Menu

Subscribe
     

MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

Wikipedia API?

I want Wikipedia to have an API, but it doesn’t. Some web searching turned up Gina Trapani’s WikipedizeText, but that still wasn’t exactly what I wanted. A note in the source code, however, put me back on the trail to the Wikipedia database downloads, and while that’s not what I want, I did learn that […] » about 200 words

Drug Side Effects Drive Patients to Gamble, Eat, Drink, and …

…people with Parkinson’s disease temporarily became compulsive gamblers after taking […] drugs designed to control movement problems caused by the illness… That’s the lead in this Forbes story on the matter, and that’s not all. A variety of ‘interesting’ side effects popped up among a relatively small number of study participants: pathological gambling compulsive eating […] » about 400 words

Segway Easy Rider Movie Trailer

Remember those guys who rode a Segway cross-country last year? Well, they’ve got a movie coming out. Yup, there’s even a trailer. Possibly more interesting: the photo gallery (from which the photo above came). Thanks to Engadget for the link. 10 mph, 10mph, cross country, easy rider, movie, movie trailer, on the road again, photo […] » about 100 words

Steelers Fan Never Misses a Game Day

In remembering James Henry Smith, a zealous Pittsburgh Steelers fan who died of prostate cancer in early July, his family asked the Samuel E. Coston Funeral Home to do things “as he would have wanted them to be.” For the viewing, the funeral home arranged a living room ensemble with the TV and recliner just […] » about 200 words

Chasing Clicks

Al asked how low I will go to chase traffic. Truth is, I can’t answer. Maisonbisson has had moments of popularity, but it’s hard to know why.

Alexa tells us there are 18 million unique sites on the Web, but…

if you take Alexa’s Top 100,000 sites you’ll find that almost 3 out every 4 clicks are spoken for. In other words, almost 75% of all the traffic on the web goes to the sites in the Top 100K list, leaving the remaining 18 million or so sites to fight over the scraps.

Like the distribution of wealth on the planet, the distribution of traffic on the Web is extremely lopsided. The Top 500 are champagne and caviar. Sites 501 – 100,000 are meat and potatoes. The rest are hungry.

(Link in original, don’t you like that political jab?)

Neutron Bomb

Boing Boing has an exclusive profile of neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen by Charles Platt. All the reports so far are that it’s a 10,000 word “must read.”

The article, Profits of Fear, is available in PDF, plain text, and Palm doc versions at Boing Boing.

Thanks to David Rothman for the heads up. Extra: Rothman asks what it all says about mainstream media when respected authors eschew traditional media for blogs.

Another Limitation of LC Classification

Right up front in the prologue of Ruth Wajnryb’s Expletive Deleted she quotes the following from Richard Dooling on the difficulty in researching “bad language”:

The Library of Congress classification system does not provide a selection of books … on swearing or dirty words. A researcher … must travel to the BF of psychoanalysis, the PE of slang, the GT of anthropology, the P of literature and literary theory, the N of art, the RC of medical psychiatry, and back to the B of religion and philosphy.

Network Effects on Violence

Some time ago I pointed to John Robb’s discussion of the potential for the network to amplify the threat of violence from otherwise un-connected and un-organized individuals. Now Noah Shachtman at DefenseTech is writing about “open source insurgents.” It used to be that a small group of ideological-driven guerilla leaders would spread information, tactics, training, […] » about 300 words

Grizzly Man

David Edelstein’s review of Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man, describes Timothy Treadwell as …a manic but lovable whack-job who doggedly filmed and obsessively idealized the bears that would ultimately eat him… The film is made up largely of the bits of the hundreds of hours of video that Treadwell himself shot during his 14 years […] » about 300 words

PHP Developer Resources

Somebody asked for some links to get started with PHP. Of course I lead them to the PHP.net official site, where the documentation is some of the best I’ve seen for any product.

I also suggested PHPDeveloper.org and PHPFreaks.com, though the truth is I usually Google any questions I have that the official docs don’t answer. Still, I’ve found some good info at both of those.

Finally, the PHP Cheat Sheet at ILoveJackDaniels.com is pretty nice to have around (cheat sheets mentioned previously).

DRM = Customer Lock-In

Donna Wentworth is now saying what I’ve been saying for over a year now. Digital Rights Management (DRM) isn’t about preventing copyright violations by ne’er-do-wells, it’s about eliminating legal me2me fair use and locking in customers. In Your PC == A Toaster, Wentworth quotes Don Marti saying: Isn’t it time to drop the polite fiction […] » about 300 words

Digital Preservation and Copyright

We’re struggling with the question of what to do with our collection of vinyl recordings. They’re deteriorating, and we’re finding it increasingly difficult to keep the playback equipment in working order — the record needles seem to disappear. We’re re-purchased much of our collection on CD, but some items — this one might be one […] » about 300 words

Atomic

While looking for a picture for my memorial to the bomb, I found a number of related links. This blog is sometimes nothing more than an annotated bookmark list, and this is why…. The Bomb Project describes itself as: a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a […] » about 300 words

Linking Bias

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

Annoises

Via Gizmodo: a CD of annoying sounds at Gadgets.co.uk. Twenty “ear splitting” sound effects and a pair of earplugs “for your sanity and protection” for £14.99. What 20 sound effects?

  • Drill
  • Party (at least 200 People)
  • Orgasm (Outstanding)
  • Train
  • Drum (Played by a Child)
  • Inhuman Screams
  • Walking (High Heels)
  • Domestic Squabble
  • Doors Banging
  • Bowling
  • Unhappy Dog
  • Practicing a violin
  • Traffic Jam
  • Garbage Truck
  • A screaming newborn baby
  • Phone Ringing
  • Ball Game
  • Pigeons
  • Spring house cleaning
  • Cock-a-Doodle-Do!

Usage instructions?

Choose your favourite track from this hilarious CD, turn up the volume, and sit back (or go out for half an hour) and reap sweet revenge.

Grizzly Man

Within the last wild lands of North America dwells an animal that inspires respect and fear around the world. It is the grizzly bear, a living legend of the wilderness. Grizzlies can sprint thirty five plus miles an hour, smell carrion at nine or more miles, and drag a thousand-pund animal up steep mountains. The […] » about 400 words

Point ‘N Shoot

DefenseTech reported on the FireFly, a disposable camera that can be shot from the M203 grenade launchers used by US land forces. The cameras fly 600 meters in eight seconds, wirelessly sending pictures back to the soldier’s PDA. Now they’ll know what’s over that hill or around that corner. Not that soldiers don’t need this […] » about 200 words

Movie Night: Open Water

Joe recommended Open Water whole heartedly, but others, like some of these one-star reviewers at Amazon, had equally strong reactions against it. I first learned of the events the movie is based on in Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, where he described the events of Thomas and Eileen Lonergan’s disappearance during a dive in […] » about 200 words

Jimmy Wales’ Free Culture Manifesto

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and director of the Wikimedia Foundation, is working on his keynote for the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt. Ross Mayfield at Many2Many posted a preview and gives some background. What should we expect? Wales’ speech touches on ten things necessary for Free Culture:

  • Free the Encyclopedia!
  • Free the Dictionary!
  • Free the Curriculum!
  • Free the Music!
  • Free the Art!
  • Free the File Formats!
  • Free the Maps!
  • Free the Product Identifiers!
  • Free the TV Listings!
  • Free the Communities!

Mayfield offers more description of each item, go read it.

60 Years Later

In what was to be the final act of World War II in the Pacific, the United States made the first and only use of nuclear power as a weapon in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th (US dates), 1945. George Weller of the Chicago Daily News snuck in to […] » about 200 words

Reminisce: My First Ebook

The first ebook I ever read was Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown on my Newton Message Pad 2000. It had a big and bright screen — “the best screen for reading eBooks on the (non-)market” says DJ Vollkasko — but it could get a bit little heavy at times.

Crackdown is available for free, along with perhaps 16,000 others, at Matthew McClintock’s ManyBooks.net. Downloads are available in 11 different formats, or you can read online.

Information Is Sexy

It used to be you could identify the librarian by the sensible shoes, but times they are a changing. Witness this ad from Library Bar. Sure their “librarians” are bartenders, but what cultural shift changed to thrust librarians up the sex appeal scale? Yeah, this is old. After all, it was the Spring 2004 of […] » about 200 words