Adam Fields (weblog)

A paper cutout of the Prince (Google apparently thinks the Japanese word for Katamari Damacy means “Lump Soul”).

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffccafe.fc2web.com%2Fptamacy.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=off&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Also, some great screenshots of KD2:

http://216.239.37.104/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&langpair=ja%7Cen&u=http://namco-ch.net/katamari_damacy_ps2/stage/index.php&prev=/language_tools

Bruce Schneier points out this EFF article on electronic voting machine recounts, which is good overall, but fails to hammer home the biggest point, I think. “Easy”, here is only a secondary goal, after “Correct” (or, more properly, “Verifiably Correct”). The first priority is that the count match the intent of the voters. Only AFTER that goal is met to the best of our ability can we start thinking about ways to make the processes of voting and counting easier or faster. “Easy” is being given too much weight, at the expense of “Correct”.

If you have a hole in your wall, it’s pretty easy to put duct tape over the hole to keep the wind out.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/01/election_recoun.html
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/002222.php

“Failure to provide reliable care instructions and warnings for the useful life of an item is a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act,”

http://coolgov.com/index.php?p=110

Concept design for a rollable frying pan.

http://www.designboom.com/contest/view.php?contest_pk=3&item_pk=1211&p=1

http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw110547_20050124.htm

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041030/OPINION02/410300314/1087/opinion

http://www.princeofpersiagame.com/minigame/game/flash/Princegame.swf

http://www.joshrubin.com/coolhunting/archives/2005/01/128_tea_mugs.html

My friend in the hospital is starting to stabilize. She’s had multiple open brain surgeries now, but it looks hopeful that she won’t need any more surgery. She’s got a long way to go, and she’ll still likely be in the ICU for a few months, but at least her condition isn’t currently actively life-threatening. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few days feeling relatively powerless, and putting a lot of my energy into just being there for her family, and helping to organize friends and family for getting news out and scheduling people to come visit.

Many thanks to the open source projects PHPScheduleIt and Wordpress.

A very close friend of mine is currently in very critical condition following multiple open surgeries to address a ruptured aneurysm and consequential cerebral hemorrhaging. Results are day by day, and it will be several weeks before there’s any inkling of the extent of the damage, which is certainly non-trivial. The best current projected scenario is that she’ll need a month in the ICU followed by a year or more of physical and cognitive therapy, and she has a chance to regain full mental and physical capacity. But the nature of these things is that anything can happen, and all possible outcomes are still on the table.

I don’t have any energy for blogging right now.

Occasionally, I find a bloglines feed that I’m subscribed to that has only two people subscribed. Whenever I find that, I immediately look at the related feeds. Since there’s only one other person that likes that feed, I assume that those must have come directly out of that person’s blog list. So I’ve just stumbled on a trove of hand-picked feeds I haven’t seen before posted by someone who was the only other person “out there” to enjoy something I enjoyed. These picks are absolutely fucking gold.

Mark - here’s a free one for you. You should be capturing this as it happens.

This is a one-liner to add a very simple Dreamweaver wrapping template to all html/php files in a directory and all child directories. You’ll need to add a template called “template.dwt” with one editable region called “Content”. After you do this, you can make changes to the template and all of the files will be updated with the template changes. Of course, it’s also a model for a general universal string replace.
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Kyle sent me this article on why concurrent programming is going to be the next big thing. It makes some interesting and valid points about how CPU speed gains have been trailing off.

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

A few random thoughts:

1) I mostly agree, but see point 3.

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http://www.photo.net/equipment/portable_lcd/

I like Bob Cringely’s writing, and I think he’s usually pretty on-target with respect to pointing out the hidden meaning. He posted this insightful article today, positing that the Mac Mini is a jump point for on-demand HD video:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120.html

Possibly true, but this article scooped him on the idea by two days:

http://osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3264

Good for them.

http://www.salathe.com/blog/music/applebeatles.html

http://trenchant.org/daily/2005/1/20/

Looks pretty good to me. There was some concern that maybe the Thing wouldn’t be “bricky” enough, but it looks fine to me.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/fantastic_four/

I mean, on the order of 3.5 hours long. There’s a lot to tell, and this is the last shot. Mr. Lucas, don’t shortchange us!

This is moving, and I’m not sure what to say. I’m assuming that this is honest, although it’s in the nature of the internet now to question such things. Maybe that’s part of the problem. I’ve started to write a number of things, advice, useful suggestions, tips, platitudes, and I’m just giving up. Nobody asked for my opinion, so I’ll just do this one thing and tell you to watch it for yourself.

http://www.links.net/daze/05/01/pix/darknight.mov

In recent history, copyright and First Amendment issues seem to have had a relatively clear professional/amateur line drawn. There has been a lot of discussion lately about how the rise of amateur journalists, content creators, music publishers, producers, etc… are blurring that line, where now everybody wants the privileges that were previously reserved to select few “professionals” in particular fields. This is not that debate. This is about the “professional” documentary filmmakers, and their struggle with increasingly rigid copyright protections for archival footage that, if not arguably in the public domain, is at least of valid historical interest.

This is an interesting post on the growing problem of documentary filmmakers who secure limited-duration rights to archival footage, but then face the problem that they can’t legally reproduce or broadcast their films after the rights expire.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050117/DOCS17/TPEntertainment/Film

The Eyes on the Prize documentary of the American Civil Rights Movement is cited as a classic example:

‘The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize’s tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive.

This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, “the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists,” says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley.’

Google is now honoring the rel=”nofollow” attribute in link tags. Basically what this means is that links in comments, and links to your competitors, or links to things you hate can be eliminated from consideration in computing the page rank of the destination page.

http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html

MSN search and Yahoo are also adding this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/msnsearch/archive/2005/01/18/nofollow_tags.aspx
http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000069.html

On the one hand, I think this is a great idea and a long time coming - I’ve often complained that links aren’t all alike and should be treated differently.

But, on the other… I run a small blog, and I get a lot of my page karma from comments I put in other blogs. I don’t see that as necessarily wrong - my comments are always on topic, and if the owner of the blog doesn’t agree, they can always delete the comment or the link. Google isn’t tracking clickthroughs (yet), so they have no way to know if a given link in this context is actually popular or not. Automatically including this tag in the comments section may decrease the level of comment spam, but it’s also going to hurt a lot of small bloggers as well, I think. And if you’re reading the links individually to make the distinction, well… why not just delete the spam ones? This is obviously meant to be an automated measure, and it’s going to catch a lot of legit links too.

It’s just pushing the unknown down one layer, and substituting one set of unknowns (owner links vs. comment links) for another (legit comment links vs. spam links).

David Weinberger on AP Article on the failure of marketing terms to match up with reality, but the problem isn’t that these terms don’t mean anything, it’s that the products they’re being applied to don’t actually qualify.

Here’s a quick run-down.

Enterprise-class: You can use the same system for your whole company, and it will let different departments communicate/schedule/publish/whatever instead of just one small group.

Scalable: Yes, “scalable” means something! It means your architecture has no serious bottlenecks that would serve as obstacles to growth, and that it can scale gracefully, not just grow. If you have one database, and it can only handle 1000 concurrent connections, your solution is not scalable that way. Scalability is important when you’re - yep, you guessed it - designing and implementing enterprise-class applications.

Solution: Sometimes what you need is not actually a product. A solution can be a product, but more often, it’s a product plus some custom development plus a process plus some documentation about the process plus a way to tell if the process is actually working.

So, yes, tell us if what you’re selling is these things (but if it isn’t, don’t!), but also don’t forget to tell us what it does.

http://www.worthwhilemag.com/entry/2005/01/18/oh_why_cahnt_the_marketers_learn_to_speak.php

NYC City Council feels royally fucked by NYS, US… again ponders secession.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/38867.htm

Apparently, the latest Japanese fad is little keychain plants. Marvels of miniaturization!

http://akiba.sorobangeeks.net/news_9086.html

Some guy tore apart his PS2 controller, connected it to the parallel port on his computer, and wrote a script to press a large number of button combinations. He used it to figure out all of the cheat codes for GTA San Andreas (including some not released by Rockstar, apparently).

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/17/1411251

This is a great example of a “class break” in systems security - the creation of a tool means that this same technique can be easily used on all games, and game developers can no longer rely (if they did before) on the codes being secret because it’s hard to try them all.

Here’s a picture of the hack:

I’ve noticed that some of the post comments feeds have been getting a lot of hits. It’s not clear that these aren’t bots of some kind.

If you are an actual human, reading the comment feeds, you must email me if you want to prevent me from removing them.

This is an interesting piece on the inevitability of P2P to survive. I’ve discussed this before.

http://montemagno.typepad.com/p2p_manifesto/2005/01/p2p_manifesto.html

Elaborating on the comment I wrote on that page —

“Content” cannot be protected from copying because it’s not a “thing”. Content is a pattern. If you can view it in any meaningful way, you can copy it. As many times as you want to. There is no difference between “usage” and “copying”. Anyone who can “use” content can “copy” it, if they so desire. It may be difficult, but it can’t be made impossible. Because of this relationship, any attempt to restrict copying will only serve to restrict usage instead, if even that.

(Update: A more concise English translation is here.)

Hehe.

http://chris.pirillo.com/_attachments/254100/mordor.gif

This is a very good explanation of why digital sensor size makes a difference in imaging devices.

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/size_matters.html

Gizmodo has a nice picture of a G4 Cube eating a Mac Mini.

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/laptops-pcs/apple/mac-mini-versus-g4-cube-029907.php

“Panix’s main domain name, panix.com, has been hijacked by parties unknown. Panix staff are currently working around the clock to recover our domain.

For most customers, accesses to Panix using the panix.com domain will not work or will end up at a false site. ”

Panix.net seems to be unaffected.

http://www.panix.net/

Pulpgeeks rejoice! Snapper Carr is the Kevin Bacon of comic books.

http://www.whiterose.org/howlingcurmudgeons/archives/007385.html

I went to see Freezepop on one of their infrequent visits to NYC.

I took lots of pictures, which are here:

http://www.aquick.org/gallery/freezepop_rare_20050114

Okay, this is a whole bunch of subjects near and dear to me. Security, content management, collaborative workflow, information sharing. The FBI’s new collaborative case file system is being scrapped after spending $170 million with a result of less than 10% of the functionality being delivered.

This really bugs me. This kind of project is totally doable, and it could have (nay, should have) been done right. This wasn’t random chance, it wasn’t happenstance. Somebody fucked up bigtime, and somebody else fucked up in writing a check to that first somebody.

Maybe $170 million wasn’t enough to do this right - that’s certainly possible. But there’s no excuse for spending $170 million and getting nothing, or spending $170 million before you figure out that it’s not enough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/14/politics/14fbi.html

(Yes, I’ll put my mouth where their money is. I think I could do better.)

Bruce Schneier has taken an advisory role in evaluating the Secure Flight initiative. He can’t talk about it. If it’s badly broken, we’ll probably never know. But at least he’s in there. I actually feel a little safer already.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/01/secure_flight_p.html

I think this is really important.

Technology has completely pervaded our society, and the complexity of these systems has increased to the point where important, sometimes critical, distinctions are very easily missed by an inexperienced populace. (Maybe this isn’t a new categorization - I’d welcome references for similar observations.)

This concept comes into play with the DRM debate - content companies are pushing for technological restrictions on copying. The tradeoffs in such restrictions are not understood by the majority of the populace. They just want to buy a TV. They don’t care, or don’t realize up front, that they’re being locked into a platform that may prevent them from watching TV the way they want to (timeshifting, recording, etc…), at some unspecified point in the future.

It struck me that this is exactly the same as the debate about whether VOIP service provides “911 service”. The general public has a very specific idea about what “911 service” means - “if I call, someone will show up and help me”, but they don’t necessarily know anything about how it’s implemented. They don’t know anything about how it’s staffed, how calls are routed, what other assumptions go into provding that kind of service on a 24-hour basis. The various VOIP services seem to offer a wide range of things called “911 service”, and not all of them qualify under the definition above. To be a little fair, this distinction is drawn in the fine print, but not necessarily in terms the average person can understand.

Does my grandmother really understand the distinction between a full-service 911 center and a “Public Safety Answering Point”? Should she have to, in order to get a phone where people will come when she dials 911?

Should the ignorant be deprived of capabilities about which they don’t know enough to demand? Should those who understand the tradeoffs stand by and allow it to happen without speaking up?

I’m not sure what the answer is (I’m thinking about it though), but one thing is clear - the nature of the transactions that people are being called upon to engage in, just to get by on a day-to-day basis, has recently changed drastically. I’m seeing more and more evidence that even the very technologically sophisticated are losing the ability to make these tradeoffs in an educated way.

To coincide with this year’s Toyfair, my family’s store is running a symposium on Toy Making. Classes range from free to $35. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about how toys are made, there’s probably something in there for you.

http://www.sculpt.com/Toy_Fair_2005_Home.htm

Mention code ADAM05 for a free gift with a purchase!

This month’s Fine Cooking, my favorite cooking magazine, has an amazing technique / recipe section on pudding cakes. I made them last night, and they’re just divine. The technique is similar to a very liquid souffle, and results in a slight puffed spongy cake gradually merging into a pool of creamy pudding. Th