Author: shacker

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Unused Applications

There’s a Windows machine on the desk next to me, almost never touched except for browser compatibility testing. Though it sits there mostly unused, it’s been taken over by spyware in the past few months, and had slowed to a crawl. Took the opportunity to back up data, wipe the drive, and install XP/SP2. I did install Thunderbird and Firefox on it, but other than that, it’s virgin.

Unused Icons Woke it up today and a friendly little balloon winked into existence, saying “There are unused icons on your desktop. Would you like to run the Desktop Cleanup Wizard?” I wanted to see what it would do. Should I be shocked that the only two icons the wizard wanted to remove from my desktop were for Thunderbird and Firefox? These are the only two applications on the computer that I have used. No, I’m not shocked. Standard Operating Procedure for MS. Business as usual.

Speaking of these friendly little balloons, I had to chuckle after installing VirtualPC on my Mac at home a few months ago (also for browser compatibility testing). Almost as soon as Windows launched on the Mac for the first time, a balloon informed me that I was “missing critical updates,” and that my “computer might not be secure.” Boy, that was comforting! I’m starting to love the little balloons.

Music: Firehose :: The First Cuss
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What’s On Jesus’ iPod?

Mark Morford for The Chronicle, hard not to quote at length:

After all, Jesus was a rebel. Jesus was the Original Liberal. Jesus was a devoted pacifist and a badass egalitarian and his best friends were all whores and dissidents and freethinkers and miscreants, artists of every shape and size and haircut and of course, were he walking around today, Jesus would be pretty much loathed and ostracized if not outright hacked to bits by the Christian Right. “Goddamn hippie liberal tree hugger,” they’d sneer, waving scythes and Bibles. “What the hell?” Jesus would say.

All of which places Jesus in direct line of the iPod’s marketing demographic and all of which naturally raises the question, well, so just what does the great mystic and healer and closet Buddhist and funky savior of humanity have on his holy iPod?

… Jesus knows this Big Obvious Secret: All music celebrates God, because God is merely another word for life and life is merely another word for “hot divine energy force” and “hot divine energy force” is merely another word for, well, “Steven Tyler.” So there you go.

Music: Stevie Wonder :: Higher Ground
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When Wikis Go Bad

Nice example of using Flash for multi-person interactivity: Someone keeps stealing my letters! So the Flash object must be sending tweening coordinates back to the server and redrawing the screen for all users — very different from the usual Flash model. There were 38 people dragging when I played, and it was very difficult even to write “pontoon,” let alone “obsequious scapegoat” or “Your hovercraft is full of eels.” Any more players and the collaborative writing project would devolve into total chaos.

Title of this post thanks to Matt Mullenweg.

Update: Jeb points out that someone happened on a session there where the users were riffing on Hopkin green frog. Beautiful.

Music: The Pogues :: The Sick Bed Of Cuchuliann
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Lockyer Scoop

LockyearInteresting graffiti incident at the J-School Friday. “On Friday, April 29, someone left this message promising a real scoop on state attorney general Bill Lockyer in chalk outside North Gate Hall. No word yet on whether anyone took the anonymous tipster up on the offer — perhaps everyone was too busy putting the finishing touches on their masters projects. Email boatbrains@aol.com if interested.” With an email address like “boatbrains,” you know you’re dealing with a credible source! The scrawl went on to brag, “P.S. I have Lockyear’s home phone #.” Photo and caption, Peter Orsi.

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Farewell Aunt Geri

Aunt Geri, life threw you a lot of weird curveballs, but you remained irrepressibly happy despite everything. You had such a flair for drama and poetic scenes, so it’s not surprising that you died yesterday in a slightly magical and surreal way. Lounging in a chair on the deck of a cruise ship, gazing out over the Atlantic ocean, fever overcame you. Suddenly, you were gone.

We differed on almost everything, and I’m sure it was as difficult for you to have a nephew as liberal as me as it was for me to have an aunt as staunchly fundamentalist and conservative as you. I never was able to convince you that the death penalty was wrong, but you changed your mind when the Pope said the same. Even though I didn’t see a lot of you in later years, the year we spent tossing political footballs back and forth via email was the year I got to know you the most — despite my wife begging me to stop the dialog to save my blood pressure, I valued that exchange tremendously. Our motorcycle trip to Vancouver will always be one of my happiest adult memories of you.

You were mother to five children, you were the levity and, in many ways, the backbone of your family. And as if five weren’t enough, you and Dennis had enough love in your hearts to take on ten foster children through the years. Not all of those experiences went well, but the fact that you took it on filled me with admiration.

You never missed an opportunity to throw a celebration, and few things meant more to you than getting the family together, despite all of our bitter differences. In fact, my mother met my father at one of your infamous parties, in the early ’60s.

As I write this, your body is in refrigeration down in the hold. In a couple of days you’ll land in Portugal, which you had never seen. Your husband will have you embalmed and shipped back to the States for a proper Catholic burial. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be him right now, alone at sea without the rock of his life by his side. And yet somehow I know that your light will shine for him, and in it he’ll find strength.

Peace and love, Aunt Geri. Forever.

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Fifi

Speaking authoritatively, Miles informed us recently: “I’m going to have a baby sister, and I’m going to name her Fifi.” This was news to us.

——-

At the park, looking out towards a nearby hedgerow: “Daddy, I have two friends named Siso and Bibo, and I met them in the bushes.”

Music: The Czars :: Song to the Siren
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SpamLookup

Just installed Brad Choate’s SpamLookup for John Battelle‘s MT installation, ditching MT-Blacklist for the time being. Looks simple on the surface, but dig into the options and you start to realize this is the next generation comment/trackback-fighting tool. Actually, it’s a whole toolbelt, including realtime distributed blacklists (which probably accomplish 95% of the dirty work alone), moderation levels and exceptions for various types of commenters, bannable wordlists, and a built-in “Passphrase” feature you can use as a human detector. This last being similar in concept to a captcha, but text-based rather than graphical. The commenter is required to answer a dirt-simple question such as “What is John’s name?,” which a bot would be hard-pressed to do. If I wasn’t having such great success with MT-Keystrokes on birdhouse, I’d install it here as well…

Music: Roland Kirk ::Bag’s Groove
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Bamboo Bicycle Frame

I want one.

The most difficult part of building the frame was to find quality bamboo rods. It took me much more time than the building itself. I visited several dealers in near surroundings and I tried to find appropriate rods of the necessary diameters from huge amount of bamboo. Finally I found a few rods I wanted, but frankly said, next time I build such a frame, I’ll rather grow my own bamboo or fly to Asia for it.

Music: David Bowie :: Kooks
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IT Conversations

Michael Alderete recommended IT Conversations over lunch a few weeks ago, and I’ve finally started digging in. The site hosts hundreds of archived speeches in MP3 format by thinkers and players in the computer industry, all free. It’s not what you might think – these aren’t boring whiteboard transcripts of talks on XML or rising disk capacity – this is big-picture stuff, history and sociology and commentary on the whole IT sphere.

Have only listened to two so far: George Dyson on Von Neumann’s Universe, about the fabrication and evolution of the first tube-based computers at Princeton in the middle of the last century, and Clay Shirky’s Ontology is Overrated, with a deep look at the power of “folksonomies” and the rise of organic cataloguing systems. Both were provocative start to finish, totally stimulating.

It’s like those too-rare times when you stumble on some great radio program on the way home and get so involved that you sit in the car in the driveway until it’s over so you don’t miss a word… but time-shifted, so you don’t have to sit in the car in the driveway.

Podcasting downside: No easy way to copy/paste excerpts, which makes it harder for me to convey why I find these talks so compelling.

Music: The Fall :: Fit And Working Again