Sandee has just launched her new site, Becoming Donna Reed:

Armed with a notepad and pen, my trusty MacBook, and the desire to be the best domestic goddess I can be, I will watch the show from the beginning and find the lesson in each episode. Consider this your Cliff’s Notes on household harmony.

She’ll still be updating The Feathered Nest with food recipes and insights on home decor while she divines the lessons of Donna Reed. Here’s what she’s learned so far:

• We all need to be reminded that we are valued and loved.
• There is no shame in calling in professional help.
• Support the ones you love and accept their support when you need it.
• When facing adversity, the right LBD can see you through.
• Make time to romance your spouse.

At the top, by the way, is Sandee celebrating the discovery of a perfectly preserved 1950s kitchen at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont.

It’s not just the critics, nobody seems to get the story on Apple’s new TV-connected device right. Darrell Etherington at The Apple Blog says it’s a non starter for him, and Ars Technica’s John Siracusa describes it as just the most recent entry in a product line that has been “a persistent loser” for the company. Even John Gruber is damning it with faint praise.

They’re all wrong.

Of course the problem didn’t start there. People were going mad with the idea that the Apple TV would introduce apps to the living room for months before the new Apple TV was introduced. And speculation about how people would control the then unknown new device grew rampant: yes, pointing at the TV is awkward, but Apple would offer a variety of remote control options, perhaps even a Magic Trackpad with inertial sensors. The Google TV is coming, after all, and nobody can be blamed for expecting Apple to try to one-up its former best friend and new rival with a whiz bang do everything device.

But that’s not Apple. Not the whiz bang. Not the unrestrained feature creep.

Apple likes their products to work simply. Apple believes in sophistication, not complexity, and that’s what makes Apple’s customers love them and so confounds the media that covers them. The new Apple TV one ups the as yet unreleased Google TV, but not by offering a bigger app store or newfangled input device (though, in a way, it does both). The media, so focused on comparing the new device with what has come before it (including announced but unreleased products, like the Google TV), can’t see how the Apple TV is so fundamentally different from those devices.

The new Apple TV one ups all of them by connecting your iOS device (and, yes, your iTunes library) to your TV. Steve Jobs demonstrated it (go watch the video again) and it’s on the Apple TV website, but nobody’s really thinking about what this means to our living rooms or TV experience. This deceptively simple feature turns the average living room inside out: where the TV and attached devices were once at the center, the locus of control is shifting to the 120 million iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches that Apple has shipped since the iPhone launch in 2007.

The Apple TV does indeed move iOS into the living room, but it doesn’t create a new app platform or need a fancy new remote. It puts the most popular personal media player ever in control of our TV. It’s not a weak attempt to translate the iPod experience to the TV, it simply allows us to view the media we’re enjoying on our iPods on our TVs.

Think on this from Core77:

One of the most awkward social interactions I regularly experience is visiting a friend’s home and suffering the “Dude you GOTTA see this YouTube clip” moment, where I am forced to stand awkwardly behind and to the side of their chair, peer at the screen they’re clicking on, and pretend to be amused by a 90-second animation of a goddamn squirrel fighting Darth Vader or whatever.

…in everyone’s home office there should be a dedicated chair for YouTube-clip inflictees so we don’t have to suffer on our feet.

So called connected TVs were big sellers last year, I have friends with them, but they’re crap. YouTube and Netflix integration are useless if you have to search for the video by navigating an on-screen keyboard with the spongy directional buttons on the remote. A person with an iPad can to find a video and watch it, as well as several related videos, in less time than it takes their neighbor to find it on their connected TV. Apple has now made it possible for that iPad user to play the video they’re excited about on the living room TV that everybody can comfortably see.

Steve Jobs told us that the set-top boxes are a mess. He told us he wants no part of that business. So don’t look at the Apple TV as a standalone device, look at it as a wireless video output port for your iTunes library and iOS device. And Apple’s hinting that it will soon be as ubiquitous as iPod Dock connectors in 3rd party devices.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve got a dozen top priorities this morning, but this dancing merengue dog just delayed them all.

Mathew Ingram on Twitter, Esquire Magazine, and bars:

It’s called social media because it’s social. In other words, it’s a conversation; and yes, sometimes it’s like a conversation in a bar.

Like WordPress MU before, MultiSite implementations of WordPress 3.0 use a script to handle image and other attachment downloads. That script checks permissions and maps the request path to the files path on disk, then reads the file out to the web server, which sends it to the browser.

That approach has some inefficiencies, and for me it introduces some problems. The process would often give up before completing the file transfer, resulting in broken images and truncated MP3s among other problems. Interestingly, the problem is exacerbated when Memcached is activated.

I haven’t solved the problem, but I found a work around in X-Sendfile and X-Accel-Redirect. Both do basically the same thing, the different names are for different implementations in various servers. A post at Tech Rocket Science offers some background and explains that support is built in to lighthttpd and nginx, while Apache httpd requires a module. The benefits are simple: Apache httpd is well optimized for reading files from disk and sending them to clients, but PHP isn’t. Those httpd servers also know how to send or respond to headers that make it even faster, including Etag, If-Modified-Since, and If-None-Match.

Here’s how to get it working on CentOS 5 with the packaged Apache httpd:

1. Nils Maier wrote the module for Apache httpd. Download the source and take some time to review the docs there.
2. Compile and install the module on the command line:
   /usr/sbin/apxs -cia mod_xsendfile.c
3. If you don’t have apxs, you probably need to install the httpd-devel package. Get that with this command:
   yum install httpd-devel
4. Once compiled and installed, you’ll need to enable it in your httpd.conf or .htaccess (I enabled it by putting a file in my conf.d directory). These are the directives you’ll need to set:
   XSendFile on
XSendFileAllowAbove on
5. Now restart Apache httpd
   /sbin/service httpd restart
6. Finally, you’ll need to enable the support in your wp-config.php:
   define('WPMU_SENDFILE', true);

Alex Bluesummers asked on a WordPress list:

How do I order posts in the loop by whether or not it is in a category, then by date?

Suppose I have 10 posts, of which 5 are in the category “Sports” and 5 are in the category “Blog News”. Both “Sports” and “Blog News” posts are mixed together chronologically. “Sports” and “Blog News” posts share other categories and tags. I want both types of posts to be present in the loop regardless of whether it’s the front page or category archive view, but ordered by “Sports” and “blog news” and then by date. How is this most elegantly accomplished?

I can think of two ways, both have their advantages and drawbacks. Here’s what I offered in response:

You’ll probably do best by running multiple loops. That way you know exactly where each category of posts begins and ends and you can choose how many you want in each section. You’ll also be able to avoid burying a category because you had a run of posts in another category.

On the other hand, maybe that’s what you want, or maybe you have other ideas. In that case…

MySQL’s ORDER BY FIELD( $fieldname, ...list of matching entries in the order you want them...) syntax my be what you need. You’d have to join the term relationships table, then order by term_taxonomy_id (or go all the way and join the other tables to order by category name).

If you go that route, the posts_join and posts_orderby filters will be your friends. You’d probably want to hook a function to the pre_get_posts action that checks that the request is for the front page and then applies the filters. You should probably also apply a hook the to remove the filters on loop_end or something like that so they don’t disrupt other queries.

I’ve been running a few instances of WordPress MU for a while now, so I was more than a little anxious about the merge of the MU functionality into the core of WordPress. It’s a good thing, but sometimes such dramatic changes pose rocky challenges.

Not so in this case.

Pete Mall blogged about it in May, and I’m happy to say that I followed those instructions (summary: upgrade, it will work) to upgrade both this site and Scriblio.net recently. The biggest challenge I faced was in migrating my SVN checkout (not discussed in Pete’s post, but people who install via FTP or use the auto upgrader don’t need to worry about this), and Pete noted the only gotcha that I might have encountered: changing the .htaccess to use a different file that had been used in WPMU.

I tested the migration on this site, and it rocked so much that I decided to go forward with upgrading the other site, even though WP3.0 hasn’t been formally released yet. Rock n roll.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We planned the donut tour. We did the donut tour. We ate donuts.

We made five stops on the tour, but this video only covers four of them. We were too stuffed to say anything about Japonais, even though the donuts there were delicious.

Here’s the full lineup:

• Donna’s Donuts (Yelp!)
• Ziggy’s Donuts (Yelp!)
• Kane’s Donuts (Yelp!)
• Sun Guang Bakery (Yelp!)
• Japonaise Bakery (Yelp!)

National Donut Day is big here. Sandee has a National Donut Day post and my pictures are on Flickr (and linked below).  This is, as Sandee says, a “kick in the pants to appreciate a special part of [your] daily life.” Go get a donut, darn it.

Since 1938, the first Friday of June has been hailed throughout the US as National Donut Day. It was founded in recognition of the great comfort donuts provide to those who eat them, and to honor those who serve them.

It was in the spirit of National Donut Day that I organized a tour of donut shops in Eastern Massachusetts earlier this year. As I describe below, New England’s donut scene is suffering. The region that birthed Dunkin Donuts has been betrayed by the chain that steamrolled the independent shops (seriously, can you find a non-chain place on this map?), then scaled back its donut production to chase profits elsewhere. But what the chain restaurants take away, local artisans can celebrate. Localism isn’t all farmers’ markets and fresh eggs, we need to find and cherish our local comfort food.

When planning your donut tour, consider your call to action carefully. Whatever you choose, it’s important to clearly state it to your participants:

Perhaps you’ve noticed: Dunkins doesn’t make donuts anymore. Sure they’ve got a few, but they’ve cut back. Krispy Kreme has closed its northeastern shops. Eat-A-Donut is closed. Top Donut has gone commercial.

Donuts are at risk! Donuts need us! Dough Nut Go Gentle Into That Dark Night!

We must go looking for the last of this delicious, if disappearing, dietary delicacy. We must go on another donut tour*. This time bigger than before. This time broader than before. This time we have a mission. This time we must save the donut.

*Sorry if you missed out on the first donut tour. All the more reason join us this time. And think of it, because this is a sequel of sorts, now you can say “donut tour two: this time it’s personal.”

Plan your trip by thoroughly researching your regional donut geography. Correlate hours of operation among the various shops with the availability of participants to develop an itinerary:

Mark your calendars: Sunday, February 7. The first taste treat on this tour of donut decadence starts at 9am, whereafter the confectionary procession continues on to five more fabulous shops.

Here’s a map of the tour:
http://is.gd/5EtI2

Because I trust bakeries where the owner is proud or confident enough to put his or her name on the sign, we’ll start the tour with shops with possessive names:

9am: Donna’s Donuts (Yelp!)
2106 Main Street, Tewksbury, MA? – (978) 988-0010?
Hours: Sat 4a – 3p, Sun 7a – 1p
Selected for their steak and cheese, meatball, and hamburger donuts, among others. (Look at the pictures on Yelp!.)

10am: Daddy’s Donuts (Yelp!)
49 Water Street, Wakefield, MA – (781) 245-1677
Hours: Unk.
Selected because one reviewer called it scary. And it’s called “Daddy’s.”

11am: Ziggy’s Donuts (Yelp!)
2 Essex Street, Salem, MA? – (978) 744-9605?
Hours: Sat closed, Sun 6a – 12p
Selected because a reviewer says “blows my mind.” Blog review.

12pm: Kane’s Donuts (Yelp!)
120 Lincoln Avenue, Saugus, MA? – (781) 233-8499
Hours: Sat 3:30a – 5p, Sun 3:3a – 1p
Selected for the “soft coffee roll the size of an adult human head.”

1pm: Sun Guang Bakery (Yelp!)
423 Main Street, Malden, MA? – (781) 388-9837?
Hours: Sunday 8a – 5p
“Awesome, Simple, Cheap, Delicious.”

2pm: Japonaise Bakery (Yelp!)
1020 Beacon Street Brookline, MA – (617) 566-7730?
Hours: Sat 8a – 8p, Sun 8:30a – 8p
Curry donuts and custard cremes: “They can somehow stuff that little piece of bread with so much custard! It’s SO good!”

RSVP by email.

Be sure to call each shop and explain that you’ve organized a tour that will be stopping at that location. Ask them to set aside a selection of their best donuts. The conversation can often reveal details that are not available online. My conversation with Bill Wilson at Donna’s revealed that Daddy’s Donuts had recently closed.

Think carefully about what you’re asking of the tour participants. Each donut can deliver hundreds of calories and many grams of sugar, but the tour will also demand considerable time in the car between stops. A few days before the event you should offer a few tips that will help the participants best enjoy and most strongly participate:

Fellow crusaders:

We are just about a week away from this remarkable event. I’m not saying that waters will part or angels will descend from heaven, but this is big. To help us prepare, I’ve developed the following list of must haves:

• A sense of purpose. We’re doing something important, we’re saving donuts.
• Full water bottle. Water helps flush the carbohydrates.
• Medical insurance card. In case the water isn’t enough to prevent dangerous insulin spikes.
• Elastic waist pants. You’r eating donuts, goddamnit, and you’ll feel ‘em.
• Gum or breath mints. I’m told bulemic purging is effective.
• A haiku that expresses your undying love for donuts. Confucious say: no love is true without haiku.

Of all the above, the haiku is probably the most important. It will help focus your mind and body for the journey we will be undertaking. Also, points will be awarded for being able to recite your haiku with a mouth full of donuts (for the purposes of this event, a limerick is an acceptable alternative).

The geekier among us will notice the attached calendar item. If you haven’t already marked this banner day, please add that to your calendar now.

Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory in this grand struggle. Together we will stand to save donuts.

Thank you,

–Casey

The interior displays at the Museum of Family Camping celebrated many generations of camping history. My docent made much of the dingle stick (the vertical stick that holds the cooking tin); good manners demanded they be left at the camp site for the next camper.

Memorial Day weekend is universally recognized as the start of summer. Tradition allows that we can start wearing white, gather family and friends for barbecue, and, for those so inclined, go camping. For the past many years it’s also been the start of the Museum of Family Camping‘s season.

The museum told the story of camping starting in the Great Depression. Modern Era migrations such as that depicted in The Grapes of Wrath set the stage for leisure time camping. Proto handymen crafted campers from kits and plans, putting to their own purpose the newly popular innovations of their day: automobiles and plywood. Yes, plywood. It’s clearly an essential component in a camper.

Judging by the outdoor displays, bumper stickers appear to be a structurally significant part of campers after mid 1960.

The generations of RV development could be seen in the well maintained collection of campers on the museum’s front lawn. Docents, who lived on site in their own campers, would walk visitors though the outdoor display and encourage them to note the emergence of different materials and changing style over the decades. An early Sears camper offered little more than a dry floor on which to lay out the family’s bedrolls, but amenities developed quickly. Lacquered plywood tables appeared, then gave way formica sheathed kitchens with small, but serviceable built-in in appliances. Tupperware was significant.

This diorama of an ideal American campground was once featured at a camping tradeshow in the 1960s and had been on display at the Museum of Family Camping.

Jessamyn visited during it’s final days last year and returned with a story that it was set to close permanently. The museum’s web site says nothing of the closure and the listed phone number still rings. Nobody answers there, but calls elsewhere confirmed my fears: the museum really won’t be opening this year. No news was immediately available about what may happen to the museum in the future, but I was told to watch the web site.

Sandee’s been getting into disposable art. First it was her holiday dames on the chalkboard in our kitchen, and more recently she’s been crafting one of a kind wrapping paper. It gets torn up and discarded in just a fraction of the time it takes her to sketch and shade it, but act of creation is what she enjoys. I guess that’s why her favorite artistic endeavor is baking.

You can’t view a web page’s source, and you can’t Command+F to search for text on the page, but you sure can get a debugging console to see the errors on the page. Here’s how:

1. Find and open the Settings app
   
2. Select Safari
   
3. Scroll down to find the Developer option at the bottom
   
4. Turn on the Debug Console
   
5. In Safari, look for the debug console’s summary info at the top of the page, just below the URL bar
   
6. Touch the summary info to view a detailed report for the errors on the page
   

Click here to view the embedded video.

How do you make news fun? Or, how do you make moderating often fractious comments on news stories fun? You follow FourSquare’s example and introduce badges:

The Moderator badge allows you to more actively participate in this process. If you are a Level 1 Moderator (earned by flagging at least 20 comments that we deleted, with a high ratio of good flags to mistaken ones), your flags now carry five times the weight of a standard flag. Level 2 Moderators (those who have flagged 100 comments that we deleted) are trusted to delete comments directly. We’ve seen how engaged you are in making sure the conversations on HuffPost remain interesting and productive, and are excited to have you become even more involved in helping maintain a non-toxic atmosphere.

The internet’s solution to high-volume problems is crowd-sourcing, but the site’s reported 2.3 million comments a month (just under one comment per second) may stretch even that tactic. Compete ranks the site #78, with about 8 million monthly unique visitors, even a small uptick in participation could offer huge returns.

Mick Jagger to BBC:

[P]eople only made money out of records for a very, very small time [...] if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

Via.

I was happy to see one of my photos used as source material for this illustration in TruthOut.Org’s seven year reality check on the Iraq war.

John Gruber linked to the sizzle in Jeff Croft’s post:

In the [FlashCamp Seattle] opening keynote, Ryan Stewart, a Flash Platform evangelist at Adobe, demoed Flash Player 10.1 running on his Nexus One phone. [...]

Here’s what happened: On his Mac, Ryan pulled up a site called Eco Zoo. It is, seemingly, a pretty intense example of Flash development — full of 3D rendering, rich interactions, and cute little characters. Then, he pulled up the same thing on his Nexus One. The site’s progress bar filled in and the 3D world appeared for a few seconds before the browser crashed. Ryan said (paraphrasing), “Whoops! Well, it’s beta, and this is an intense example — let’s try it again.” He tried it again and got the same result. So he said to the audience, “Well, this one isn’t going to work, but does anyone have a Flash site they’d like to see running?” Someone shouted out “Hulu.” Ryan said, “Hulu doesn’t work,” and then wrapped up his demo, telling people if they wanted to try more sites they could find him later and he’d let them play with his Nexus One.

Here’s the steak:

[W]ith media sites (and yes, porn sites) developing HTML5 video solutions for mobile devices, Hulu and many game companies moving towards native platform apps, and Apple’s impending release of iAd, the question on my mind is: by the time Adobe has Flash working well on mobile, will anyone still care?

There’s a lot more nuance in Jeff Croft’s post, including a clear admission that HTML5, JavaScript, and all the other  open web standards can’t yet do what Flash can. Indeed, I’m glad to admit that Flash development is easier than standards-based development for some sophisticated things.

Let’s hope that Flash development is moving slowly because Adobe only has half their engineers on it and the other half working on a sweet HTML5 + JavScript + Canvas + etc authoring app.

Jeff Howe writes: idea jams “allow people to discover the fringe question (or idea, or solution), then tweak it, discuss it and bring the community’s attention to it.”

“Idea management is really a three-part process,” says Bob Pearson, who as Dell’s former chief of communities and conversation rode heard on IdeaStorm. “The first is listening. That’s obvious.” The second part, Pearson says, was integration, “actually disseminating the best ideas throughout our organization. We had engineers studying IdeaStorm posts and debating how they could be implemented.”

The last part is the trickiest and most important: “It involves not just enacting the ideas, but going back into your community and telling them what you’ve done.” Starbucks, which maintains its own version of IdeaStorm, employs 48 full-time moderators whose only job is to engage the online community. In other words, Starbucks is investing the vast share of its resources in the second and third parts of the idea management cycle.

Listen, evolve, report. Sounds like good advice to me.

David Cloutman on Code4Lib:

Don’t forget to look at trends outside of “Libraryland”. A lot of professional library discussion takes place in an echo chamber, and bad ideas often get repeated and gain credibility as a result. Librarians usually overstate the uniqueness of their organizations and professions. When the question, “What are other libraries doing?” arises in addressing a technical problem, don’t be afraid to generalize the question to other types of organizations. Too often, the answer to the question, “What are other libraries doing?” is “Failing.” Emulate for the sake of success, not conformity.

It’s a point I’m always trying to make: look outside your specialization.

Thanks to Kathleen Seidel, a fellow New Hampshire resident and blogger at neurodiversity.com, I now have what appears to be a good example of a motion to quash a subpoena (even cooler, she filed it pro se). I’ve also learned that NH is among the states that allows lawyers to issue subpoena in civil cases without prior approval of a judge.

Take a look and prepare yourself for some law talking.

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash minces no words in its conclusion:

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.[...]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

A comment in the University of Lincoln’s Audio Production course blog demonstrates the value of public blogging in academia:

I am looking forward to beginning this course in September and have been finding these blogs very useful in providing a guide as to what sort of things to expect during my first year. Keep up the good work!

Thanks to Joss Winn for the tip.

The above graph and this MySQL performance blog story are from last year, but I believe are still relevant and instructive now. Sure, the FusionIO is faster, but how the hell can you beat a single SSD in terms of price/performance?

• RAID 10: 4.8 transactions per minute per dollar
• SSD: 27 transactions per minute per dollar
• FusionIO: 3.6 transactions per minute per dollar

I’m a big fan of the P2 theme for WordPress. It makes it dead easy anybody familiar with WordPress to host a discussion site and improve collaboration across time and distance.

That said, one feature I’d like to see is the ability to order the posts by the last comment date, rather than post date. When we started using P2 to power a workgroup discussion last year, I wrote a bit of code to sort the posts that way, here’s how:

function p2plus_posts_fields( $query ) {
global $wpdb;
 return( $query .", IF( $wpdb->comments.comment_date, MAX( $wpdb->comments.comment_date ), $wpdb->posts.post_date ) AS last_comment_date " );
}

function p2plus_posts_join( $query ) {
 global $wpdb;
 return( $query ." LEFT JOIN $wpdb->comments ON $wpdb->comments.comment_post_id = $wpdb->posts.ID " );
}

function p2plus_posts_groupby( $query ) {
 global $wpdb;
 return( " $wpdb->posts.ID ". $query );
}

function p2plus_posts_orderby( $query ) {
 return( ' last_comment_date DESC, '. $query );
}

function p2plus_pre_get_posts( $query ) {
 if( is_home() || is_front_page() ){
 add_filter( 'posts_fields', 'p2plus_posts_fields', 7 );
 add_filter( 'posts_join', 'p2plus_posts_join', 7 );
 add_filter( 'posts_groupby', 'p2plus_posts_groupby', 7 );
 add_filter( 'posts_orderby', 'p2plus_posts_orderby', 7 );
 }
}
add_action('pre_get_posts', 'p2plus_pre_get_posts', 10);

This results in page of posts ordered by comment date a query MySQL that looks like this:

SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS mistime_posts.*, IF( mistime_comments.comment_date, MAX( mistime_comments.comment_date ), mistime_posts.post_date ) AS last_comment_date
FROM mistime_posts
LEFT JOIN mistime_comments ON mistime_comments.comment_post_id = mistime_posts.ID
WHERE 1=1
AND mistime_posts.post_type = 'post'
AND (mistime_posts.post_status = 'publish' OR mistime_posts.post_status = 'private')
GROUP BY mistime_posts.ID
ORDER BY mistime_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 20

In 2007 it was the deputy chief of liquor enforcement.

Last summer it was the Wolfboro police commissioner who was arrested importing 900 pounds of marijuana from Canada.

This week it’s a liquor commissioner who was stopped on suspicion of DUI.