Monthly Archives: August 2005

The Water Down There

August 31, 2005 – 5:51 pm

I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen many images of the flooding in New Orleans until I found these. Amazingly, The Times Picayune is publishing PDF editions during disaster. The hurricane and flood damage are truly scary, but the worst news is on page five, which tells of widespread looting:
Law enforcement efforts to contain [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Politics & Controversy, Travel | Comments (1)



The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

August 31, 2005 – 12:11 pm

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:
The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (2)

The Ultraviolet Sun

August 31, 2005 – 1:19 am

From the NASA website:
EIT (Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope) images the solar atmosphere at several wavelengths, and therefore, shows solar material at different temperatures. In the images taken at 304 Angstroms the bright material is at 60,000 to 80,000 degrees Kelvin. In those taken at 171, at 1 million degrees. 195 Angstrom images correspond to about [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Technology | Comments (0)

Enabling .htaccess On Mac OS X

August 30, 2005 – 7:39 pm

I do a lot of web development on my laptop. I’ve got Apache and PHP there, so it’s really convenient, but I usually move projects off to other server before I get around to wanting to mess with mod_rewrite. Not so, recently, but I ran into a big stumbling block when I discovered OS X’s [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

Coconut Battery

August 30, 2005 – 7:50 am

coconutBattery:
coconutBattery is a tool that reads out the data of your notebook-battery (iBook/Powerbook). It shows the current charge of your battery as well as the current maximum capacity related to its original.
Via O’Grady’s PowerPage

tags: battery monitor, coconut flavour, coconut-flavour, coconutBattery, maximum capacity, mobile technology, notebook battery, powerbook battery, powerbook, powerpage

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (0)



AWStats

August 29, 2005 – 12:12 pm

As much as I like the bstat functionality of bsuite, I never intended it to be a replacement for a full server log-based stats application. That’s why I’m happy my hosting provider offers AWStats. The reports suggested ways to optimize my pages so that I could control my bandwidth consumption — up to 3.7GB/day before [...]

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (0)

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

August 29, 2005 – 7:13 am

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry.
Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy
?Google Economy? identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked to other resources. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (0)

bsuite Development

August 28, 2005 – 11:44 am

bstat has become bsuite. The name change reflects the fact that I want the plugin to do a lot more than track usage stats. One of the first features to enter testing here is the ?related? section below. I’m calling it ?bsuggestive,? but that may turn out to be too cute a name to tolerate [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (7)

Beloit College’s List Of Things That Make Us Look Old To Incoming Students

August 27, 2005 – 10:01 am

We’ve seen lists like this before. Beloit College in Beloit Wisconsin releases their ?Mindeset List? for their incoming class every year around now. The point is to remind us how cultural touchstones change over time. It does that, but it also give us (me, anyway) a good chuckle.
It’s worth reading all the way down to [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)

Video Bulb and Zakka Shop NYC

August 26, 2005 – 7:48 am

The Video Bulb is a ?lipstick-sized tube? that plugs in to your TV’s RCA jack and plays Bitman videos.
GadgetMadness explains what Bitman is:
Bitman is the creation of Japanese Art Performer ?Meiwa Denki? and was an 8-bit electronic stick figure who would dance, pose, etc.
The VideoBulb sounds interesting enough, but I think I could get into [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (1)

Changing Modes Of Communication

August 25, 2005 – 5:46 pm

I talk a lot about the Google Economy here, and how that and other ideas are driving changing modes of communication. Today I learned of arXiv. Henry Farrell describes it at CrookedTimber:
[I]t?s effectively replaced journal publication as the primary means for physicists to communicate with each other. Journal publication is still important ? but as [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Technology | Comments (3)

WordPress As CMS

August 25, 2005 – 12:43 pm

A friend and I have been talking about what it would take to turn WordPress into a CMS. We both have our doubts, but today I found this job ad that suggests we’re not alone in at least thinking of the possibility.
Needed: Web Designer/Programmer For Our Sites
We’re growing very fast, and have outgrown our current [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

KingCosmonaut & WP Themes

August 25, 2005 – 3:43 am

I stumbled across the sometimes funny How To Live Your Life and got curious about the theme. Turns out it’s by Sebastian Schmieg, who keeps things real at kingcosmonaut. The theme is Blix, but the kingcosmonaut site is much cooler.

tags: blix, kingcosmonaut, sebastian schmieg, theme, web design, wordpress, wordpress theme

By Casey | Posted in Blink, Technology | Comments (3)

Flock

August 24, 2005 – 12:12 pm

The developers describe Flock as
[T]he world’s most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.
Which is a good enough sales pitch to make me try the free demo, but it’s all still a private beta. Perhaps they’re trying to prove the point that nothing builds buzz better than unavailability. Osakasteve gushes:
A browser that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)

iTunes Music Store API?

August 24, 2005 – 7:12 am

I can’t explain why, at least not yet, but I’m looking for a way to search the iTunes Music Store catalog outside of iTunes. Rumors of an iTunes-Google partnership have been flying lately, but what I really want is a webservice/API I can use. Yes, Apple offers an affiliate program that supports direct links, but [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (8)