Adam Fields (weblog)

http://www.orlycogan.com/

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2005/03/28/m1a_honeybees_0328.html

The creator of Wordpress is apparently using the pagerank gained from every wordpress site linking to wordpress.org to game adwords by having thousands of unrelated articles cloaked on the site:

http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml

I can’t blame the guy for trying to make some money off of his wildly successful software, but this is the sort of thing that really ought to be disclosed to the community of people putting in their work for free.

Also, it raises the question (and I have no reason to believe that it’s the case) - “if the leader of this project thinks it’s a good idea to host a link farm, what other surprises may be lurking in the code?” It’s a GPL project, so of course, you can check the source code. But it’s a blow to think that you have to check for something that was widely considered a community-based project.

http://www.wankey.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=58&Itemid=

Gahk!

Williams Chicken, the kosher catering company with the best fried chicken I’ve ever had, a staple of my Upper West Side childhood, seems to be closed. A moment of schmaltz for these fine purveyors of golden poultry goodness paired with half sours and barley.

Dude registers a domain to put up a fan site for a local mall, of all things. The lawyers attack, and he defends. Successfully. Bravo.

http://www.taubmansucks.com/

http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS8386088053.html

A crew of improv artists staged a dance-in in the windows of the Union Square Whole Foods building.

http://www.improveverywhere.com/mission_view.php?mission_id=47

I’ve been a Musicmatch user for many many years. They’ve always used Marimba to automatically download updates. But, unfortunately, version 10 is horribly broken, and it shit all over my music folder. There’s really no other way to put it.

The first time I ran the watchfolder update under the new version, it decided it knew where my files should go, rearranging the entire directory hierarchy, copying files around (to new directories organized by artist instead of album), and filling up the last 20GB of the disk. I lost a bunch of music in the chaos (not irretreivable, but this is a major pain in the ass to fix), and I never want to touch the thing with a 10 foot pole again. Stupid - this is why I hate iTunes!

I also recently discovered that Yahoo has purchased Musicmatch. I’d love to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt for not destroying things they buy (read: flickr), but this is not the rosiest of starts.

EARTH TO MEDIA DEVELOPERS. I KNOW WHERE MY FILES GO. YOU DO NOT.

http://www.inannaspalace.com/Default.aspx?tabid=244

http://de.lirio.us/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/

Wow.

A study was was published this week in Nature that “suggests that plants, and perhaps other organisms including humans, might possess a back-up mechanism that can bypass unhealthy sequences from their parents and revert to the healthier genetic code possessed by their grandparents or great-grandparents.”

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050321/full/050321-8.html

I’ve been working on performance optimization for ourmedia.org for the past day and a half or so (for those not in the know - performance optimization is part of what I do). I’d submitted some photos and done a very small amount of template development a few weeks ago, but wasn’t involved in the launch, which, as you’ve probably heard, didn’t go so well.

The site wasn’t able to stay up past about 300 or so concurrent users, let alone the 10,000 that slashdot brought. I did some emergency MySQL tuning on the current server to alleviate the load somewhat, but it was clear that the first priority needed to be migrating to a bigger dedicated server. This evening, we completed that move, and the site was brought back up.

There’s still a bunch of tuning that needs to be done in short order, but it should hopefully be fairly stable from here on in.

I think this is huge, and I’m glad to have been a part of it so far. Congratulations to JD and Marc on their launch.

http://www.ourmedia.org

So, I’m on hold for Godaddy support, and I hear the wonderful words of freedom:

“To hold without music, press # now.”

#.

Ahhhhh.

Ask Jeeves bought bloglines. Now IAC has bought Ask Jeeves.

Where does this leave bloglines?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/business/21deal.html

It’s a good day for online media.

Ourmedia, a free, open repository for grassroots media, had a public soft launch today. This will be a fantastic resource. They’re providing free media hosting for Creative Commons licensed media, through the Internet Archive, in an attempt to aid the cause of preserving a shared internet culture. This is a goal I wholeheartedly support.

I contributed a verrrry small amount of coding to the site, and a number of photographs.

The site does seem to be having some performance issues on launch, but those should be ironed out soon.

http://www.ourmedia.org

http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2005/03/yahoo_actually_.html

With a new, very funny trailer (#3).

Everything I’ve seen so far about this makes me smile.

I get the general sense that one of the things they have coming is a Marvin replacement for the MS Word assistant paperclip. Now that, I’d actually use.

http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/

Apparently, the entirety of Extraordinary Machine is now available for download.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/03/16/notes031605.DTL

‘BigChampagne, which monitors songs available on file-sharing services, found that at any one time about 38,000 users in the United States are downloading songs from Extraordinary Machine. The most popular track is “Please Please Please,” with more than 20,000 simultaneous downloads, according to the company.’

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,66926,00.html

Just what the hell is going on here?

Ugh.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?id=30633

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=47&aid=78683

That’s very cool. It locks up your bike and suspends it high above the ground, away from thieves and rain.

http://www.biketree.com/

Of course, in NYC, that would probably just mean there would be a rash of clear-cutting…

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600

Apparently, Tivo has signed a HUGE partnership deal with Comcast, stopping the Tivo Death Clock. The initial term of the deal is seven years. This is great, and I hope they sign a similar deal with the other cable companies. The idea of anyone out there using a Scientific Atlanta DVR and thinking “this is what it’s all about?” gives me the shivers. Congratulations to Tivo!

“On March 15, 2005, we entered into a non-exclusive licensing and marketing agreement with Comcast STB Software DVR, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Comcast Corporation, and Comcast Corporation, as guarantor of Comcast STB’s obligations under the agreement. Pursuant to our agreement, we have agreed to develop a TiVo-branded software solution for deployment on Comcast’s DVR platforms, which would enable any TiVo-specific DVR and networking features requested by Comcast, such as WishList^™ searches, Season Pass^™ recordings, home media features, and TiVoToGo^™ transfers. In addition, we have agreed to develop an advertising management system for deployment on Comcast platforms to enable the provision of local and national advertising to Comcast subscribers.”

http://advancedmediacommittee.typepad.com/emmyadvancedmedia/2005/03/tivos_8k_comcas.html

Chris Justus writes:

“Hundreds of companies - big and small - are all racing to replace your cellphone / MP3 player / digital camera / video camera / PDA / PC / gaming platform / etc with a single device. I’ve been waiting years for this device to emerge, and it finally occured to me that it is not ever going to happen. When did this epiphany occur? I was reading Wired magazine a month or two ago and somewhere in there, they recommended that small and/or home based businesses should go get combo fax/scanner/printers.”

He goes on to explain why converged devices inevitably fail to be really good at any of the converged functions, particularly multifunction printers.

I have to disagree. I recently bought a multi-function printer (Brother), largely because it seemed to be the cheapest way to get a sheetfed scanner for filing contracts and sending faxes (which I do on the computer anyway, not directly, as I have no land line). It’s no substitute for a good laser printer, but the ink jet performance is pretty impressive. Granted, I don’t ask much from it, but it works perfectly well.

However, that’s not really my point. Getting convergence to work well is probably one of two things:

1. A shoehorn problem to stick together two things that don’t belong together (because they have different ideal form factors or different usage patterns or different failure rates)
2. A design problem to work out the issues and present the proper functionality to the user

I think the TV/VCR combo fits into the former. People look at these units and say “what happens when the VCR breaks?”. The shoehorn is really an insoluble issue - these devices don’t belong in one box together. I’d much rather the entertainment industry focus on standardizing the AV connections to make components easier to connect.

The latter problem is a more interesting one. There are devices that go together, but there are “minor” issues to resolve. The multifunction printer/fax/scanner is actually, I think, a great example of three devices that should go together. A fax machine is just a scanner with a sheet feeder and a printer - so why not be able to use any of the functions independently, and make them better than you’d expect out of a normal fax machine? I think this is just a matter of getting the components cheap enough so that when you buy all three, it’s still cost-effective (and we’re just about there, now that the still-usable-but-still-pretty-crappy bottom of the ink jet and single-page scanner markets are around $30-$40). Complaining that the multifunction fax machine doesn’t give you adequate feedback about the fax is a design issue, not a convergence failure.

I’m reasonably happy with my Kyocera Palm/Phone. Granted, there are some design issues, but a palm and a phone should go together. I want to have my calendar and contacts with me all the time, and the fewer devices I have to carry, the better. With a decent set of headphones, there’s no reason why this can’t be an MP3 player, too (although I have a standalone one from wayyyy back which I’ve never felt the need to replace). I’ve never been terribly interested in portable video, so TV on my phone seems like a bit much, but I think a standard KVM connector for portable devices would be really handy - so you can use the same machine through whatever kind of interface you have handy, but it all lives on the device you can take with you.

Maybe it won’t be the next big thing, but there’s value is getting our devices to not just do as many things as possible, but also to do them all well. For many applications, I see no reason it can’t be possible.

Hooray for nudity on film!

http://www.todayinhistory.de/index.php?what=thmanu&lang=en&manu_id=1398&tag=16&monat=3&weekd=&year=2005&weekdnum=&dayisset=1&lang=en

I find clothing/naked side by side photographs very interesting, boobies aside.

http://www.kladblog.com/image/200503/babes_pages/snoblog20050314-1.htm

(Update: apparently, there are a lot more of them here: http://www.fineart.sk/index.php?cat=2)

It’s pretty near the top of the list of things we didn’t need - the Lord of the Rings musical.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/THEATER_LORD_OF_THE_RINGS?SITE=APWEB&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

That’s totally cool.

It’s a javascript library that lets you make images and blocks on the page draggable and resizeable. And it’s cross-platform/cross-browser.

http://www.walterzorn.com/dragdrop/dragdrop_e.htm

Butler is a user script for Greasemonkey, that autolinks Google results to competing services. I’m curious to see how they like it, given that they think it’s okay to do to others.

http://diveintomark.org/projects/butler/

“ICANN considers this to have been one of the more serious breaches of its policies by an accredited registrar. We are also very concerned by Melbourne IT’s explanation that the incident happened because Melbourne IT had purportedly ‘delegated’ to a reseller the critical responsibility for obtaining the consent of the registrant prior to submitting a transfer request to the registry [...] While we appreciate Melbourne IT’s report that it has withdrawn the offending reseller’s ability to independently initiate transfers, Melbourne IT has indicated that it intends to continue to operate under agreements with other resellers that provide that Melbourne IT will not directly and independently verify the intent of registrants prior to initiating transfer requests.”

http://www.smh.com.au/news/Breaking/ICANN-review-blames-Melb-IT-for-hijack/2005/03/15/1110649182358.html

http://slashdot.org/articles/05/03/15/015219.shtml?tid=101

Why, oh why, are every single one of these fan films populated by people with the same stilted “Skinemax” delivery style? I mean - it looks GORGEOUS - great ships, great sets, great costumes. great effects, but… no Alderaan.

Oh wait, it’s just like a real Star Wars movie.

Bonus points: which planet in the Star Wars universe gave rise to the Long Island accent?

A bunch of guys are really into playing Storm Troopers in Star Wars Galaxies. The gamemasters decided to reward them for this, and sent them a virtual Darth Vader to give them a surprise inspection and pep talk. Of course, it couldn’t have been the real Vader, since no one got strangled to death…

Via boingboing:

http://swg.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_section.phtml?site=13&id=25

CGI-animated lego batman starring Adam West, Mark Hamill, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Dick Van Dyke.

Nice.

http://www.daveschool.com/BATMAN/index.html

I’ve launched a new blog dedicated to product reviews of things I use. Check it out!

From my about page:

“I am an expert consumer.

I’m that guy that all of my friends go to for advice before they buy things. I’m picky. I won’t keep something unless I’m satisfied with it. I routinely buy things, find I don’t like them for some reason or another, and return them. But, even through all that, there are a lot of things I do like, and I see no reason to keep that to myself.”

http://www.buyadam.com/blog

Very cool. Flat, yet not flat. Laser cut sheets of metal folded into furniture:

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/household/thinology-laser-cut-furniture-035710.php

In space, no one can hear you clean.

Interesting story about what astronauts do with their laundry:

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/news/2003/news-laundry.asp

It’s been bugging me for a while that Firefox doesn’t let you easily adjust the cache request frequency by default (i.e.: it doesn’t check for new content on every request, which sometimes makes using and debugging web apps difficult).

Here’s a good page on how to fix it:

http://www.mikeaxelrod.com/archives/2005/01/customizing_fir.html