DeLoreans Are Back In This Future

If the DeLorean looks at all like a Lotus Esprit, it should. Both of them were designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, and much of the engineering work was done by Lotus founder Colin–to add speed, add lightness–Chapman. Amusingly, John De Lorean also owned a company that manufactured snowcats under the DMC name.
Owners and wannabes can join [...]

MoveOn: We Can’t Afford Bad Song Parodies

In yet another lesson about how a bad joke in front of one audience can trouble a larger public, MoveOn wants McCain to know bombing Iran is no laughing matter.
Music and bombing, it could be said, really only go well together when joined in criticism.
moveon, iraq, iran, bomb iran, barbara ann, bomb bomb bomb, mccain, [...]

WordPress, Permalinks, Mod_Rewrite, and Avoiding 404s

I made a mistake in changing my WordPress permalinks, but by the time I’d discovered it my blog had already been indexed. Fixing the permalinks meant breaking those indexed URLs, leading to a bad user experience, but leaving them as is wasn’t really an option.
Last night, after getting 404′d while using Google to search my [...]

Some Needs, Some Of The Time

I don’t know why I love this quote from a post in panlibus:
serve some needs of some parts of the population, some of the time
…though my love for the quote may have something to do with my embrace of what OpenSearch creator DeWitt Clinton describes as the “80% case,” the solution that would work for [...]

Joost Brings Television To The Internet Age (Finally)

On demand internet TV has been just around the corner since the dawn of the popular internet, but like flying cars, it’s still not here. The problem is how TV streams clog the internet’s tubes. Bandwidth may be cheap, but there’s still never enough of it.
Well, that’s true if your metaphor for the internet is [...]

Usability, Findability, and Remixability, Especially Remixability

It’s been more than a year since I first demonstrated Scriblio (was WPopac) at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio. More than a year since NCSU debuted their Endeca-based OPAC. And by now most every major library vendor has announced a product that promises to finally deliver some real improvements to our systems.
My over-simplified list said [...]

My Boston Library Consortium Presentation

Speaking Thursday at the Boston Library Consortium’s annual meeting in the beautiful Boston Public Library, my focus was on the status of our library systems and the importance of remixability.
My blog post on remixability probably covers the material best, but my slides are online as both an animated QuickTime and PDF.
BPL, BLC, boston library consortium, [...]

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)

redirect: http://maisonbisson.com/blog/bsuite

Contents:

bsuite Features
Fixed/Changed/Added
Installation

Upgrading

Commands

Clear bsuite_speedcache
Rebuild bsuite tag index

Options

Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports
Output default CSS
Default pulse graph style
Suggest related entries in post
Tag input format
Highlight search words and offer search help
Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words
Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel
Ignore hits from these IP numbers

Tag Support
Using bsuite Functions
Known Bugs
Money [...]

Is The Moller Skycar A Fraud? Will I Ever Get My Flying Car?

A recent comment here reminded me to check in on our options for flying cars, now at least seven years overdue.
It turns out that Moller International, the folks developing the M400 Skycar aerodyne, are accepting deposits:
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is accepting deposits [...]

Yep, Skulls Are Office Products, Brains Not Included

I don’t know what’s funnier, that Amazon sells skulls (just $132, get one now!), or that they’re classified as “office products.”
Extra: more office weirdness in this video.
Australopithecus Afarensis Cranium, Cranium, Australopithecus Afarensis, Australopithecus, Afarensis, office products, skull, skulls

I’m A Fonero, Are You A Fonero Too?

Now that I’ve moved I’ve finally set up my Fonera. I had hoped to offer a story about the process, but it was so simple I can’t really say much more than “I plugged it in, I registered it, it worked.”
The Fonera is a tiny little router/WiFi access point that looks worlds better than the [...]

Google MyMaps and GeoRSS

O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 Conference isn’t until the end of May, but Google just released two sweet new map-related features: GeoRSS support and MyMaps.
The GeoRSS support means that any application that can output it’s geocoding — as simple as <georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point> — can now be linked to a live map with no more effort than it [...]

Twitter Twitter Anti-Twitter

My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit.
So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter.
Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of [...]

Dawn Of The Citizen Professor?

It should be no surprise that journalists are talking about citizen journalism, but what of the disintermediation of other industries?
Man-on-the-street Mark Georgiev told Marketplace:
I didn’t want a certificate, I didn’t want any kind of accreditation, I really just wanted the knowledge. And I also wanted to work at my own pace.
Georgiev, the story explains, has [...]

Pranks International

Matt tells us the office pranks he masterminded a couple weeks ago got reported in Saturday’s Daily Mirror (scan above):
JOKER Matt Batchelder had the last laugh after he was left out of an office conference trip.
Alone at his desk for a week, the snubbed computer geek dreamed up a series of pranks to greet his [...]