Author: shacker

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Putting the F Back in FAQ

What the FAQ on kissthisguy.com says:

Q: Would you send me the lyrics to my favorite song?
A: No. We don’t have any more access to real lyrics than you do, and even if we did, we wouldn’t spend all day doing free research for the general public. There are many sites on the Web that archive real lyrics, and you should look to them, not this one, for that service. Google knows all. In addition, we have a discussion board here on the site, which is a great place to ask other lyrics fans about real lyrics.

The kind of mail I get from users several times a week anyway:

Hello – Please me to send lyrics(texst) from Hungarien group ‘Omega’ from album ‘Gammapolis’ song ‘Lady Of The Summer Night’ original english text version. Thank you too. My best Wishes.

Why bother?

Music: Jimmy McGriff :: Canadian Sunset
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thornography.net

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes thornography.net:

Mr. M. Thorn’s private path, petal-littered, meandersome and pungent, in the World Wide Wonder. Words (with occasional illustration), so many words, mostly pertaining to things shiny, absurd, and new: ideas, events of currentness, technology, culture. Occasional saber-rattling involving Finland.

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No Uncertain Terms

Miles-Rc-Note Woke this morning to a pair of precisely arranged cardboard boxes in Miles’ play area with a note attached (apparently dictated to Amy by Miles), informing me — in no uncertain terms — that not only was I not to disturb the boxes, which were configured in the shape of a race car, but that my only son was headed for New Zealand. It’s going to be lonely around here. Kind of bummed – I had hoped to travel to N.Z. with him when he turns eight, and now he’s apparently decided to go without me.


Miles-Paint-Racecar Late that morning, up to his elbows dolling up the car with purple and red finger (read: hand) paints. Once the car was ready to race to New Zealand, thought he’d be gone like a flash, but nope. Found him on the living room floor paging through a book of Mark Rothko paintings (not kidding), telling me what he liked or didn’t like about each. Guess he’s not leaving after all.

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STOP SHOUTING

The Caps Lock key takes up valuable keyboard real estate, encourages shouting (accidental or intentional), and results in mis-typed passwords. The CAPSoff blog has become a rallying point for users who want to encourage manufacturers to either ditch it or move it up into no-man’s land alongside Scroll Lock, et al. Wired News:

“The Caps key is an abomination,” Hintjens writes on his blog. “It’s a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it’s only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers.”

…

“Obviously the keyboard producers have been so indoctrinated that they don’t even inspect their own products any longer,” Hintjens writes. “Listen, dudes: No one wants that crummy Caps key. It’s history.”

File under: Noble effort, but historical momentum is too hard to fight. If you want the keyboard to be logical, may as well throw out the whole thing and start over. Or go Dvorak.

Music: Tom Glazer :: Where Is The Stratosphere?
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Plinkety Pleasures

Just back from “Plinkety Pleasures: A Ukelele Revue” at 21 Grand. Singing saws, a washboard with cat food cans and hotel service desk bell attached, ukes of all stripes. First time I’ve seen a banjolele in action. “Just Henry” performed a down-tempo but soaring version of Bowie’s “Suffragette City” that floored me. Stella! had piles of charisma. Tippy Canoe, not so much (though she does possess the absolutely perfect ukulele name). 5 Cent Coffee owned the evening with gritty, soulful, sometimes Tom Waits-ish grit and soul. All of it a total gas.

Music: Mighty Sparrow :: Jean Marabunta

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Precious Bandwidth

Warning: Extreme nerd content.

View source on just about any Google page and you’ll see most of the code jammed together on a single line. With the kind of volume they do, every byte saved adds up to real money, so removing line feeds saves dough. But if they’re being that careful about conserving bandwidth, how does Google Video figure into the equation? Thought it might be fun to do some cocktail napkin math.

If I run a Google search and save the source code to a file, that file is 24032 bytes. If I open it in BB-Edit and run Format | Plain (which adds line breaks at logical places but adds no indentation), the file grows to 26868 bytes*. So Google is saving an impressive 2836 bytes (2.8k) per SERP by removing line feeds.

Now, assume a video stream that runs at around 2MBs/minute and lasts three minutes. At 1048576 bytes per MB, that’s 6,291,456 bytes per video stream. Which gives us a ratio of:

6,291,456 / 26868 = 2218.4 / 1

So the precious bytes Google saves by removing line feeds on 2,218 SERPs is nullified by serving a single three-minute video. Of course, they dish up a hell of a lot more SERPs than videos, but it does raise the question: Is bandwidth precious to Google or not? I can picture the looks on the faces of all the engineers who had spent a decade living under the “Optimize the hell out of it” mantra the day they learned the company would be serving up unlimited gobs of video to the public for free.

Update: Sean observes that some of the videos he’s downloaded from Google average 6 MBs/minute, which would pretty much exactly double my estimate. We would need to download a bunch of videos from Google to get an accurate average, but if they’re averaging 6MBs/min, it makes me think that very little optimization is going on in Goog’s video dept. I train students to compress video at around 3 MBs/minute (320×240, 15fps, MPEG4). Since I was assuming that Google also has a strong interest in video optimization, I originally assumed that their streams would be of a similar size.

* Incidentally, if I run Format | Gentle Hierarchical at this point (which adds common indentation for nested elements), the file swells to 43356 bytes. And if I run Format | Hierarchical (which indents aggressively), the file swells to 64102 bytes — almost 3x its original size. Yow!

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dangillmor.com

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes dangillmor.com, a portal page for author and citizen media advocate Dan Gillmor.

Dan Gillmor is director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Gillmor is also the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People.

Gillmor also runs kralums.com, “A blog for the soon-to-be thousands of former Knight Ridder employees.”

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Soul Train

One of the things I loved about Soul Train was the fact that they had actual train tracks running right down the middle of the dance floor and up the wall. Here, grooving with the Isley Brothers.

I was probably about 7 or 8 years old during this era of Soul Train, and the whole thing was just mystifying to me. Made me think grown-ups had a secret, separate world where they went to have strange kinds of fun when they weren’t busy taking care of us.

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Eno to Score Spore

Spore1 Follow-up to Eno, Wright, Generative Systems: Eno later described the session as “Two strangers becoming friends in front of 900 people.” Two guys in completely different fields working on exactly the same thing — building generative systems from cellular automata. Numberless:

[Each of them] use the idea of cellular automata as a basis for their creations. Cellular automata … refers to a simple initial rule-set that is capable of generating very complex and disparate results.

Shortly after the session, Wright announced that Eno would be creating the soundtrack to the upcoming game Spore. I’m not a gamer, but I’ve been looking forward to this game (due in 2007) for a long time now.

Wikipedia: Spore is, at first glance, a “teleological evolution” game: the player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal, until the species becomes intelligent. At this point the player begins molding and guiding this species’ society, progressing towards a spacefaring civilization.

Some of the screenshots and video floating around the internet are amazing, but apparently don’t do the actual gameplay justice. The generative link between Eno and Wright could result in some great audio. Most game music is set on endless repeat, but Eno’s audio will be sui generis, and will never repeat. Wright:

“Science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world which will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable…..It’s not engineering and design, so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds.”

Music: Pere Ubu :: A Day Such As This