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The Smell of Burning Resin

That thin blue line running vertically down the left side of my iMac screen mentioned a few weeks ago? It went away on its own. I don’t like symptoms that appear and disappear without reason or cause. Few things more mystifying than intermittent computer problems. Things should either work or not.

Two days ago I walked into the office to have nostrils greeted by a truly acrid chemical smell emanating from the top vents. The kind of smell that you just know causes cancer without even having to look it up. Shut it down, opened it up, everything looked absolutely hunky. Must be pooting forth from somewhere hidden — inside the power supply or something. Fortunately, the Apple Genius was able to duplicate the smell immediately (“I love the smell of burning resin in the morning,” he said, quoting Duvall). A capacitor frying, probably. Or something worse. Maybe I’ll get a new motherboard out of the deal. [Update: Yep, an industry-wide problem with bad caps.]

So now I’m working on a borrowed PowerBook — divorced from all my data — for the next two weeks. Which actually coincides nicely with WWDC, and is giving me a chance to check out the new Mail.app in Tiger, which has come a long way, baby. Loving it. The fact that it integrates with Spotlight while Entourage doesn’t is giving me one more reason to consider moving on from Entourage (even though I do think it’s one of the cleanest apps MS has ever produced, it’s got an IMAP bug that drives me crazy, so I’ve been using Thunderbird for IMAP for the past few weeks).

Also having a great time playing with Dashboard Widgets, and will learn how to create them myself next week. Friend Guy D2 created a Widget port of Brian Eno’s classic Oblique Strategies. My strategy for today:

Make what’s perfect more human.

Will strive to do that. Got a favorite Widget? Let me know.

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How Very French

Salon: Back in March 2003, Reps. Walter Jones and Bob Ney led the effort to get French Fries renamed to “Freedom Fries” in the Capitol’s cafeteria. But since the North Carolina Republican has come full circle on the war, Jones now says he wishes the incident had never happened. Once a staunch supporter of the war, Jones now wonders whether Americans were intentionally given bad information in order to justify the war. He’s not alone.

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OS X on x86

We watched Apple move from 68k to PowerPC. They survived, and were better off for it. We watched as Be moved from the Hobbit processor to PowerPC, and then to x86. The x86 transition worked so well for Be that we heard Jean-Louis saying things like “Our only regret is that we waited so long to do it.” Now it seems that Apple is not getting the speed bumps they need from IBM, and are going to start shipping Macs with Intel processors. With all of the recompiling (and porting of advanced instruction sets) that a move like that entails. With the inevitable impact on current sales. With the shock and awe of “professional pundits and analysts,” who need to take a deep breath and loosen their jaw muscles a bit, methinks.

The story could be a red herring or false leak, but news.com is pretty credible and doesn’t do rumors. The armchair critics at MacSlash and SlashDot are having a field day with this. Of course it almost certainly doesn’t mean OS X running on any old beige box — chances are great that the system will depend on custom ROMs only available on Apple hardware (remember that most of Apple’s profit is in hardware — the OS is luxury bait to sell the hardware, a mystical glue that welds consumers to the real cash cow). But the door does get opened, and it’s not inconceivable that we could see OS X on generic boxes in the future. With Darwin already x86-compatible, a huge amount of underlying work is already done. I have no love for CPU architectures – I’m here for the OS (just installed Tiger today, having a gas). The cheaper and more ubiquitous the box, the better.

I’ll be at WWDC most of next week – will be interesting to see the announcement and watch the fallout.

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Support the Magnetic Ribbon Industry

Sites like rightwingstuff.com offer t-shirts bearing such enlightened slogans as “Peace through superior firepower,” “ACLU – Enemy of the state” and “Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions” (sorry, liberal baiters, I’m not biting). A UCSC prof of mine once went on an extended tirade about the seductive idiocy of bumper sticker philosophy, but the crap just keeps getting thicker. Meanwhile, Pomo Sideshow offers sideways magnetic yellow ribbons to counter the current flood of sideways magnetic yellow “Support our troops” ribbons, featuring sensible slogans such as “Demand open source voting” (I’m down with that), “God bless jingoist ribbons” (you know she does!) and “Support the magnetic ribbon industry.” Tell it like it is.

Thanks baald and mneptok

Music: The Polyphonic Spree :: Days Like This Keep Me Warm
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BLF Celebrates Ronald McDonald’s 50th

To Serve Man The Billboard Liberation Front yesterday tweaked a San Francisco billboard to celebrate McDonald’s 50th Birthday. The modifications were some of the most extensive ever undertaken, including “the world’s first animatronic billboard alteration: a life-sized figure of Ronald McDonald feeding a corpulent child his daily dose of Big Macs.”

Construction photos here. A good one of the San Francisco Fire Department removing the corpulent child from his perch. Not sure how I get how the alien connects to the overall theme, but it appears that he too is growing a McFlurry waistline.

Music: Nick Drake :: Voice From The Mountain
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BitTorrent, XviD, UnRarX, iDVD

Recently missed the season finale of a favorite TV show due to a Tivo screw-up. None of my friends had a copy of the show, so decided it was time to figure out what most 17-year-olds already know: Everything is on BitTorrent. Unsurprisingly, found that the BitTorrent world is somewhat biased towards Windows users, and that usage instructions don’t come with downloads. With a bit of research and experimentation, I was able to pull all the pieces together to download, decode, and burn the show to disc from the Mac. Decided to post notes here to save other 40-somethings the pain of figuring all of this stuff out.
Continue reading “BitTorrent, XviD, UnRarX, iDVD”

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Massive Organic Peer Review

Great evening event tonight with Amgine — one of a handful of volunteer administrators at WikiNews. Probably safe to say he blew the minds of a roomful of journalists, discussing grassroots journalism and the growth of open-source information repositories. The discussion, of course, centers around the credibility of the source when you replace the traditionally trained information gatekeeper with a collaborative, volunteer-driven process that can only be described as massive organic peer review. Lots of discussion throughout this conference about citizen journalism, but most of the attempts at enabling it pale, I think, in comparison to the success (both in numbers and in growing credibility) of WikiNews and WikiPedia.

At home, started browsing WikiPedia’s public stats pages. Freaky facts (synthesized from that page and tonight’s talk): WikiPedia currently contains more than half a million articles (6x larger than Encylopedia Brittanica), and is growing at a rate of around 1,000 articles per day — the largest single, unified body of information on the planet. The WikiPedia database now weighs around 67GB, most of it plain text (and only 20% of that text is in English). Dishing up around 1200 hits per second. The changelist, when viewed through the administrator’s IRC-like interface, sometimes scrolls by too quickly to read. Average time needed for the hive mind to correct a vandalized article: 4.5 minutes.

And it all runs as a non-profit entity, on top of donated servers and bandwidth. The only religion of the admins and hardcore participants is total, obsessive commitment to neutrality.

It’s difficult to gauge or imagine what the ultimate effect of open source knowledge bases will be on traditional journalism, but it’s clearly adapt-or-die time. It’s going to be fascinating to watch traditional media struggling to cope with this phenomenon over the next decade.

If you missed tonight’s live webcast, I’ll try and get the archives up by late next week.

Update 2012: Amazing infographic on Wikipedia and education:

Wikipedia
Via: Open-Site.org

Via OpenSite

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Venus de Moto

Ezra Demoto    Ezra Ambassador

Traveled with some of our visiting journalists yesterday to the hideout of Ezra Daly, who makes instruments (mostly basses) out of junkyard parts and found objects. Pictured: Venus de Moto and Frankenbass — the latter crafted from an old Moto Guzzi Ambassador gas tank, resting in an old Yamaha chassis re-deployed as a bass stand. The instruments are gorgeous in person. Long in the making, one-of-a-kind, and completely functional. Total commitment and patience in these. Daly plays mostly psychobilly and cow-punk, but has very eclectic tastes. I was sort of a hanger-on, mostly went along to see the instruments, and to help with tech stuff as needed. Amazing to see these instruments in person, and to hear them played. With fire.

Update: One of the journalists put an image of me from the same visit up on his Flickr account. Not particularly flattering, but love the lighting.

Music: Ozric Tentacles :: Ayurvedsim