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Driving down Richmond today I saw local business owners putting up angry anti-rail signs and banners. I figured residents would cry NIMBY at the light rail, but I was surprised that local shops would also oppose the rail, especially given the positive effect of the Main Street line on its environs.

Structural engineer, photographer, and all-around urbanographer Christof Spieler explains why in today’s Intermodality blog entry:

The businesses along Richmond have some very real concerns. Businesses did suffer from Main Street construction. Richmond is narrow in portions, and fitting in rail wouldn’t be easy. But I’d like to see them talk about this issues and to engage METRO in a dialogue, not a political confrontation. And I’d like to see METRO reach out to them with good information, with opportunities to participate, and with measures to minimize the impacts.

He goes on to write a detailed FAQ about the proposed Universities line that should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in Houston light rail. [Previously, in my public bookmarks: Christof’s Why Richmond makes sense.]

I’d be willing to bet that the sudden surge in OBEY posters has something to do with Shepard Fairey’s exhibition at Aerosol Warfare in Houston (concluded on Feb. 10). I guess the big guy’s still got a posse.

It looks like the open-sourced Binder (the fancy multithreading component framework underneath Palm OS 6, which began its life as BeIA 2.0 during the final months of Be, Inc.) has finally been
officially released:

Contributing to the Open Source Community – ACCESS and PalmSource have contributed Open Binder, a component object framework, similar in general concept to DCOM and CORBA, but better scaled for use on small devices. Open Binder provides a unique inter-process communication (IPC) paradigm implemented as a kernel-loadable driver, and incorporates a broad range of programmatic utility classes and frameworks. PalmSource and ACCESS have released the Binder driver and its associated frameworks to the open source community. For more information, see www.openbinder.org.

Elsewhere: Jason (pretty much the mastermind behind the open-source effort).

Update: Eugenia has posted what I think will prove the definitive reportage of this release: OpenBinder introduction & interview with Dianne Hackborn.

Update 2: Slashdot covers the general PalmOS-Linux announcement. Nobody seems to have noticed the Binder part (except Eugenia); who can blame them, given the way it was buried in the press release?

Update 3: Wow, look at that cluttered architectural block diagram. A lot of unpleasant things there, like GTK and GStreamer (when we had a perfectly awesome rendering engine and media framework already built—that is, completed—for Binder). And hey, check it out, the nebulously-named “messaging framework” lives on! I swear, that thing will never be finished until someone decides to actually throw a team at it (instead of a pale blue rectangle on a diagram and a checkbox on a features list).

It’s at this point well-known that Krispy Kreme overexpanded, saturating the market with mediocre product instead of trading on the scarcity of availability (remember the lines outside a new Kreme store back in the late 90s and early 00s?) and cachet of its brand (Krispy Kreme is not the same as Shipley’s). Other factors claimed by KKD for its troubles include Atkins, although it’s now generally agreed that this was a smokescreen to cover its shady accounting practices and franchisee bullying.

So, in other words, this is all old news. Still, I think it’s still momentous that KK is abandoning an entire top-10 metropolitan market like Houston, even temporarily:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts is exiting the Houston market after reaching an agreement with its Houston franchisee, Lone Star Doughnuts.
The five Houston-area stores will cease operations on March 8, as will the location in Beaumont.
Lone Star Doughnuts said Thursday that it will launch its own brand of doughnuts as soon as Krispy Kreme closes. And Krispy Kreme said it plans to reopen stores in Houston, but didn’t say when.

The Chron article goes on to discuss the relationship between KKD and Lone Star Doughnuts, which had devolved into litigation (the settlement of which includes this franchise pullout).

Bottom line: you’ve got less than a month to get HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW.

Zillow.com makes your Realtor® just a little less useful: free market comps by neighborhood, with pretty zooming maps. It’s still in beta, so they don’t have comprehensive data yet, but who’s to say that your real estate agent even has comprehensive data? (It’s certainly not in his/her interest to tell you.) [via]

A new technique in foiling content-based spam filters: using CSS rendering to construct text that the filter can’t see.

V<span style="float: right"> b </span>I<span style="float: right"> d </span>A<span=20 style="float: right"> z ...

The “chaff” characters (b, d, z, …) float to the right, while the letters “VIA” in the above example (followed by “GRA” in the source material) settle to the left, lining up in order. Your spam filter’s tokenizer sees nothing.
(Previous version of this hack relying on HTML rendering to construct text that the filter can’t see. Example: V<!--foo-->I<!--foo-->A<!--foo-->G<!--foo-->R<!--foo-->A.)

(This one took us down here at home, too.)

To: Rice University Community
From: Facilities Engineering and Planning
Subject: Campus Power Outage
Date: Wednesday, February 9, 2006

Early this morning, the Rice Campus lost power for approximately 2
hours due to a Centerpoint
transformer failure. The emergency generator back-up systems
throughout the campus operated
properly. Power was restored to campus at 4:15am. Campus
infrastructure and building systems
have been and will be brought on-line and rechecked throughout the morning.