive Edition for Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Reuters News Article

Here's a sticky wicket. Teacher is "banned" from using the Declaration of Independance in class.

Are this fellow's First Amendment rights being violated? Do First Amendment rights even apply when the issue is classroom materials (not political speech, by any means, or shouldn't be). The article refers to 5 - 10 % of the classroom docs containing references to Christianity - that doesn't seem outlandish; in point of fact, the founders did use Christian theology as a basis for much of their writing. However, many of the pertinent details of the case are absent from this post - does the teacher have a history of proselytization, for example? One of the follow ups to the memeorandum post has commentary by someone who actually read the lawsuit (which I have not) and indcates that the teacher may have been overly pushing the god aspect (ref: the comment). In fact, I'm not sure that the Declaration itself was banned as much as this particular teacher's use of it was to be closely watch, so the very headline is sensationalist.

These issues surrounding The Declaration of Independance seem to me to be substantially different than the issues surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance in several ways: 1) children aren't being forced or coerced into reciting the Declaration, and 2) the "under God" phrase in the Pledge has no historical basis whatsoever - it was inserted in the 1950's.

This was bound to come, and I think it shows a certain "liberal" disconnect with the majority of people in the US, but the questions it raises are important ones, and ones that are certain to be heard often in the next 4 years.

Podcasting Employment Notice

2004-11-24T11:01:00.000-06:00

Yahoo! Groups : ipodder-dev Messages : Message 2198 of 2198: From: theprimespot@a...

Date: Wed Nov 24, 2004 10:34 am

Subject: TPSradio seeks Blogging Podcaster from SoCaL (562)

I get these all the time on my BizTalk related mailing list, but this is the first one I've seen that is someone posting a job opening for a podcaster.

Talk about an early adopter!! There's nothing like viral distribution of technology!!!

activeRenderer News

2004-11-24T10:51:00.000-06:00

activeRenderer News: ""

activeRenderer is a very cool plug-in for Radio UserLand that uses OPML to generate expanding lists in dynamic html. Very neat application of OPML technology. If I ever get serious about building the OPML browser editor I'm thinking about building then I received Marc's permission to model my html after what his tool generates.

See examples of the technology at the site, or at Adam Curry's weblog.

Also some pretty cool api work at activeRenderer API

Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns

2004-11-24T08:54:00.000-06:00

Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit - Enterprise Integration Patterns

Interesting application of database and error correction procedures to a real-world scenario. This kind of thing would be a great starting point for a project analogy, or to explain to non-programmers the kinds of things that need to be considered in a specific processing model.

Also some good links from this page relating to integration patterns.

Feedster :: RSS Search Engine

2004-11-22T23:51:00.000-06:00

Feedster :: RSS Search Engine
No posts today - something frelled my feedster account and I was getting apparently random posts to the screen. I tried to separate the wheat from the chaff, but had to give up after a while. I'm convinced I had subscribed recently to a bogus feed of some sort, so I'm adding them back in one at a time.

This just goes to show how much I had come to rely on this medium to get me my information - I was completely lost without this resource today. Of course, it didn't help that I have an ear infection, but that's how it goes, I guess....

Kevin Sites Blog

2004-11-21T23:24:00.000-06:00

Kevin Sites Blog

Long post from Kevin Sites, but an important one describing his experiences filming the video of the marine shooting the unarmed Iraqi.

Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory

2004-11-21T23:00:00.000-06:00

Only a Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory

I'll have to say, this frightens me a little. Who knew?

Scobleizer: Defending Ballmer

2004-11-20T05:28:00.000-06:00

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Hmmm.

Fundamentally, I think Scoble gets it. It's certainly heartening that he's ambivalent about the issue. There's an space between patents and no patents that we should all strive to achieve. No investors means no money, no money means no inovation, no jobs, no new gadgets or software, and that's bad. No openness means you can only get any specific function from one vendor, and that's bad. It's one thing to protect the code that you've paid people to write, and I don't really have a problem with that - I'm tremendously glad that not every one does it, but it's OK if you feel you need to do it. But patenting clicking a button in a web page or asking for help from another application or other functional ideas is patently (ha ha) ridiculous.

If I see a cool function in a piece of software and I spend the time to parse out a way to do it with my own code then I ought to be able to do so. To say otherwise would be like saying that since Farenheit 451 is largely about book burning no one else can write a book about book burning without being sued. Fewer functional patents benefit both open and closed models, and there's still plenty of money to be made by doing it earlier, or better, or offering more support or integration.

It's Steve Ballmer that doesn't get it. Threats and FUD will lose you customers - even his source for the statements he made apparently disagrees with him (Author of Linux Patent Study Says Ballmer Got It Wrong). C'mon, Steve, get with the program. Microsoft doesn't need to threaten customers, it needs to win them over by proving it can do things better, faster, and more securly than it's open source rivals. And it needs to realize that having the competitors out there will make Microsoft do better work in the long run. Accept the competition, respect it, and it will make you better over all. Belittle it and you end up looking little yourself. Microsoft has problems in its own closet, and a case like the Kodak vs. Java case could be on Microsoft's horizon as well.

Excerpts from Steve Ballmer's statements can be seen here. Additionally, I do believe that this is all a little overblown...

More resources:
Software Patents Gone Bad
The Public Patent Foundation
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: Protecting investment???
Software patents
KasLog » Scoble Replaced by Lawyer?

The Doc Searls Weblog : Google vs Google Scholar

2004-11-19T09:41:00.000-06:00

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, November 19, 2004

Interesting comment here. I'm curious how Google is differentiating between these result sets. Skimmed the FAQ but didn't see anything obvious - I'll have to go over it better.

MSNBC - Specter gains crucial support to head panel

2004-11-19T06:08:00.000-06:00

MSNBC - Specter gains crucial support to head panel

OK, some of this stuff sounds disastrous.

It's meaningless to have a moderate Republican in the chairship of the Judicial committee if everything he says (and possibly does) is scripted by the party - in much the same way that the very democratic / republican idelas this country was founded on are quashed by the power of two entrenched political machines - and that's what they are, machines.

So Mr. Specter is willing to move "...nominees [to] quick committee hearings and early committee votes" and has "...no reason to believe that I’ll be unable to support any individual President Bush finds worthy." What happened to the idea that we should talk about these folks before they start ajudicating our laws?

Not only that, but Specter declaimed his potential support for changing Senate filibuster rules to only needing a simple majority to break a filibuster. This puts an overwhelming amount of power in the hands of the currently most powerful political party (whichever one it is) - too much power for any of these idiots to be trusted with. I wouldn't even trust my fav, Senator Feingold from Wisconsin, to hold that kind of power. And here's what I see as the next step. In 4 years the Dems will control the Senate and somehow the Republicans will "reconsider" these rules, and convince some well-meaning Democrats to change the rules back.

Bill Frist (who is a prime moving force behind some of the reactionary principles being followed by the current majority) is a megalomaniac. I wonder whether he took the Hippocratic oath in Medical School. If he did, what version? Was it one that states "Above All, Do No Harm"? Or what about

"My professional judgement will be exercised as independently as possible and not be influenced by political pressures nor by factors such as the social standing of the patient. I will not put personal profit or advancement above my duty to patients." [ from The Modern Oath of Hippocrates, Appendix I, para 3 ]

Regardless, he has forsaken it.

In all honesty, I hope Mr. Specter can hold on to some of his individuality and that his presence on the committee will serve as a moderating influence.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Home working trial proves popular

2004-11-19T05:46:00.000-06:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | Home working trial proves popular

I'd love to see my company do something like this.

We're pretty flexible as a rule to working athome when a specific need arises, but it would be nice to see some trials longer than this of a regular work-at-home schedule. Not 5 days a week, maybe 2? There are definitely things that are harder to do from home in my line of work, so still having some tim ein the office would be key.

Wired News: Advertisers Muscle Into RSS

2004-11-18T09:12:00.000-06:00

Wired News: Advertisers Muscle Into RSS

OK, my initial response to this was B*LLSH*T. I accept on its face that ads in RSS are inevitable, but don't have to like it.

I was reading a little bit on Signal vs. Noise about their enthusiam for this technology (see post).

I was also seeing a little about this at Doc Searls' IT Garage, which has some pretty good comments.

I guess my view right now is that if you want to make some money from your on-line work, so be it - I don't necessarily have a problem with money making on blogs. People who stick a bunch of ads on personal blogs are a little over the top, but if you have a corporate blog, or a journalistic one (like Engadget or Gizmodo) then ads are an accepted part of getting the content. However, an RSS feed isn't the same thing as that content. The best RSS posts have me control-clicking in FireFox faster than you could say "Boo!" (were you so inclined). Then I'm at the site, see the content and the links and the other media, and the ads.

Let me put it this way. If the content you're spewing in an RSS feed isn't good enough to get me to come look at your site then you don't deserve my attention to your ads.

All of that said, I'm still ambivalent. I haven't seen any RSS feeds with ads yet, so it's a little hard for me to judge. I was going to subscribe to the Signal vs. Noise feed because it sounded interesting, but noting that they're ad-stuffing their feed led me to think again. Now I'm thinking a third time, and I think I'll try it just to see what it's like.

Come see a brain trust in action

2004-11-16T08:21:00.000-06:00

I'm a frelling genius!

It only took me 4 weeks of listening to podcasts every day in my car to discover the wonders of technology I already owned.

When I finally woke up, I grabbed the portable CD player -> auto cassette player adapter that came with a cd player we bought 4 years ago, plugged it into my Lyra, and now I can listen to podcasts over my car stereo system.

A real brain-trust goin' on here....

2004-11-14T07:39:00.000-06:00

I found this picture of Dave Slusher last night. Strangely enough, it was on a McDonald's Happy Meal. How'd he manage that?

Evil Genius Podcaster?

More FireFox goodness

2004-11-12T21:05:00.000-06:00

mozdev.org - : /pipermail/reloadevery/2004-November/000063

I'm definitely coming along on the FireFox front.

The link above is the ReloadEvery author's tip to adjust the install.rdf file in the .xpi archive and reinstall. Worked like a charm, so I'm ReloadEvery enabled again - what a relief!

Also, I've replaced the GoogleBar with the A9 search toolbar (available here) which gives me the A9 search and Google to boot. What's not to love (OK, besides the fact that it's by Amazon)? So I'm down to missing DownThemAll. Not too shabby!

What a load of hooey.

2004-11-12T20:36:00.000-06:00

Indexed Forever » But the TV show or the band?

I like Adam's podcast OK, although I wouldn't call it the best that's out there. Neither, I suspect, would Adam. But this fellow loses authority with me when he says:

"the first time I saw the Real World or Survivor – this is big idea, and they nailed it"

"Their [Howard Stern's or NPR's] content is heavily edited and only occasionally interesting."

Sure Survivor and the Real World were popular, but that doesn't make them insightful, valuable, or even good. I think many people would agree that there's more to a good TV show than its money making abilities and popularity; even many of the people that I know that watch(ed) these shows decried them at the same time.

I agree that Adam has a hand in (all right, a really big hand in) something truly huge, but he's only part of it. Podcastiing is the biggest thing since Survivor, not Adam. (Sorry Dave)

Another one down!

2004-11-11T07:59:00.000-06:00

mozdev.org - copyurlplus: index

Another of my "necessary" FireFox extensions has been updated to work with 1.0. My FF life is getting better day-by-day!!

Scripting News: 11/10/2004

2004-11-10T09:22:00.000-06:00

Scripting News: 11/10/2004

Dave, that's what you get for having such a popular blog. Me, I don't have any such problems.

Just kidding

Mozilla - Home of the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Suite

2004-11-10T08:42:00.000-06:00

Mozilla - Home of the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird and the Mozilla Suite

OK, one day (almost) into the new installation and I'm a littl happier.

It so happens that 2 of the 14 extensions that FF1.0 broke are in fact not even needed: I used SwitchProxy (and wasn't thrilled with it, but it was all I had) and TabBrowserPrefs. The funtionality of both seem to have been built into the new FF release, and the proxy functionality of FF exceeds that of SwitchProxy for my uses.

Also, the WebDeveloper toolbar extension had an update that work fine in 1.0.

I'm still a little annoyed that the update process wasn't more automated, but that's milk spilled under the bridge I suppose.

There are still 4 extensions I'm missing a lot: ReloadEvery, DownThemAll, GoogleBar, and CopyURL+. Once those are updated I'll be pretty happy.

Belated congrats to the FF team!

.NET Undocumented: Office XML

2004-11-09T22:20:00.000-06:00

.NET Undocumented: Office XML blog post
CNET News original article

OK, here's some really cool news to offset my frustrations with FireFox from earlier.

It's great that M$ is finally starting to see a little of the light when it comes to open standards and the value thereunto. Hope they keep it up....

It is interesting to note, however, that this is an EU decision; no mention of if MS will follow through state-side.

Also interesting to note is that they will not be sending these formats to a third-party standards org, but will keep developping them in-house. Some malarkey about maintaining compatibility with previous version. Seriously, though that's a valid issue, I think that more widely-accepted and open standards is more important....

Slashdot:: FireFox 1.0 released

2004-11-09T09:28:00.000-06:00

While I'm excited that the release version of FF is out, I think the FireFox org kinda screwed this one up.

I've only just installed the newest version, and I'm hoping for good things.

However, 1.0 broke almost all of the extensions that I have installed. Now, I expected at leat some of that, but not nearly as much as I got (literally, 14 out of 17 don't load). I'm also aware that this is mostly a problem for the extension developers. Where I think FF messed up was not segregating that extensions site from the site that's managing the 1.0 downloads. Since they know that many of the extensions wouldn't work OOTB, they could have at least made it easier to fix that problem.

The main (only?!?) reason that I use FF instead of another non-IE browser is the extensions. The browser is much less useful to me without them.

Also, seems like this page doesn't display well in the new version - I wonder what's broked?

grrrrr.

Looking for art sites with feeds

2004-11-07T23:26:00.000-06:00

My wife opened a feedster account tonight, and we're looking for sites/blogs about the fine arts (mostly visual; painting, sculpture - any period) that have feeds she can subscribe to.

Contact me with suggestions.

Thanks!
k.

Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States | The Register

2004-11-07T08:34:00.000-06:00

Reach out and sneer: Dem radicals speak to the Red States | The Register

Here's a good example of getting it wrong, Democrats. While what is said here may be true, the message is wrong-headed. This will not win people over. The folks talked about here don't want to feel like idiots - they want to feel worthy. And that's going to keep them coming back to the Red party because it makes them feel good, even if it is a lie.

Wise up, Dems. Don't treat the 50+% that voted for Bush as if they're stupid, or they'll continue to behave that way.

Boing Boing: iPod Download can work again if you fix what Apple broke

2004-11-02T04:51:00.000-06:00

Boing Boing: iPod Download can work again if you fix what Apple broke

How great is this?? Simply hack the hex in the iTunes binary, change one character, and you're all set to run your iPod addons again!

Up yours, Apple-fascisits!

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Sports (Winning Tradition)

2004-11-01T13:02:00.000-06:00

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Sports (Winning Tradition)

Probably the only time you'llever hear me say this:

GO PACK!!!

Packers over 'Skins 20 - 7; Kerry wins the White House!!!!

Todays is the last day Podcast Reviews will be posted at the House

2004-11-01T07:18:00.000-06:00

Today is the last day I will be cross-posting podcast reviews from The New, New Podcast Review to The House of the Hanged Man. If you're still looking here for them, please go there. If you're still subscribed to the Atom Feed for the purpose of seeing podcast reviews, please see the syndication section of TNNPR to choose your new poison.

After today I will also be removing any podcast reviews that do not have comments on them from this blog - they have all been reposted at the other site, but comments didn't make it, so I'm going to leave those couple here.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep blogging here about stuff-not-podcast-related, but we'll see how my time works out....

gmail invites

2004-10-30T16:52:00.000-05:00

I tried this once before, but I'll try again and see if I get better responses.

I have gmail invites to give out if anyone still needs one. Email me if you'd like one. Include first and last name, or I'll have to make them up.

monster of all podcast feeds

2004-10-28T04:37:00.000-05:00

If any of you all are crazy enough to be thinking about syndicating Dave Winer's RSS feed of the last 100 podcasts (like me), be forewarned. Last night it pulled down 736 Mb of data to my hard drive by itself (not to mention the additional 200Mb + from my other feeds).

Wow.

Podcast Reviews have moved

2004-10-26T07:17:00.000-05:00

The podcast reviews have been moved. Their new home is The New, New Podcast Review. Please update your bookmarks/favorites. Also, if you've subscribed to my Atom feed, please remember to change the pointer to that feed to the new one.

In the interests of a smooth transition, I will be posting reviews in both spots for about a week. After that point I will remove all the podcast reviews from this location.

I will be continuing to post other content not directly related to podcast reviews here, so feel free to stay subscribed or come back and visit.

Thanks;
kinrowan

Thinking about moving....

2004-10-24T07:18:00.000-05:00

I don't know how many folks are syndicating this stuff, so I really have no idea if this will effect anyone at all, but I'm thinking of moving the podcast reviews to a new blog location.

Since blogger.com doesn't have a mechanism for me to classify my posts by type or category, it has ocurred to me that if people are actually reading this stuff they may have a hard time parsing out the reviews. I haven't been able to find any free weblogging solutions that do allow for that, and the one solution I thought up was to move the reviews to a different blog at blogger.com so that they would all be there with no other cruft to distract from that content.

If anyone out there is has thoughts about this, or another suggestion outside the range of my lackluster imagination, please post a comment or email me

Thanks!
k.

Podcast Review: The Dragon Page Live Fire Show

2004-10-24T06:44:00.000-05:00

Format: Talk
Content: Sci-Fi talk, commentary, and reviews
Rating:
What I'm going to do: subscribe
Typical Length: varies; 40 - 50 minutes

This is a podcast of a weekly radio show out of KFYI in Phoenix.

The hosts, Michael Mennenga and Evo Terra, have a good routine down; their interaction is smooth and witty, and they know a lot about where science fiction istoday; way more than I know, that's for sure.

Since this is a re-cast of a publicly broadcast radio show, I think you can expect the content to be work-safe, and you can certainly expect professional level production quality.

The only drawback that I see to this podcast is that listeners to the podcast don't seem to have any way to interact with the hosts. In fact, it's not necessarily that interesting to listen to a radio show call in that happened some time in the past. The positive side of this is that some of the podcasts have been editted to drop some of the commercials, so we don't have to sit through all of that.

The shows often have interviews with some science fiction luminaries (e.g. Terry Brooks and Nancy Kress in one show) and their conversation deals not just with the science fiction world, but also on the regions where science fiction impinges on today's culture.

Subscribe to mp3. Their webpage has a lot more information about sci fi as well.

Podcast suggestion

2004-10-23T08:14:00.000-05:00

I want to find a podcast of kid's music - preferably not freighted with copyright concerns.

I know, some of you will say I should start my own. Yeah, but ... from personal experience I know I'm a sucky broadcaster.

Fred Sampson's Radio Weblog

2004-10-23T07:29:00.000-05:00

This fellow, Fred Sampson, mentions my blog in a post. He also comments that I'm moving too slow:

"But at the rate he's going he'll never keep up."

He's right - I don't have time to listen to the ones I like and the new ones at the same time. I also don't want to review someone's first few attempts and pan them for quality while they're trying to improve (see my post about Tech Rag Tear Out), which means that one listen for the new stuff isn't good enough. And with most 'casts coming in at > 20 minutes, it'll be tough.

Luckily, I don't want to review them all; my goal is to pick a few that have promise because of content or quality and review those. While I try to keep my writing concise, I want to give enough details to have someone be able to make a judgement based on my thoughts.

I think I'm going to start making better use of the Last 100 list. We'll see how it goes.

The post that Fred's responding to mentions that someone would be well-served to have a site that rates podcasts objectively with a 5 star system. The problem with that system is that it's not objective - my review is by definition subjective, and if it's simplified to a 5-star rating them people might miss a podcast that's perfect for them based on my review (not that anyone's actually going to listen to me, but you know what I mean). However, maybe a 5-star rating would be helpful, I dunno. If anyone has any thoughts on that I'd like to hear them.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts, Fred!

Guerilla gadget terminates TVs

2004-10-22T09:09:00.000-05:00

Future Tense has some info about TV-B-Gone.

The gizmmo is pretty interesting (I've seen stuff aout it in other places as well), but the interview in the audio is even more interesting - they interview the inventor, who compares TVs in restaurants to second-hand smoke.

More about TV-B-Gone at Gizmodo, Alice and Bill, Engadget, and, of course, Slashdot

Dave Slusher critiques the critic

2004-10-22T06:17:00.000-05:00

Wow.
Dave Slusher actually spent part of his 'cast yesterday talking about my blog. I was floored; thanks, Dave!

One of the things Dave talked about was the name "podcasting." I was really hoping he would, and I'm really glad he did. I had a few more thoughts in response to Dave's comments:

Dave made a point about the origin of the name. The thing is, this medium is about the future, and as such it doesn't make much difference where the term came from, as far as I can see. I was listening to a 'cast last night (the first post of Wizards of Technology), where they even called it iPod-casting. Grr.
Dave also commented that he felt that much of the animosity against the term was representative of Apple-hatred. Obviously I can't speak for others (I didn't even know others had the same concerns when I voiced them), but I don't possess any Apple-hatred. I was a long-time Mac devotee up until about 8 years ago when I started working in a corporate (read: Windows) enviroment. I even learned AutoCAD on the Mac, which is saying something.
Dave further mentioned that he thought that the current 'casting craze was fueled by the name and the 'casting wouldn't be where it was without it. I suspect that Dave doesn't mean that in as one-sided a manner as his oral comments might suggest. There is by no means a direct causal influence, and to believe otherwise is to engage in a fallacy (Cum Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc). I don't really think Dave believes that (or even necessarily that he actually said that), but that's what I heard.
Finally, Dave says that "Podcasting" is the best term for the technology and that nothing will uproot it. I'm afraid he's right about that; I think it's a done deal - it's ingrained at this point and is unlikely to be changed. It doesn't help matters that none of the alternative terms are nearly as sexy as "podcasting" (I know "RSSAudio" rolls off the tounge like peanut butter). I agree that "podcasting" is a meme-itic and sexy term, positively perfect for a marketing effort. Still, it rankles me. I don't think I'm the one to come up with a term to beat "podcasting." But I still don't have to like it.

All of that said, I'll step off now. I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that.

In any case, Dave, thanks again for the plug! I appreciate it, and will strive to live up to it.

Added a counter...

2004-10-21T17:53:00.000-05:00

In the sidebar, look for the icon.

Some may have privacy concerns; if so, see the provider's privacy policy.

Chose it because I likes the icon.

Tidbit for RCA Lyra MP3 player owners

2004-10-21T13:22:00.000-05:00

A few weeks back when I was staring to listen to a lot of RSSAudio downloads, I was interested to know if I was burning battery power with my Lyra when I had it connected to my laptop via USB. Stupidly enough, I sent RCA support an email asking about it, expecting that they'd know. After a little bit of back-and-forth (not too bad, really), they responded to say "We don't understand what you're asking, call us to get an answer to your question."

After quite literally 5 minutes of soul-draining questioning for them to be able to get me into their database (you know what I mean, what's your name, phone number, address, first child's middle name... ad nauseum - the poor fellow on the other end didn't seem to be able to get past the "My phone is unlisted" statement - it didn't fit his data structure) I finally asked my 15 second question:

"Where is my Lyra getting it's power when it's connected via USB."

The answer I got back went something like:

"It takes part of its power from the USB port and part from the battery."

That sounded like an "I don't really know, but don't want to ask" answer, but I was burned out with this at the time, so I said thanks and hung up.

It wasn't until a few days ago that it occurred to me to actually try it out for myself. So I removed the battery, plugged it into the USB port, and voila! It ran!

I still don't know if it consumes battery power if you have it plugged in and the battery in at the same time (it certainly might), but I just open the battery door when I connect it and can leave it connected for hours.

New Linux Distro

2004-10-20T22:08:00.000-05:00

Well, not really new, but new to me. It's called Ubuntu and it looks intriguing. They've got an awful lot of nice sentiments and philosophies on their website, and it looks like it's packaged pretty slickly.

It's based on Debian, which is what my current Linux server is running. Of course, I haven't even had that machine on in more than a month, so it's obviously not very critical to my day-to-day computing needs. I've been talking with a friend who has suggested that I try Mandrake, which I may do. Since I've put some Ubuntu disks on request (they ship them for free!) and since the Ubuntu shipment won't be until after the next stable release around the end of the month, I may have time to do both.

One thing I found interesting was the quote:

"...we do not see free and open source software as either distinct or incompatible."

I agree that it needn't be incompatible, but think that the philosophies of the two organizations (both of which Ubuntu referenced) are certainly distinct. They also have the interesting idea of offering bouties (like a stipend) for certain open source development tasks.

RSSAudio Review: Evil Genius Chronicles

2004-10-20T05:58:00.000-05:00

Format: talk, with some music
Content: podcasting (mostly, for right now)
Rating: subscribe

Dave Slusher, at Evil Genius Chronicles talks about podcasting. A lot. Just ask Russell Beattie. And that's OK. Just ask Dave.

Seriously though, I''m not here to give Dave a hard time about talking about podcasting a lot. It's his feed, and as he rightly says, if you don't like it - unsubscribe.

What I do want to talk about is the high quality of Dave's RSSAudio feed. Dave's one of the grandfathers of the new audio broadcasting movement - having been posting audio feeds since at least late September, 2004, [editorial comment: Dave tells me his first audio post was on August 20th, almost 2 months ago. That makes his one of the very first in this wave, along with Dave Winer's post starting in June] which in this technology is a very long time. He's been mentioned in public forums by Steve Gillmor and Robert Scoble and the like, and with good reason.

Dave's feed is well produced and interesting. He's personable and has an easy manner of speaking, with few hesitations; he's obviously either a great extemporaneous speaker or he's got a script to work from. He's also often very funny and self-deprecating, and is insightful to boot. He has a lot to say about the technology and culture of RSSAudio feeds. His posts are also well edited, and he integrates audio of other things he's heard (IT Conversations in particular) and music into his shows quite well.

I'm sure this 'cast, with it's rich and varied talk about 'casting and the technology behind it, is a great inspiration to new RSSAudio creators, and Dave's willing to help new creators set up their system to enable creating their feeds. He wants to help people, as he says, "eat his lunch." I don't want to eat your lunch, Dave, unless it's a nice grilled cheese with bacon on rye, then I'll take it. What I do want is for Dave to keep producing, so we can keep listening.

Dave's posts usually run around 30 minutes. You can subscribe to the Evil Genius Chronicles RSSAudio feed as mp3s or bittorrent.

RSSAudio (or podcasting, if you must) Reviews

2004-10-20T01:12:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to a lot of the new RSSAudio content that's become available as part of the "podcasting" wave that's taking the web by storm right now, and it's ocurred to me that one thing that's missing is some reviews of the content of these feeds. As with any new media, and even moreso a type of media with this low a barrier to entry, the content is likely to be of widely varied quality - especially while the technology is in its nascency.

I've casted about (ha ha) for a way to contribute to the dialog springing up around this new content, and I've settled on this as one way to contribute. I have no interest in creating any audio content myself, but like most consumers of the content, I have a keen interest in content quality and the feedback that will help the content acheive the kind of quality I'm looking for.

I'm not doing this to bust on anyone's effort - as I said, I have no interest or motivation to do what you guys who are creating the content are doing. In fact, I have nothing but respect for you and your efforts (and guts), and so will try to be polite and respectful at all times. I'm sure there will be the RSSAudio equivalent of Web Pages That Suck and other sites that are more troll-like soon enough, and I have no enthusiasm for filling that role.

I also claim no expertise in the subject other than that I have opinions and am willing to share them.

My thought is that I'll review two feeds at a time, one new one that is in its infancy (within the first couple of posts, probably) and which won;t have much of an in-depth review because the creator will still be fleshing out his/her style and methodology, not to mention working out the bugs. I'll also try to review another more established feed. All, of course, subject to change.

Frequency? Who knows??

First post tomorrow....

Open Source in the Enterprise

2004-10-19T13:08:00.000-05:00

I listened to the audiocast of The Gilmore Gang's conversation with Kim Polese at IT Conversations and I was struck by a couple of things:

this is really exciting - it's been obvious for some time that Open Source adoption in the enterprise requires a support and service structure and that it must have the "one throat to choke" feature alluded to in the conversation.
the idea that the closed source vendors in going to go away is ridiculous - I'm not sure anyone was saying that that's going to happen, but there was some discussion of that concept

Some one (I can't tell who - don't know the players well enough to recoginize voices yet) mentioned that hundreds of the kinds of companies like SpikeSource before deep adoption of this kind of package is likely across the enterprise market. I can't agree more, but I still don't think that open source software is going to put closed source software out of business. And I, for one, am glad of it. An awful lot of developers would be out of jobs if closed source vendors went away.

I used to feel like a lot of the "Free Software" bunch did, that software should be free for everyone. Now I don't think so. There's a place in our world for people who make their livings writing software, and to make a living at it, someone has to be making a profit. I seriously doubt that many of the people writing code for the Open Source software are making aliving doing it, just like few of the developers who are writing software for the Shareware market make their living at it. It's great that they have the time and energy to do this (I know I don't, nor the knowledge), but they need to pay the rent and stock the cupboards, too.

I think the best interaction between the open and closed source worlds is when the open source stuff can give enterpises (and users) some real choices (and by that I mean choices that are saleable to CIOs and financial and legal people and that don't require a huge amount of internal IT dollars to support and implement). When this happens, the closed source vendors are pushed to create some great software - and
let's face it, much of the truly great software out there is written by closed source vendors. They're pushed to be more concerned about their customer base and to be more standards-compliant. And in order for the open source software to fill this niche, we'll need those hundred companies like Kim's.

Thanks for the great conversation, Doug and Steve (et. al.)! And thanks SpikeSource!

More iPodder....

2004-10-14T06:30:00.000-05:00

OK, I was wrong. iPodder does not work from behind the proxy server at my place of business. It runs through the check process, but doesn't find anything (and doesn't error out or let me know that it can't connect, either - grr.). It also doesn't allow one to select a threshold for downloads (by date or size or anything), although I may be using a slightly out-of date version and this may be fixed. I'll save any further feature/bug rants until after I verify this.

On another note, some of the Daily Source Code and Trade Secrets audio casts aren't downloading successfully. I spent most of the day yesterday with my laptop connected to my company's open and unproxied wireless connection trying to catch up my downloads to little avail, and then again last night - there seem to be about 15
downloads that aren't coming down, and since these all take a while to download that's a little frustrating.

I wonder if anyone else is as annoyed at the label "podcasting" as I am? What better term might there be for this?

Stop me if you've heard this one....

2004-10-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

Saw this on /. and thought it amusing.

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her
altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him,
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an
hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air
balloon approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet
above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude
and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude."

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Democrat."

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is
technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your
information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to
me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you're
going. You've risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot
air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you
expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position
you were in before we met but, somehow, now it's my fault.

iPodder results

2004-10-11T19:28:00.000-05:00

I downloaded and installed iPodder from iPodder.org over the weekend. IPodder worked well; it was very easy to install and configure new feeds to be downloaded to my laptop. It also seemed to work just fine through the
firewall at my place of work, which is somewhat unusual for many internet-based applications, which are often blocked or can't negotiate the authentication at the firewall. I can't say for certain that it worked because due to circumstances beyond my control (having to do with a bat flying around the inside of my house) I didn't have time to check the contents of the downloads folders before I left for work this morning, but the timestamp on the audio-blog from today leads me to believe that it as retreived from work and not from home. I'll check with more thoroughness tomorrow.

I did have a few minor concerns with the iPodder application, however. You cannot use the UI to set the location of the downloads folder, like you can in many Windows apps. I could alter the location of the install, but couldn't change the location of the data/download directory. It's been so long since I've operated a Mac (OS 7.1, anyone?) that I don't remember if that platform typically allowed for user-definable application directories. I also don't know if iPodder was developed for the Mac OS moreso than the Windows OS (Windows, Mac, Linux, and PocketPC versions are all available at the download page), but have the imporession that Mac might have been the first version - maybe because the iPod is an Apple platform.

My other issue is that the taskbar icon only gives you options to Exit or Check your feeds and doesn't give you the option to show the configuration window. If you open the shortcut to the application again you get another instance of the app.

These both seem to be pretty minimal changes - I may try to pick up enough Python and brush up on my rather shaky Java enough to patch these "problems". If I'm wise, however, I'll realize that there's no chance I'll actually get to this, so I'll post a comment somewhere to let the development team know about this feedback, and they can decide to implement changes or not. More likely I'll convince myself that
I'll get to it and end up not doing anything about it at all.

In order to get iPodder to work with my Lyra, I used Jake Luddington's guide to using iPodder with Windows Media Player. Thanks to Robert Scoble for the link. It works pretty well, heavily leveraging some of the automation available in WMP to monitor iPodder's downloads folder and create an autoplaylist of the recent contents of that folder that can then be synced with your MP3 player with considerable ease. The only drawback to this process for me is that I often put several hours of my current audio book on my Lyra, and if I want to listen to one of the audio-blogs I have to navigate to it through the Lyra's semi-convenient hardware UI. That, however, is a limitation of my Lyra and my usage of it, and in no way lessens the usefulness of
Jake's guide or method.

My last irritation with this experience was the content of the intro to iPodder audio-blog entry that gets downloaded by default when you install iPodder and sync the first time. Adam Curry introduces the platform, and his post is so heavily iPod slanted that it left a bad taste in my mouth for hours after listening. Or maybe that was the lukewarm coffee.

Whew! Long post tonight!

Until next time....

Finished the Sabriel series yesterday

2004-10-09T07:12:00.000-05:00

I finished listening to the last book in the Sabriel series yesterday, titled Abhorsen.

The sense of how well-written a book is is often hard to discern from
an audio book of the work; it's sometimes difficult to determine
whether you're enjoyment of the book comes from the reading or from
the writing, especially when the reading is done well. I would never
claim, for instance, that I'm knowledgeable about a book like Conrad's
The Heart of Darkness by listening to even a well-read audio
version.

However, Sci Fi and Fantasy are well-suited to the audio book medium.
Since the writing is more often focused on plot and character, it's
perhaps a little easier to tell good writing of this sort by listening
than for some other kinds of literature.

In any case, back to the work at hand.

This was an excellently written series (the above caveats admitted).
Characters are well-developed, and the plot is riveting - I could
barely "put it down" (that is to say, take off my headphones). In
addition, it was incredibly well read by Tim
Curry, who performed excellently. I'll have to look for more
books he's read.

I've determined that this is a great way to spend my commuting hour
each day, although I do sometimes miss NPR, and am certainly
less well-informed than I was when I listened to that twice daily.

Next up: The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman, read by an
entire cast - a new experience for me.

Why I hate the term "podcasting"

2004-10-08T08:07:00.000-05:00

That term is like calling weblogging Mac-blogging. It's too brand-specific.

Listen. I don't own an iPod. I don't intend to buy one; they're too expensive for my pocketbook. I do have a small MP3/WMA player, an RCA Lyra 1021A with a 256 MB SD Card, for a total of 300 MB space, or about 11 hours of audio. And I use it to listen to Audio Blogs like Adam Curry's Daily Source Code.

The term "podcasting" indicates that this revolution is only for the owners of iPods, and this seems reductive and exclusive. Dave Winer subscribes to this view, as evidenced by his recent post on podcasting.

Harold Gilcrist seems to be a little more open - he defines it with relationship to the iPodder software. But still. The term has got to go. It's incorrect and misleading (although I'm sure that Apple loves it).

Robert Scoble has called Dave to task, indicating that there are many kinds of MP3 players that will work, and Ipodder.org also seems to indicate that iPodder will work with other MP3 players. I'm going to load it up and give it a shot.

Now I've gone and done it...

2004-10-07T08:47:00.000-05:00

After some time of sneering at the blogger nation, it seems like I've thrown in the towel.

I've blogged a blog.

My opinion before

I've been thinking recently about how the blogosphere seems to be a bunch of useless navel-gazers. There's a lot of talk about how important blogging is, how it's the next revolution in media and that it's the movement that's going to change the way the public interacts with the internet annd the traditional media (or, alternatively, that it already has done these things). But then I would look at what's being uoted, and it's all other bloggers. Seemed a little too self-reflexive, if you know what I mean.

A quick example is Dave Winer. A look at his posts for today shows that all of them thus far have to do with blogging. Yesterday shows 19 posts, of which 11 are blogging related. Now I realize that this is a slanted selection; Dave's extremely hot on blogging right now and has a lot to say about it. He's also involved in quite a few blogging-related projects that are high up in his thinking (his podcasts with Adam Curry and BloggerCon II, to name a few), but still, his blog is highly regarded, well-read, and influential.

I'm also aware that this is a miniscule sampling of the blogoshpere, that there are many blogs out there that never mention another blog. I'm also aware that there's some validity in the idea that blogging is changing/has changed the mainstream media's hold on the American intellect (the CBS Bush memo debacle being a case in point). None of that changes the fact that I'm tierd of reading people blogging about blogging or about blog entries in someone else's blog. Enough already! This is just navel-gazing at it's boring worst.

My Opinion now

Partly after having blogged my first entry about someone else's blog entry, but mostly after having thought my previous objections through more carefully while writing this entry, I've come to believe a little differently. I still believe Dave Winer might be taking the blog-centric stuff a litle too far, but that's his right - I can remove his feed if I get really irritated, and since I typically view his stuff in a full-text feed on feedster I get to peruse it really quickly and only waste my time on stuff that seems worth wasting my time on. And the community (if there is such a thing) needs to have such proponents/advocates the way American politics needs Ralph Nader (OK, the positive parts of Nader, not the ruinous ones) - someone on the edges, pushing the thinking about the technology and its effects to the forefront: an extremist, so to speak. Do we need conferences about blogging? I don't think so, but obviously many do.

The more important conclusion that I came to is that this is simply the natural evolution of the merging of blogging more and more into the public conscience. It's the blogging version of hyperlinking to other web-sites. It's the same concept that forms a net of inter-connectedness across the world-wide web, which is what makes the www so powerful and important. Maybe this is obvious in retrospect, but there you have it; I'm dense.

So yesterday I blogged a post from Cory Doctorow. His post ended up changing a policy on a web-site that I'd never even heard of. I doubt very much that my post had anything substantial to do with it, nor, most likely, did my comment to them about their policy. But the aggregate of Cory's post changed the policy, and that's what mattered.

I've seen the enemy, and he is me.

SNAP changes linking policy

2004-10-06T19:43:00.000-05:00

Based on Cory's post (and my comments, ha), Bill Gross from SNAP has already removed the offensive policy.

Excellent.

Link to Cory's post.

Stupid linking policy on SNAP

2004-10-06T17:16:00.000-05:00

I just got this post from Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing (link). I think he's right - no linking policy this stupid should go unchallenged.

Go to their feedback page (link) and tell 'em about it. Here's what I said:

I will never use your search engine until you change your linking policy. The very life of the WWW is based in the interconnections made within it, and you are standing in its way.

I think Cory should post this advice as well....

Savebetamax Call-in Day Today!

2004-09-14T06:19:00.000-05:00

Today is Downhill battle's Savebetamax call in day. I am scheduled to call 3 senators at 10:17 this am (10:17? yes, 10:17).

Didn't know much about Savebetamax until I saw it referenced on Slashdot (direct link at Savebetamax), but it seems like it's currently the best defense against the INDUCE act and its proponents. What's the INDUCE act, you say? It's the RIAA/MPAA's custom written bill intended to keep anyone from developing any technology that might possibly ever be used to "induce" someone to defeat copy protection schemes. Like the people who produce Sharpie markers. Seriously (maybe). One of the many problems with the act is that it's worded so vaguely that since Sharpies can be used to defeat some copy protection schemes, the company that makes them could be sued under the terms of the act. There have been suggestions of revisions to the INDUCE act to clarify some of the language, but it's still a remarkably chilling attack on fair use principles.
The Supreme Court's "Betamax" decision (full text) determined that even though a particular technology could be used for illegal activities (such as copyright infringement) did not mean that the technology itself could be outlawed, so long as it has legitimate uses.
In any case, one of the interesting things about the call-in day today is that I'm scheduled to call 3 senator's offices, but none of them are my senators. I'm curious about this - I mean why should they even listen to me? I don't vote for them and have basically no recourse against them should they not act as I request. I'm going to call, since I signed up to do so, but my email to Downhill Battle has as yet gone unanswered.

In other news, to day is also primary election day for state and local elections in my neck of the woods. Nobody terribly important on the ballot I'm going to vote on (just a State Senate race), and I seriously considered using my vote as a poison vote in the Republican Senate primary (since my state has an open primary), but even if that kinds of thing were to make a difference, I'd have no idea who to vote for. Anyway, civic duty and all of that....

Links:
Stanford's Fair Use Center
--Great resource for fair use principles
Downhill Battle
--"... working to end the major label monopoly and build a better,
fairer music industry"
RIAA Radar
--great tool to check if the music you're about to buy is produced by the evil
zombies of the RIAA
Electronic Frontier Foundation
--"Defending freedom in the digital world"
Creative Commons
--great alternative to copyright

Like the new Blogger look

2004-09-11T00:04:00.000-05:00

Just another aside; I like the new look of the Blogger.com header.
The small, bar header is much more attractive and functional (not to
mention more likely to attract new user) than the previous block-style
header image.

Good work, Blogger.com-Folk!!

gmail invites to give away

2004-09-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

Just out of curiosity, to see how many folks actually hit my blog, I
have several gmail invites to distribute, and will give 1 away to the
1st 4 folks to comment on this post (provided I can discern a
reasonable first/last name and email from the comment).

I expect 0 takers - I don't think many folks read my blog (no
surprize; not much interesting going on here) and gmail invites seem
to be almost impossible to give away these days....

Anyway, we'll see....

More aggregator experiences...

2004-09-07T17:19:00.000-05:00

Just finished a long IM chat with one of the Feedster guys, and am
very impressed with their service. He fixed several bugs that I was
having problems with as I chatted with him over IM (including the
export one mentioned previously), and logged a few others to look at
soon.

More details later, but this rocked!

2004-09-07T13:48:00.000-05:00

No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

Seeking the perfect Web-based RSS aggregator

2004-09-05T20:44:00.000-05:00

I'm trying some (free) web-based RSS aggregators to collect
interesting news articles, and here are some thoughts:

I should probably preface this by saying that I'd like to browse my
feeds in a FireFox browser window and that I use the ReloadEvery
(http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/) to refresh my news-like sites (both
my feed aggregator and SlashDot, among others). I should also note
that while at work I'm behind a proxy server/firewall, and none of the
(free) desktop-based aggies that I've seen have been able to handle
the proxy authentication that my org's proxy requires.

These aggies all show the feeds grouped by feed source. This might be
useful for some users, but I'm looking for a running list that I can
read without looking at a bunch of different links. If I wanted to
look at my feeds this way, I could just have a folder of links that I
browsed every so often (well, all right, this might be a little
easier, but you get the idea).

FastBuzz (http://www.fastbuzz.com)
Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com)

As a result of my preferences, I haven't tested these ones much....

Here's another that shows the feed grouped by source, but it's a
little different than the others - it's in the format of a FireFox
extension, and displays the list of feeds as a pane in the browser,
like the history pane. If I were to view my feeds in this manner, I'd
probably use this tool.

Sage (http://sage.mozdev.org/)

Feedster (http://feedster.com) shows my feeds the way that I want, the
newest posts on top, regardless of their source. I like the
interface; adding feeds is easy, and there's a good list of already
indexed feeds to choose from. If you're not sure what you want to
watch then this is a good starting place (in fact, it's the first one
that I tried). They're also very responsive to problems - they have
an AOLIM account, and I've chatted with them several times regarding
prob lems that I was having. The drawbacks are that it seems a little
buggy (I've been unable to access my feeds on several accounts, often
the slashdot feed is far behind current, and I still can't export my
feeds. There are also several features that I can't seem to get to
work. In fairness to them, however, I haven't notified them of all fo
thes, either), and that the navigation isn't terribly intuitive -
there are places that are difficult to find unless you know the URL to
type in).

Finally, out of all the ones that I've seen is the WebApps version
from server.com (http://server.com/WebApps/NewsApp/). As far as I
casn tell, this one displays the content in the manner I want to see,
but since I just now updated all of my feeds it's a little difficult
to tell - there were quite a few from each source all clumped
together, but I think that might have had to do with the fact that I
had just added those sources, so to NewsApp they all seemed like new
posts. I'll have to give this one a little time, but right now it
seems like it keeps a lot better up-to-date than the feedster version.
Drawback that I can see right away are that in a few days they're
going to place ads at the top of my feed page, and I can't export my
feeds to OPML.

One question that I have is to wonder why none of these tools is more
configurable (why can't I see my feeds in either chronological or
threaded fashion in the same page?). Perhaps I'll have to roll my
own....

--
Cheers!
kinrowan

New look half way done

2004-07-29T09:48:00.000-05:00

I've updated the template for the main page here and included the images I wanted to (the Hanged Man card from the Millenium Tarot and House of the Hanged Man by Cezanne - links in previous posts). Also changed the color palette a little bit, but more work to be done there. Oh, and the header image truncates at the top (can't figure that one out yet, but probably a margin setting in the style sheet somewheres).

Hope it turns out ok….

Tonks it is....

2004-07-28T05:42:00.000-05:00

It's been officially decided; Tonks is the name of the new cat.

While Jilly (and Jacky - another of Charles deLint's wonderful female
characters) were both more popular with the over-10 crowd at our
house, we neglected to use our dictatorial powers. And no, it's not
that we would have reminded ourselves too much of Bush and his
cronies. Actually, we wanted a name that the kids and the
adults could appreciate - so Tonks is it.

Hanged Man image

2004-07-27T08:32:00.000-05:00

The Hanged Man from the Millenium Tarot

Here's an image of the Hanged Man card from The Millenium Tarot by Dorothy Simpson Krause that's one of several that I'm considering using. The artist has graciously given me permission to use the image in the header image for my blog. She'll also have a web-site running for her Tarot cards soon; I'll post the link when the site is ready.

A new cat!!

2004-07-27T07:57:00.000-05:00

Well, we got a new cat this weekend.

She was too good to pass up; about 4 months old and very cute and playful. Also already spayed and front-declawed with all shots. The price was right as well - $70 as opposed to $200 for the 2 months old kittens. Here's a pic:

JillyTonks

Hopefully she'll get along pretty well with our other aminals once she gets settled in. Name? As yet undetermined, although Tonks (http://www.fact-index.com/n/ny/nymphadora_tonks.html) and Jilly (from Charles deLint's Newford books) are big contenders.

Just an aside...

2004-07-25T07:30:00.000-05:00

The title of this blog has absolutely nothing to do with Cezanne's
painting of the same name (which you can see here).

That'll teach me - I should have googled the name before I chose it.
I don't think Cezanne will mind, but I should have at least known
about it.

I do like the picture, though....