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MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

…And The Floods Moved North

The rains this weekend swelled the rivers to flood stage in south-western New Hampshire. As much as half of Keene is said to be under water. Further north, the small and historic downtown of Alstead has been washed away. This picture comes from the Portsmouth Herald, and reports in the Washington Post from Keene and […] » about 200 words

Switched Servers

I switched to Lunarpages last week after the fiasco with my old hosting provider. Now, because of bandwidth and CPU usage, I’m moving to a new server at Lunarpages. I wasn’t surprised about what they said when I got a message from the sysadmins about excessive CPU usage on my shared hosting account, but I was surprised with their proactive and customer friendly approach.

Anyway, I’ll be figuring out my new server and control panel (it’s Plesk, and I’d been using CPanel for a while). Please alert me to any problems you might find with a comment to this post.

Bluetooth Headset

As I was contemplating making angry calls to my hosting provider last week when they shut down MaisonBisson for a couple days, it occurred to me that I would rather make those calls via SkypeOut or some similar service that didn’t reveal my home phone number. After all, I wouldn’t want an angry sysop to […] » about 400 words

Ear Shrapnel Noise Grenade

Engadget calls it “skull-shattering fun” and Gizmodo labeled it “ear shrapnel.” It’s available at Paladone.com and Boy’s Stuff, though nobody seems to have yet found a domestic supplier. From the catalog page: The Sonic Grenade features three different levels of the most noxious sound since the last Westlife album. To launch, pull the pin and […] » about 200 words

Compact, Modular, And Lego-Like Housing

Compact, modular, and Lego-like housing is nothing new. Buckminster Fuller‘s Dymaxion House (now at the Henry Ford Museum), designed in the 1940s, was probably the first. But the Lustron House was actually sold commercially in the years after World War Two. Though it didn’t turn out to be a commercial success, the house did show […] » about 200 words

Bye Bye Pepper Pad

My week with the Pepper Pad is over, and the UPS van just drove off with it, but I’ve still got a lot to report. My testing ran into problems when it turned out that the WiFi network in the library was on the fritz. I did some netstumbling today and found that only two […] » about 300 words

Who Knew Transit Maps Were Copyrighted?

The MTA, the folks who run New York’s subways and busses and such, weren’t the only ones to smack a cease and desist down on iPod Subway Maps last week, but they’re the first to tell they can pay $500 for the privilege of distributing those maps in an iPod-readable format — but only for non-commercial distribution.

Cluetrain moment: doesn’t the MTA understand that services like this serve potential tourists like me? Don’t they understand that the availability of such maps increases both the likelihood of my visit and the commercial opportunities of my visit (tourists don’t spend money in subways)?

What I really want to leave with, however, is this: Barb Dybwad at Engadget got this one right when she aknowledged the two sides of the issue and added:

These are exactly the kinds of cases in which traditional copyright law feels unsatisfying in the age of digital mashups, and we can only see the demand for these kinds of “information conversions” increasing.

Five Days Left To Apply To Be Chivas Life Editor

Chivas, the folks who bring us Chivas Regal scotch whisky and virtual tours of the Playboy Mansion, is looking for a pair of ambassador editors for ThisIsTheLife.com. The deal pays $100,000 to the lucky pair to tour the world making good press and pictures for the brand. You’ve got six more days to put together […] » about 100 words

Library-Related Geekery

Ryan beat me to reporting on the interesting new services at the Ockham Network (noted in this Web4lib post). The easiest one to grok is this spelling service, but there are others that are cooler. He also alerted me to a Perl script to proxy Z39.50 to RSS. Though for those more into PHP (like […] » about 300 words

Distracted By My Shiny New Camera

The Olympus C8080, one of the best digital cameras ever, can be had for under $500, refurbished, from some sellers on Amazon. That’s about where the price/features ratio against the C7000 I was excited about last week tips strongly in favor of the C8080. I might get into why I’m not excited about dSLRs in […] » about 200 words

Open Content Alliance

The news is that Yahoo! announced they’ve formed the Open Content Alliance. Though that certainly fits the Google versus Yahoo! story that newsmen want to report on now, it’s somewhat disingenuous to the Internet Archive, which has been beating the Open Content drum for a while. But Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive […] » about 400 words

Introducing bsuite_speedcache

I wrote bsuite_speedcache to reduce the number of database queries I was executing per page load. By implementing it on some of the content in my sidebar, I dropped 35 queries for each cache hit. That might not seem like much, but it should average about 525 queries per minute that that my host server […] » about 300 words

Meltdown

Sometime around 10 PM Friday the MySQL server at my hosting provider took a walk. The hosting sysop blamed it on my site and disabled the database that serves it by making the directory the MySQL files are in unreadable. MySQL didn’t seem to handle that condition well, and since MaisonBisson was still piling up […] » about 600 words

Open Test Sites

I guess not everybody in Nevada loves the Test Site as much as this postcard might suggest, but hey, what do tourists know? The image comes from _roberta‘s Flickr photostream, and she doesn’t seem too critical. About 850 miles southeast today, the Trinity Site — where the world’s first atomic weapon was detonated in a […] » about 200 words

Pepper Pad — First Impressions

The Pepper Pad (available at Amazon) has a very clean out of box experience. There’s nothing to assemble and no questions about what order to do things in. Just open, unwrap, plug in, startup. I attempted running through the configuration in my office, but the WiFi propagation is very weak there and Pepper Pad couldn’t […] » about 700 words

Those Crazy K-Fee Ads

It turns out that K-Fee, the company that pushes its energy drink with the scary TV ads, has a English-language website. It also turns out they’ve got the scary car ad and eight others online. Here they are: Angler Car Buddha Golf Beach Meadow Yoga Soothing Waves Ocean Path tags: angler, beach, buddha, car ad, […] » about 100 words

Pepper Pad — Arrival

The Pepper Pad‘s technical details — a lightweight Linux powered device with an 8.4-inch SVGA touchscreen, Wi-Fi auto-configuration, Bluetooth device support, multi-gigabyte disk, full QWERTY thumb-keypad, stereo speakers, and more — are already well reported. But I’ve been arguing that attention to such details runs counter to the purpose and intended use of the device. […] » about 200 words

Must Read: Ambient Findability

Peter Morville‘s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good. Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a […] » about 300 words

Mt. Moosilauke

Will and I climbed Moosilauke in early August, but it was only now that I got around to stitching the panorama. The view is considerably wider than 360 degrees, composited from 33 photos. The “full-size” version on Flickr contains 8 gigapixels of data. The real full-size version is a over 34 gigapixels. tags: 4000 footer, […] » about 100 words