dsandler.org

More Moleskine Hacks. (Coda this MetaFilter thread from 2003.)

“Apparently, some Starbucks managers are begging upper management to let them free up the WiFi, because they know they’re losing business to others.“ I’ve been making the case for free WiFi as customer retention perk for some time now (analogy: free bathrooms). Free wireless at Starbucks might be enough to bring me back.

“There is nothing inherently wrong with monetizing a full-post RSS feed.” —from Ads in RSS, or is RSS the Ad?

So, let’s say you have some shiny new speakers. Or crappy old ones. Or you’re a DIY audio enthusiast. How do you really know what those speakers are giving you? Chris Liscio’s new FuzzMeasure software will tell you. No other hardware required!

MLS Stands for Maximum Length Sequence, and it is a great way to measure the dynamics of your loudspeakers, listening room, or whatever you wish, using the hardware you already have. FuzzMeasure is the first-ever MLS measurement application available exclusively for the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple Store, London, UK

Seventy-five percent said people with cancer and other serious illnesses should be allowed to use marijuana for medical purposes as long as their doctor approves, according to a Scripps Howard Texas poll question commissioned by Texans for Medical Marijuana.

Yes, Texas. (from the Burnt Orange Report)

Halo Needs Women!

Better mention the Wired article on RSS advertising and the Signal vs. Noise thread about it too. Despite the abundant pithy disgust response (”Unsubscribed.”), I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. RSS items are marshallable, mungeable things. If a user doesn’t want to read an ad, she doesn’t have to click the RSS item. Software can be written to sift ads from content if you’re really upset, but honestly, what’s wrong with targeted text-based ads?

Data point: Google’s PageAds don’t bother me at all. They don’t blink, don’t jump around, and I can choose to look at them or not without a whole lot of hassle. They’re unobtrusive, and therefore I’m less likely to shut them all down. And so now what we have are textual advertisements in a structured medium—perfect for this kind of take-it-or-leave-it user scenario.

Look at it this way. If the RSS ad keeps your favorite feed running, but doesn’t obscure the content or cause an epileptic seizure, be thankful.

Another possible way to support RSS feeds: headlines are free, but you can pay a few bucks a year for full-article service, audioblogs, images, etc. That sounds like a winning proposition.

I actually built something very similar to Skribe (a Scheme-based document construction languge) when I was a junior at Rice. Working with Shriram, I built Chisel, which could emit HTML or PostScript (by way of LAT_EX, naturally). It actually had a slightly friendlier syntax than Skribe (you didn’t have to know as much Scheme … or, more accurately, you didn’t have to knowingly know as much Scheme). I guess I should have released it, or something.

Seen recently on-campus:

Frickin’ ELECs.

Erin sez: “I’ve updated Lost, and I’ve introduced a new format, whereby I pull apart the current events from the backstory. It should make the episodes more straightforward to synopsize.”

A new Paul Graham essay, Made in USA, is out, in which American suburbs and cars are contrasted with American software and movies. And why 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA is actually, secretly, the street address of the Embassy of Japan.

So, I’m old-school, I guess. Instead of all these fancy podcasts, I use RadioRecorder to schedule TiVo-like mp3 streams for my favorite radio shows. Now I can hear Morning Edition on my iPod, whenever.

Unfortunately, the iPod’s display is too narrow to disambiguate several recordings (in this case, Morning Edition from 11/16 and 11/17):

(Radio News)

Morning Edition - Nov 1

Morning Edition - Nov 1

I started poking around the (GPL) source to RadioRecorder to see if I could hack around this. What I discovered is that RadioRecorder uses [NSDate descriptionWithCalendarFormat:] on the text in the “Title Prefix” field (of the “Track Tags” tab), so you can pop any kind of strftime() compatible formatting codes in there to add date/time information to the beginning of your track names. No coding required!

The prefix I’ve selected begins with [%b %d], which will result in files named “[Nov 11] Morning Edition - Nov 11, 2004 05:00 AM”, which will be easy to distinguish on the iPod screen.

Just thought I’d share that.

To: People of Earth
From: God
Date: 11/17/2004
Subject: stop
 
knock it off, all of you
 
seriously, what the hell
 
-- God

Coming soon to the standalone TiVo OS: when you hit fast forward to skip past commercials, small banner ads will show up on your screen. You’ll be able to click them to get more info, see an informercial, or send your home address details to get more info about a product mailed to you.

But with Pixar announcing earlier this year that it would end its distribution relationship with Disney following the 2005 release of the Lasseter-directed “Cars,” Disney CEO Michael Eisner and studio head Dick Cook have signaled their determination to bring Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the gang back to the big screen.

—CNN: ‘Toy Story 3′ in the works, something Jobs had no interest in allowing (as seen on /.)

Psychological overhead is the amount of cognitive work that must be done to make certain that a responsibility is taken care of. In other words, if two members of a household split all chores but one is in charge of making sure that they’re split and completed, there is no equality because the psychological overhead is at play. It takes a rare housing situation for everyone to equally maintain the psychological overhead.

Excerpt: psychological overhead of responsibility

February 26, 1993— I’ve learned that love can be a lot like surgery. And breaking up with Wanda was a lot like dental surgery—dental surgery with a pair of hedge clippers and a polo mallet.

McSweeney’s does it again: The Lost Journals of Doogie Howser, M.D.

Slashdot tackles art tips for programmers. Designers everywhere suffer myocardial infarction. (Fear not—many of the responses on that thread offer the following sound advice: Unless you’re willing to invest a large amount of time making graphic design a part of your skillset, you’re probably better off just hiring an artist for your project. They (often) work cheap, and (usually) produce great work. There are a few solid tips for the dabbler, as well, such as “be consistent”, “pick a few styles”, “learn about fonts”, “avoid clip art”.)

Prentiss rounds up all this podcasting hoo-hah in a convenient summary format.

OK, so Erin and I aren’t the only ones who think KPRC’s “weather dog” (”Radar”) was a stupid idea. KTRK now has one too, but, see, their weather dog (”Doppler”) is … a Chia pet. Oooh, SNAP! [via Metroblogging Houston]

Tell me a secret, something you haven’t told anyone else. Make me special again, I want to write. But I don’t have the guts. Instead, “How are you doing?”

Excerpt, Re: (no subject)

Epitaph for KLOL: Houstonians mourn the loss of KLOL and its 34 years on-air (Houston Chronicle).

Darryl points out some hard data for us radio-haters. And lo and behold, crapulent KRBE plays “Over and over” by Nelly … over and over (every two hours and six minutes). KTBZ plays its favorite songs once every 3½ hours—marginally better. Believe me, KFOG’s 26-plays-a-day maximum is looking pretty good right about now.

Whoa. (MPG link)

(The reason you don’t see stuff like that here in the States is that some moron would sue Citroën for false advertising.)

I had previously scraped my RSS numbers together by extrapolating from Bloglines subscriber data, but today’s Boing Boing article on RSS bandwidth includes a helpful link to Boing Boing’s own Web stats page.

File type	Hits	Percent	Bandwidth	Percent
xml1	2230472	11.1 %	46.36 GB	22 %
html	1924753	9.6 %	43.47 GB	20.6 %
rdf2	225715	1.1 %	4.11 GB	1.9 %

¹ from /rss.xml and /atom.xml

² from /index.rdf

That’s right—they’ve served 50 GB of RSS/Atom data so far this month (somewhere in the vicinity of 3 GB/day, since we’re but halfway through November). Straight HTML only accounts for 44 GB over the same period, which is surprising: RSS readers are pulling down more bits of text and markup than web browsers.

I had previously conjectured (based on a rather larger RSS feed size, 40 KB; the logs say the average is more like 20 KB) that Boing Boing serves 22 GB/day (40 K × 11,500 Bloglines subscribers × 48 requests per day), so my estimate was perhaps a little high.

In the most conservative case, this means that Boing Boing has (3.6 GB·day^-1) / (48 users·polls·day^-1) / (20 KB·poll^-1) = 3,750 unique RSS readers. Many clients don’t poll every half-hour or all day long, so there are probably quite a few more. What this tells me is that bandwidth problems are real, and we can expect them to get worse as more users discover RSS (to wit: yet more mainstream press, this time in Sunday’s TIME Magazine Europe).

Judging by these stats (and Glenn Fleishman’s figures), it’s clearly still important that we repair the distribution architecture of RSS. Even with the best-behaved clients, the growing user population spells DOOM for polled RSS.

[Aside: Glenn’s graph shows a beautiful weekly heartbeat in RSS bandwidth; he attributes this to well-behaved readers cooling off over the weekend when his XML feed is completely static. I think that’s part of it, but I’d also be willing to bet that some of this can be attributed to clients being switched off over the weekend. Rodrigo Rodrigues had some great p2p membership graphs in his IRIS workshop talk that showed many hosts disconnecting for about two days—Saturday and Sunday.]

[Note: This article was updated as of about 21:15 to reflect a closer reading of BB’s stats page.]

Study group.

Brian has a pretty good roundup of the death of TechTV. “After firing all the TechTV people in San Francisco, [Comcast] graciously hired back some of them [to the new G4/TechTV channel] and forced them to pack up everything and move to LA, only to be fired 2 months later just before Thanksgiving and Christmas.” More tales of corporate screwage and thickheadedness.

Well, now you know I have some terribly pedestrian tastes in music (OK, I guess you knew already). But I’m definitely always looking for new stuff (unlike some people).

So, what are you listening to right now? Some of my favorite music at the moment is a result of serendipity, recommendation, and chance, so your advice may land on my solstice-holiday music wishlist. (Yes, family members, it’s OK to buy me a CD or two. I know you feel like buying music is just a half-step up from buying a gift certificate (horror!) but, look, it’s cheap, and I’ll get a huge amount of enjoyment out of it, because I’m like that about music.)

Send me your favorite jams, and help me blot out the sun!

I was tempted to seek out How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (it’s the U2 album coming out next week, gentle reader-under-a-rock) on the Internets this evening. (Before we go any further, let me explain that there is no chance in hell that I’m not buying the album when it comes out. This isn’t a question of long-run theft, but rather, uh, temporary ownership violation.)

I didn’t, in the end, download it. Not because I couldn’t—it’s definitely out there, if you’re patient enough to deal with that sort of thing—but because I’m really trying to curb my need for instant gratification.

For one thing: the album’s coming out in a week, for goodness’ sake—I ought to be able to wait. Normal people wait. Law-abiding people wait. Everyone waits, and I need to suck it up and take a number.

I have to admit, though, that that argument doesn’t hold nearly as much sway over me as does this one: You’ll spoil it. This is the first album in four years; I remember how excited I was in 2000, when All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released; I had been working at Be, Inc. for a few months, and things were already getting stressful and busy at the office. Chris and I decided to tear down our cubicles on the first floor of 800 El Camino and create a slightly more team-oriented space, and so I put the album on my tinny PC speakers and rocked out as we schlepped Hermann Miller module chunks across the office.

I don’t want my memory of Dismantle to be, “Oh, yeah, when that came out, I was hunched over my filesharing software, subverting law and order.” I’d prefer for it to be, at the very least, “… I was hunched over my final projects, despairing of finishing by the end of the semester.” You know, something glamorous like that.

Spotted a memepool entry about paper airplanes, citing this complex design as the best (also: lots more designs). But I can’t imagine that any of these flies as well as Joe Palmer’s planes, especially when you consider that no tearing or cutting is required. (The PL-1 is extraordinarily easy to fold, too—only a couple steps away from the old dart that everyone knows how to fold, but which flies straight into the pavement.)

And while we’re talking about paper planes, be sure to grab a copy of Glider PRO, now that John Calhoun’s made it freely available.

When you digest food, its carbon atoms enter your blood. Unless they are expelled from your body, they add to your weight. But here is the salient observation: the only effective way your body has to get rid of digested carbon is to combine it with oxygen to form carbon dioxide, and then expel it through your lungs. Unless you breathe out the carbon, you gain weight.

I’m not sure how I feel about this Physics of Gluttony article. Yes, the author is a respected UCB physics professor, and yes, the “conservation of carbon atoms” argument makes a great deal of intuitive sense. Maybe I’ve become distrustful of elegant solutions. Does that mean I’m growing up?

Wow, I had no idea that the Python interpreter never releases memory. It recycles storage from objects that have been GC’d, but it never releases those pages back to the OS. So the memory usage of a Python process is essentially nondecreasing. Wow.

More on the Audion story. “If there’s one thing that really bugs me, it’s when I have to kill babies.”

Dave teaches us all about Spy Numbers. Sometimes, the actual world of espionage is actually weirder than the made-up one. (Do not listen to the Swedish Rhapsody in the middle of the night, that’s all I’m saying.)

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