MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Time-Picayune In Exile

Times-Picayune editor Jim Amoss answered questions for On The Media‘s Brooke Gladstone. Amoss and his staff have been covering the catastrophe in New Orleans as only locals can.

Some of the best reporting I’ve seen on this has come from the Times-Picayune, and I was quite amazed when I discovered the electronic edition Wednesday. Despite the damage, they appear to have start releasing a print version again and are distributing it in the city and in communities where refugees have fled. For so many displaced people, and in areas where power prevents other communications, I can imagine how valuable this thread is.

Back To School Video

Kate says: “Life is good. And I’ve got a sleeping bag from the future.” Tim explains, a bit.

None of that matters nearly as much as the video Kate is quoting from, and that matters now because back to school time means play dates and sleepovers. Tim guarantees it will kill a few braincells, but nothing ridicules us the way we once were (and often still are) better than Saturday Night Live.

Things Go To Hell

DefenseTech’s Noah Shachtman writes:

Organizing thousands and thousands of people, in hellish conditions and in a hurry, is tough work. Let’s take that as a given. But still: We’re now a work week into a natural disaster that had been forecast for years, and New Orleans “is being run by thugs,” the city’s emergency preparedness director tells the Times. “Some people there have not eaten or drunk water for three or four days, which is inexcusable.”

In another post, Shactman asks how the DHS could fail its job so badly?

Meanwhile, Pravda declares George W. Bush has abandoned Americans and it turns out that FEMA is directing donations to Rev. Pat Robertson, yes, that same Pat Robertson who put a fatwa on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and is now wanted as an international terrorist.

Extra: Earl Hutchinson explores How to Create a Crisis.

Policing By Cellphone

Though we imagine the Dutch to be a rather unexcitable lot, I did anyway, it turns out they have a history of getting rowdy at football games (yes, if this all happened back in the States I be calling it “soccer”). So it can’t be so much of a surprise that fans rioted again in […] » about 200 words

The Water Down There

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 […] » about 300 words

The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

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 as well be hidden in a cave.

The Ultraviolet Sun

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 100 words

Enabling .htaccess On Mac OS X

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 […] » about 200 words

AWStats

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 […] » about 200 words

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

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 […] » about 600 words

bsuite Development

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 for long. The results are based on the tags for the post, so it doesn’t work with old posts that haven’t been tagged, and it sometimes returns some weird matches, but it’s still alpha, so what can we ask for. Though, if you arrive at MaisonBisson via a search on one of the recognized search engines, the related posts will actually be based on the search terms used. The results in those cases seem to work better, which probably says a lot about the quality of my tagging efforts.

I hope to release a public beta of bsuite in the next couple weeks, but expect to see continued development of the bsuite features here.

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

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 […] » about 900 words

Video Bulb and Zakka Shop NYC

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 […] » about 200 words

Changing Modes Of Communication

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 […] » about 400 words

Flock

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 is designed around social software like blogs and flickr

And Roland Tanglao overflowed:

I was blown away! Drag and drop blogging – drag text from a blog post and it automatically creates a cite tag with a link to the original post and the quoted text is indented using a blockquote tag. Drag and drop Flickr photos. And Chris teased me with some more future features like having del.icio.us as your bookmarks (goodbye to useless local bookmarks).

Extra: it’s based on Firefox and will fully love Mac, Win, and Linux. Interesting ideas…where’s my beta invite?

iTunes Music Store API?

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 […] » about 400 words

Copyright and Academic Libraries

Back when I was looking things up for my Digital Preservation and Copyright story I found a bunch of info the University of Texas System had gathered on issues related to copyright, libraries, and education. In among the pages on copying copyrighted works, A/V reserves, and electronic reserves I found a document titled: Educational Fair Use Guidelines for Digital Images.

It’s some interesting stuff — if you get excited about copyright law. Beware, however, that they cite Texaco a bunch, and Laura Quilter has issues with that.

Re-Shelving Orwell’s 1984

Via Jon Gordon‘s Future Tense: Re-shelving George Orwell.

Smart people everywhere are taking it upon themselves to re-shelve George Orwell’s 1984 from fiction to more appropriate sections in non-fiction, like “Current Events”, “Politics”, “History”, “True Crime”, or “New Non-Fiction.”

Instructions and photos on Flickr.

Laura Quilter Defends Google Print

With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.

The Internet Archive is certainly a library. […] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?

More interestingly, she casts a critical eye on the Texaco decision that everybody points to as the guiding law on fair use. This, and the rest of her blog are good reading.