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Safari’s RSS Puzzle

Every few months I get tired of Firefox chewing memory and hanging every 2-3 days, and decide to return to Safari. It’s a dilemma: Safari’s speed, elegance, and stability, or Firefox’s wealth of plugins? For now, I’m going to put speed and stability first and make Safari primary again. I can switch over when I need to do something Safari can’t do.

As long as I’m tweaking the apple cart, decided to finally check out the Safari 3 beta. Love the new in-page search, love the resizable text fields, love the speed. But the RSS reader? Unchanged, as far as I can tell. What’s going on here? Over at my O’Reilly blog I’m letting Apple have it over Safari’s anemic RSS tools:

OK, geek boys and girls, pop quiz: How do you use Safari’s built-in RSS reader as a feed aggregator? Go ahead, take a minute to figure it out. Take 5. Whatever you need. I’ve got time.

Apple – Whatever you do with RSS in Leopard, please turn up the voltage on the de-confusifizer. RSS is important technology, and consumers aren’t going to get excited about it until you simultaneously show them its power and make it simple. Isn’t that what you do best?

Music: Pete Townshend :: Forever’s No Time At All
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Village Music, R.I.P.

Pcard-South Nice profile in the SF Chronicle on Mill Valley’s legendary record store Village Music, or, more specifically, on the fact that it’s shutting its doors at the end of this month after 60-some years in business. To a certain extent, the store’s demise could be related to the fact that the owner has steadfastly refused to adopt a shred of 21st century technology (or even latter-20th):

Goddard does not own a cell phone or use e-mail. His store does have a Web site, but his wife has to take him there. His store telephone is a rotary dial. He does not take credit cards. He does not even sell by mail order (“I like to see who I sell my records to,” he says). He does own two ’50s Chevys.

But those same Luddite qualities are probably a part of the reason why the store has become renowned as it is – Goddard is about the music, and nothing else. Sadly, one can’t say that about many of the record stores left in the country. And the ones that do remain aren’t long for this world.

Goddard quotes Rolling Stone magazine saying that 36 percent of this country’s record stores have closed since 2003 and credits his staying in business as long as he did to “stubbornness.” “I outlasted Tower,” he says. “Who’d-a thunk?”

A tear falls.

Music: Jonathan Richman :: Dodge Veg-O-Matic
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Maximum Altitude: 10,000 Feet

Your daily dose of seldom-used tech trivia: Checking out the specs on the new iMacs, noticed a one-liner at the bottom of the Electrical and environmental requirements:

Maximum Altitude: 10,000 Feet

Not sure whether this is new to the new iMacs – I’ve just never noticed the stipulation before. So… what computer components are altitude-sensitive? Floated this question to a mailing list I’m on and got back some good theories, such as the fact that thinner air doesn’t circulate as well, and therefore lacks the cooling power of air at lower altitudes. Another respondent noted that mountaineers scaling Everest had purchased multiple iPods to find one that kept working all the way to the top (apparently some do, others don’t).

Found the most plausible explanation in a thread at Metafilter:

Specifically, the altitude concern is for the operation of the hard drive. Above a certain altitude, the low air pressure will allow the drive’s heads to scrape against the platters when in use, resulting in physical damage and data loss.

Larn something every day…

Music: Nick Lowe :: I Must Be Getting Over You
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Blackmail

The creativity of spammers never ceases to amaze me. Received this overnight, smack in the middle of a dozen spammy comments that made it through Akismet (but not through the moderation layer):

Hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50%. In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it, its just done for higher rankings in search engines.

I feel so vulnerable, so helpless. I don’t know who to turn to for help. OK Richard, you’ve got a deal!

Music: Steely Dan :: Black Cow
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Kucinich’s Real Numbers

Listened to a very moving conversation with presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich on the Commonwealth Club podcast the other day, and found myself wondering why he gets such a small sliver of the spotlight. The more I heard, the more I felt myself feeling strongly aligning with his views. Apparently I’m not alone – someone whipped up a simple script to ask where you stand on various key issues, then tells you which candidate should be your guy.

The results are pretty amazing. You’d expect to find Obama and Clinton at or near the top of the pack, while in fact 57% of the 147072 who have taken the poll so far have discovered that Kucinich is their man – or would be, if aligning on issues were the whole story. No other candidate even broke out of the single digits. Of course it’s not, and realistically Kucinich has about as much chance of rising in the polls as he ever has (i.e. very little). But fascinating to see how it stacks up.

Music: Tindersticks :: Closing Titles
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300 Million Non-Existent Chinese

China’s one-child-per-family law, enacted in the 70s, has prevented (avoided?) around 300 million births since that time – roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. Now China is making the connection between the reduced birth rates it’s enforced and the environment.

“… avoiding 300 million births means we averted 1.3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2005”

Hard to argue with the math – the question is whether China is using the numbers as proof that it’s doing its part in the fight against global warming. Oops, guess they are:

“This is only an illustration of the actions we have taken,” said Su Wei, a senior Foreign Ministry official…

The environmental benefit of the reduced population is real. Spinning that reality as though it were China’s intended contribution to the environment is dishonest – especially in a country where air pollution causes up to 750,000 premature deaths each year.

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On This Site Stood

Artist Norm Magnusson has been creating cast aluminum sculptures in the style of classic historical markers, but focused on contemporary issues.

Nm

Taking observations that may once have been chilling but by now have become old news, and casting them in metal as if they were some kind of official state declaration somehow makes them affect one all over again, like this one did me:

ON THIS SITE STOOD RY BRAUER, TYPICAL AMERICAN TEEN. BY THE AGE OF 18, HE HAD WITNESSED OVER 30,000 MURDERS ON TV

Others focus on institutions that “once stood,” rather than on individuals:

Nm02

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The Other WP-Cache

Miles WP shirt WP-Cache easily ranks among the top five of my most-used (and most critical!) WordPress plugins (static site performance with dynamic site behavior, and all that jazz). But last week, heard about another kind of WP-Cache — developer Ryan Boren planted a couple of ammo cans full of WordPress t-shirts in the middle of Almaden Quicksilver Park — and didn’t list them on geocaching.com. In other words, a little insider training :)

Don’t generally like to drive much for a geocache (it kind of taints the enviro aspect), but made an exception today – this just sounded like too much fun. A huge and beautiful park, and plenty of traditional caches in the area too. Made the trip with Miles this morning and ended up spending almost the entire day hiking.

Tracked down the shirts mid-day and there’s still a ton of ’em. No extra-smalls, so had to drape him in a small. The find was extra special because this was, coincidentally, our 100th find! Happy birthday to us, or something.

Stopped to eat Bunny Grahams and drink the last of the water (when will I learn?). Splashed each other in a creek. Found an entire deer skeleton (and brought the skull home in the bag my WP shirt came in). Dropped off some of the travel bugs we picked up in Minnesota. Ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches in the middle of the woods. Hiked our butts off (Miles did five full miles today!) Amazing views, very few people, great father-son day. Life is good.

Flickr set

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Gull Lake, 2007

Gull Lake If it’s been quiet around here lately, it’s because I just returned from a much-needed two-week vacation in Minnesota, relaxing with extended family. Five days of the trip spent on the shores of Gull Lake – canoeing, fishing, reading, golfing (yes, I said golfing!), playing tennis, geocaching, fishing, feasting, relaxing our hearts out. Nice little water skiing injury to show for my efforts – a ski whacked the top of my foot at speed and created a 3/4″ pillow bruise on top of the foot… which forced me to sit on the beach and devour a book and a half* (ah, shucks). Still recovering from that. Did I mention Wi-Fi in the trees, so you can use a laptop from anywhere? Life’s rough.

Back at work now, trying desperately to hang onto the vacation glow, but it’s fading fast. Big semester coming, with me in a new role at the J-School (more on that another day).

Just uploaded a pile of vacation images. Again trying something new – Image Rodeo has been great over the past few years, but never liked the fact that it forces you to output a separate database from iPhoto and then generate an album from that. Decided to give the free Galerie (which generates galleries with custom templates directly out of iPhoto) a shot and loving it so far, though it did take a while to port my template to its syntax.

Rained a bunch in the last few days (and I had my first encounter with a storm of nickel-sized hail – scary stuff!), but didn’t let that stop me – had an amazing experience on the last day doing a 15-geocache run in the rain, on bicycle. I’m almost always caching with Miles – was great to get out on my own. The Land of 10,000 Lakes is just packed with gorgeous meadows and wild lands. Trails run everywhere, ponds around every corner. The vegetation is incredibly lush — I could die of greenery.

* Read Sam Harris’ “Letter to a Christian Nation” and half of Sam Leavitt’s “Freakonomics” – both incredible. Hope to post more on those some day soon.

Music: Porter Wagoner :: Albert Ervin