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Rainforests of the Sea

Once damaged, coral reefs take well over a century to grow back – and they’re being damaged at an alarming rate, both by natural phenomena such as tsunamis and by humans. Coral reefs (aka “the rainforests of the sea”) worldwide are among the world’s most endangered ecosystems.

The years prior to 1991 saw a lot of bad mojo at work around Bunaken and Manado Tua. For decades, fishermen bombed the reefs with dynamite, or squirted them with sodium cyanide, to net large harvests of fish that surfaced. Low tides forced local boats to anchor amid the fragile corals, and dive boats (not to mention clumsy divers) wrought havoc as well. Storms reduced already weakened corals to rubble.

If the regrowth of natural reefs can’t be accelerated, the ecosystems surrounding them can. Berkeley-based Seacology is installing ceramic EcoReefs reef replacement systems — ceramic “snowflake” modules “that are designed to mimic branching corals.”

Pix here.

Music: Olu Dara :: Rain Shower
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Brown Shoes Don’t Make It

Cringely: Alongside all the other bad news for traditional media, the “brutal honesty” of pay-per-click advertising could make it impossible to reproduce the ad revenue models of the print world — which would in turn make it impossible for print publications to survive online migrations.

There are of course lots of other reasons why print pubs don’t make it online as “shovelware” — going for it without “getting” the web’s unique capabilities spells doom in general. But the fact that focused digital advertising provides a level of transparency that traditional media can’t withstand is something I hadn’t considered.

Shacker’s bold and ruthless prediction for 2006: Two major newspapers will fold entirely.

Thanks Colleen

Cool: MT’s “Post to the future” scheduled posting system works nicely (we used to call this a “drip date” in the CMS we used at ZDNet).

Music: The Jewels :: This Is My Story
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Rails: Light Goes On

Started stepping through OnLAMP’s Ruby on Rails tutorial this evening. A lot of foreign concepts — brave new world compared to PHP development. Then, suddenly, on page 3, I added a field to my database and wham! — that field was added to all relevant pages of my application. A text entry field for the edit, create, and update pages, and an appropriate column on the display pages. Number of lines of code added to the application: Zero the Hero. Change that field’s position in the database table, and its placement throughout the application changes automatically. The application automagically models itself after the form of the database. The dataset is the model for the application.

Granted, we’re just talking about the scaffolding here, but when I stopped to think of the number of files I need to modify in a PHP application to get the same effect (and how many times I’ve needed to wheedle through exactly that kind of repetitive work), just had to roll my chair back from the desk and take a deep breath. This has some pretty stunning ramifications.

Also amazing how much mileage Rails gets out of simple naming conventions. Name a model class Recipe and it will automatically map to a corresponding database “recipes” (the pluralization translation happens automatically). Stick to the conventions, and the need to write database CRUD (create, read, update, delete) code goes away. And elegant URLs are totally automatic too.

Newbie steps, but all of a sudden I’m “getting” what all the fuss is about.

Music: Albert Ayler :: Ghosts
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Brilliant 2006

Newyear-2006 May all of you enjoy the most brilliant and squinchy year possible (for a humanoid). We here at Birdhouse certainly intend to! Thanks to everyone for continuing to read despite my frequent lapses and misfires. You guys make it fun.

Pictured: Variant of this year’s holiday card. Technological marvel: We shot the image, photoshopped it in, uploaded to Snapfish, selected a “frame,” and had our cards ready for pickup at a local Walgreen’s an hour later. Soup to nuts. And for cheap.

Another techno marvel: In interminable checkout line for a small purchase at the Apple store yesterday. Attractive techno-hippy employee walks up with what appears to be a souped-up Newton and asks if anyone is paying by credit. I am. Dude uses the device (wireless) to scan my item, charge my card, and record my email address. Says my receipt is waiting in my inbox and “Good day, sir.” I walk out, dodging the rest of the line. Life is good.

Except that the cosmonaut pictured above is very, very sick right now, and it’s been a sad and fretful couple of days. Here’s to most-excellent Miles getting his health back very soon. Miles minus vital energy isn’t very fun.

Music: Rachel’s :: The Mysterious Disappearance Of Louis LePrince
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Birdhouse IRC Channel

Conceptualized initially as an alternate support avenue for Birdhouse users, but also serving as a multi-function water cooler, we’ve launched our own IRC channel! Accessible via the Live Chat option on the hosting pages, or through any standard IRC client. Come idle a while in #birdhouse on GIMPnet. No guarantees at any given time that anyone will be around, but we’ll see what grows.

Many thanks to IRC superfreak and Birdhouse backup sysadmin mneptok for all the IRC plumbing and text — I just plugged it in.

Music: Eek-A-Mouse :: Modelling Queen
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Dos

Just back from 21 Grand to hear Dos (Watt, ex-Minutemen and Kira, ex-Black Flag) jamming bass duets. They’ve been at this for 20+ years, through thick and thin, and play like it. Kind of humorous to watch Kira scamper and pogo as if drummer were present, and she’s a very good bass player, but stoic Watt is the amazing, fluid virtuoso. Not quite like anything you’ve heard before (if you’re thinking punk rock, stop). Watt:

dos (spanish for two, as in uno, dos, tres…) is kira … on bass/singing and watt on bass. that’s it – just two basses and her voice. sometimes watt’s voice too but not much. we’ve been together since the fall of 1985, this is my longest running band. I really dig playing w/dos. it started as an experiment w/making what’s commonly believed a backup instrument up front and paired off w/a twin, using pingpong-like arrangements to create a special space which is pretty much close to the deck but not smothered by competition. what we try to do is develop converstations between our two basses and create a landscape of low-end dynamic. in dos there is no hiding. this is both the challenge and the reward.

Standing room only, short show. Someone called nina put up a Flickr set of the evening.

Music: Spoon :: The Delicate Place
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Web-Site Dinner

“Daddy, guess what? I made Plato* a web-site dinner.”

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“Butter.”

“What did you make it out of?”

“Flour.”

* Our cat.

Music: Velvet Underground :: lisa says
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Who Gets No Spam?

Lebkowsky posts about his mostly-rosy transition from Outlook to Thunderbird, but wonders why the spam controls aren’t more robust. “… and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there’s a bunch more that the filters miss.”

What I don’t get is why people are still dealing with daily buckets of spam on the client side at all. It’s been years since most mail hosts began offering excellent server-side spam handling (Birdhouse included). I’ve found the combination of SpamAssassin + ClamAV + RulesDuJour to be tremendously effective. And don’t forget to disable your “catch-all address — probably the most powerful single spam magnet you can have. After months of not landing a single false positive, I finally stopped using a server-side “Junk box” for monitoring at all – now I just set my spam threshold to 2.5 and let the systems delete spam before it ever hits my server-side mailbox.

Result: About 90% of the mail bound for my addresses is discarded without ever being seen by a human or handled by a mail client. What finally slips through the net is a grand total of about 3-5 spams a day.

On the TWiT podcast, John Dvorak gets teased regularly — by industry experts, no less — for his claim “I get no spam.” What’s so outlandish about that? If you’re still getting spam in your mail client, you probably just need to turn on the controls your mail host probably already has set up for you. And if your mail host doesn’t offer server-side spam controls, find one that does.

Music: Half Man Half Biscuit :: Bottleneck at Capel Curig
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Can I Get An Amen?

Nate Harrison discusses the history of the legendary “Amen Break” – probably the most-used drum sample in all of hip-hop, jungle… and advertising. An entire subculture based on a 6-second loop from an obscure 1969 R&B record.

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Fascinating (relatively speaking) to watch how the progression of the needle across the LP inversely tracks the progression of your own QuickTime slider.

Lessig: “Culture is impossible without a rich public domain.”

Thanks Sean Graham

Music: T.Rex :: The Motivator