Monthly Archives: January 2008

Never Forget, 1-31-07

January 30, 2008 – 8:00 pm

Paranoia
If it’s not an American Flag, it’s probably a bomb.

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)



What Do Coots Eat?

January 29, 2008 – 4:26 pm

Turns out that coots are omnivorous, but prefer plant matter. Why.

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

Forget Time Capsule, I want a Space Ship

January 29, 2008 – 12:30 pm

Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more.
The MacBook Air’s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed with [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (10)

Camera Found In Cab Starts Digital Goose Chase

January 29, 2008 – 9:18 am

What would you do if you found a camera in a cab?

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

LCSH News: ?Mountain Biking? Replaces ?All Terrain Cycling?

January 29, 2008 – 1:19 am

Even though mountain bike sales and participation are down (as a percentage of market share, biking has been declining for ten years), the Library of Congress has just issued a directive to change the subject heading from ?All Terrain Cycling? to ?Mountain Biking.? The term was apparently first coined by Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher [...]

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



Stephen King Doesn’t Hate Kindle

January 28, 2008 – 12:23 pm

Stephen King writes at Entertainment Weekly.com that he doesn’t hate the Kindle:
Will Kindles replace books? No. And not just because books furnish a room, either. There’s a permanence to books that underlines the importance of the ideas and the stories we find inside them; books solidify an otherwise fragile medium.
But can a Kindle enrich [...]

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

McQualifications

January 28, 2008 – 7:55 am

Bruce Pechman earned his credentials, but you could get yours at McDonald’s. Yes, the fast food chain is apparently offering diplomas in Britain now.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Dangerous Grains Call For Drastic Measures

January 27, 2008 – 10:11 am

?The Office of Emergency Management, the New York City Fire Department, Department of Buildings, NYPD, Health Department, and Department of Agriculture? all apparently showed up to evict 200 tenants from a building called the ?kibbutz? in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Why? ?Dangerous grains,? and a matzoh bakery. It’s been labeled Matzo-Gate, and speculation is [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Apache, MySQL, and PHP on MacOS X

January 24, 2008 – 12:07 pm

p0ps Harlow tweeted something about trying to get an AMP environment running on his Mac. Conversation followed, and eventually I sent along an email that look sorta like this:
If you’re running 10.4 (I doubt it, but it’s worth mentioning because I’m most familiar with it), here’s how I’ve setup dozens of machines for web development [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus

January 24, 2008 – 9:00 am

This an old one, but it just caught my atention. In A List Apart tells us Usability experts are from Mars, graphic designers are from Venus. Is this still true? Haven’t the last several years been about the triumph of good design in both the usability and graphic senses? Or are rounded corners not actually [...]

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Dancing With The Nerds

January 23, 2008 – 8:06 pm

Richard Stallman’s Soulja Boy dance, MIT style (via).

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

WordPress to_ping Query Optimization

January 23, 2008 – 12:34 pm

The WordPress team has taken up the issue of performance optimization pretty seriously, and I look forward to the fruits of their efforts, but I’m also casting a critical eye on my own code. Thanks to caching and a hugely optimized query architecture, Scriblio is now performing better than ever, and I’m now looking at [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (0)

This Would _So_ Cramp My Style

January 23, 2008 – 7:55 am

The New Hampshire House is considering a ban on texting while Driving. Please, no.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Even Cheetah Moms Have To Argue With Kids About Dinner

January 23, 2008 – 5:47 am

Mother cheetah wants kids to learn to hunt gazelle, but cubs want to nuzzle it.

By Casey | Posted in Dispatches | Comments (0)

Signs Of User-Centric Shift At CES?

January 22, 2008 – 9:55 am

Doc Searls in Linux Journal compares previous CES expos to 2008 and finds a shift from talk of ?broadcasters and rights-holders extending their franchise? to a Web 2.0 enlightened user-centricity.
At every CES up to this one, I always felt that both open source and user-in-charge were swimming upstream against a tide of proprietary ?solutions? [...]

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