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Tech Training for Journalists

The Knight Digital Media Center has been running workshops providing multimedia skills training to journalists for a while now, but this week marks the start of a program expansion, as we offer our first Tech Training for Editors workshop. Rather than Photoshop, Sound Track Pro, and Flash, we’ll be teaching RSS, podcasting, map mashups, and other essential internet technologies to editors looking to expand the web savvy of struggling newspapers.

I’ve been busy setting up WPMU as a mock CMS for the editors to work on, relying heavily on the PodPress, Twitter Tools, and WP-Flickr plugins. I’ve also got the new Prologue theme installed, to demonstrate how publications can provide Twitter-like services of their own (I’ll be demonstrating it in a mini-session on microblogging).

The mid-day and evening sessions will be webcast as usual, but this time we’re adding a new element to the mix — rather than panning the camera to a screen displaying output from the presenter’s laptop, we’ll be using Vara Software’s Desktop Presenter to mix output from the speaker’s laptop with camera output, directly into our webcast software (knock wood). Tune in!

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Rickrolling Yngwie

This week at Stuck Between Stations: Rickrolling Yngwie (me) on StSanders’ sublime video overdubs of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.

Already we’re seeing spin-offs. It’s one thing to watch Eric Clapton’s face and fingers scrambling after bad college-level jazz, but what do you do with real jazz? Check the great Oscar Peterson quartet ripped to shreds by an equally talented pianist calling himself Tibenham:

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Future Mule

Gizmodo: “Boston Dynamics keeps working on their BigDog quadruped robot, which will probably grow to be the future AT-AT of the Pentagon.” Video:

Something about the way the bot moves elicits sympathy in the viewer – its motions are so animal-like they throw you. When the researcher kicks BigDog to demonstrate how it can regain its balance, my first reaction was one of sympathy for “the animal” – internally, I had already started to identify it as a living creature (and thus as sentient). But the whine of the two-stroke Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine keeps you reminded. Wonder why it isn’t electric?

More here.

Music: Steve Hillage :: Sea Nature
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Bottled Water

Santa Clara Valley Water District’s fact page on bottled water:

In addition to the misconception about health benefits, there are other, more serious, problems associated with the production and consumption of bottled water. According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption required more than 17 million barrels of oil, not including the energy for transportation. Bottling the water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. It took 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water.

More at the site.

See also: Bottled Water: The Hoax

Music: T.Rex :: Main Man
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SQLite Rules

Quick, what’s the most widely deployed database in the world? MySQL? Oracle? Nope, it’s that puny squirt SQLite – the one you see listed as an option every time you set up a new Rails or Django site. SQLite is not a database server, but a SQL-compatible interface to a single file — perfect for every application that needs a full relational database without the overhead and complexity of a client/server connection. In other words, it’s in your smartphone. It’s on your Mac (driving the indexes in Mail.app, plus the databases behind Aperture and Safari). It’s in Adobe AIR. It’s in FireFox. It’s in Android. It’s in a bunch of giant products and services that will never admit to it.

SQLite is fast. Hella fast. Not great with massive concurrency or transactions, but runs circles around its more popular big brothers in simple SELECT/INSERT statements in moderate-traffic environments. Apparently it can be used to run production web applications if you don’t transactions or permissions (“If your site is small enough to run on a single server, it’ll rock on SQLite.”)

Excellent interview with SQLite’s creator Richard Hipp in this week’s FLOSS. Incredibly humble guy. Talks like his accomplishments ain’t no big thing. But his software changed the world. And instead of making a million bucks off it, he took his name out of the source code and released it into the public domain. Now he makes his living doing customizations for giant corps. Altruism can be good business.

Music: The Who :: Sunrise
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Duck Butter

Sauces 2008

Ooooooo wEEEEE! Made my “annual” pilgrimage at SXSW to Tears of Joy Hot Sauce Shop in Austin (bottom of 6th street, across from Damn Good Tacos). Since I depleted last year’s 8-bottle shipment easily, ramped it up to 10 this time, plus an assortment of mustards (I loves me my mustards) and a bottle of Salt Lick BBQ sauce for good measure. Came home tonight to a big box full of foam peanuts and bubble wrap, which Miles and I dove into just in time for dinner (chicken sandwiches).

First up: Duck Butter. Mmmmm tasty! But too mild. Followed by Bee Sting, a honey-based habanero sauce. Totally different kind of tasty, but still on the mild side (Amy disagreed). I was looking for some real tears of joy, which I finally got with a big dollop of Lottie’s scotch bonnet elixir. Blinding sheet of pain racing up the plane of my face and I’m in heaven.

Music: Rufus Thomas :: The Preacher And The Bear
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What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?

Wall Street Journal: In the international PISA test, Finnish students rank as among the smartest in the world. Yet they don’t start school until age 7, have no classes for the gifted, no standardized testing, have plenty of “fruittari-hoppari,” and don’t agonize over college (since it’s free).

Finland’s secret? Not much. Basics. Pride. And, oh yeah – small class sizes and teachers with masters’ degrees. Another interesting difference – a much narrower gap between the highest- and lowest-performing students (4% in Finland, 29% in the U.S.) That’s because in Finland, none of the students move on until the slower students have caught up. Rather than pushing advanced students forward, they’re invited to help the slower ones. The thinking is that they can do so without harming their own progress.

“In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs.”

There are good reasons (see article) why it would be hard for the U.S. to emulate Finland’s educational performance, but surely we can learn something by observing? Let’s start with smaller classes, better teachers, and and end to No Child. That seems pretty fundamental.

Music: The Hold Steady :: Cattle And The Creeping Things
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WordPress Patch Committed

Wpicon Woo hoo! Last June, while trying to convert a Movable Type site to WordPress, I struggled to come up with a way to get the site’s existing tags, stored in the MT “keywords” field, converted to native WordPress meta fields during import. Finding no workable recipes in the wild, realized I was going to have to modify WordPress’ MT importer directly. Took a bit of hacking and experimenting, but eventually got it working. Decided to share my mods back with the community by contributing a patch to WP Trac.

Months passed, nothing happened. In WP 2.3, WordPress gained native tagging support and I found myself facing a similar problem, needing to convert MT keywords directly to WP tags. Modified the importer again, re-contributed my patch, and… nothing happened. Then, last night, just a week or two before the release of WordPress 2.5, received notice that my patch has been committed to trunk. Fewer than ten lines of code, but it’s my first tangible contribution to an open source project (beyond helping with documentation and plugins, etc.)

A small deal, but I’m proud.

Music: Talking Heads :: Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
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Shift Happens

This video’s projections re: the capabilities of a $1000 personal computer exceeding the capabilities of the human brain by 2023 and that of the entire human race by 2049 remind me of one of the most jaw-dropping books I’ve ever read, Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.

You are a speck, flitting briefly through an inky void…