Menu

Subscribe
     

MaisonBisson

a bunch of stuff I would have emailed you about

The Google Economy Vs. Libraries

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

I’ve been calling this the “Google Economy,” where the value of information is directly proportional to its accessibility. This is a foreign land to libraries, where isolation and division of information is the norm (just count the number of unrelated search boxes linked on your library site), but it’s something I see a few people working to overcome. Kudos to Roger and others for a lot of great work.

What?

I’m not sure what to think about Steve J’s WWDC announcement (video stream) of Apple’s switch to x86 processors. Coverage at MacNN, Mac Rumors, Ars Technica, etc. I’m not sure, but it would be easier to take if I wasn’t the only one who saw conspiracy in it. Does this relate to Intel’s recent shoehorning of DRM onto the CPU?

It wasn’t long ago that I was praising Apple for making devices that served the remix world that exists in the void between fair use and copyright infringement, but moves since then have concerned me. I live with iTunes DRM, but can I tolerate DRM throughout the OS all the way down to the hardware? Can I tolerate something that eliminates the (entirely legal) me2me sharing that I expect (and is revered in the analog world)?

Anyway, there’s some mixed news about PPC on X86 emulation that will be part of the next OS release, and I expect the jabbering about the effect of this announcement will last all summer. Here’s some now from MacNN, and PowerPage{#14641}. And here’s something I can laugh at.

On The Media Does Copyright Issue

I had just sat down to post a note about an interview with J.D. Lasica in On The Media (listen to MP3) this week when I found David Rothman beat me to it. The interview was one of the better treatments of copyright issues that’s I’ve heard/seen in the (relatively-) popular media. Here’s the summary […] » about 300 words

Doggy And You: Mark Schutte’s Dog Powered Scooter

Engadget has a link to Mark Schutte’s dog powered scooter. This catches my eye because my friend Joe is always looking for ways to exercise his sled dogs in the summer. The developer, of course, is very serious about its befits and usefulness of this contraption. Here’s the sales pitch: Focus your dogs energy and […] » about 200 words

Remixing Reality: Good or Bad?

We’ve all seen the ads they digitally insert on the field during football games and we’ve heard talk about inserting new product placements as old TV shows play in syndication. Ernie Miller has been thinking about this recently. Last week he noted that folks are creating ipod-able, independent audio tours of museums. “…Hack the gallery […] » about 300 words

Ohara Fireflies

I don’t consider myself a Japonophile, but I do find myself reading Mainichi Daily News each day, and when they put up a picture like this, of fireflies near the Yamada River in Ohara, (Chiba Prefecture) I can’t help but notice. Technorati Tags: fireflies, mainichi, mainichi daily news, ohara, yamada » about 100 words

TeleRead Spends Morning On Portable Computing Stories

…Well, not entirely, but I couldn’t help but read the posts on the PepperPad and history of the Newton. I’m a fan of computing devices that don’t fit the mold, so I eat up stuff like this. I noted the Pepper Pad previously, and written a few posts about the Newton and ultra-portable computing. Update: […] » about 100 words

Wikipedia and Libraries

Wikipedia seems to get mixed reviews in the academic world, but I don’t fully understand why. There are those that complain that they can’t trust the untamed masses with such an important task as writing and editing an encyclopedia, then there are others that say you can’t trust the experts with it either. For my […] » about 400 words

Disobey

Gary Wolf wrote in the June issue of Wired about how smart mobs in New York’s World Trade Center outbrained the “authorities” and enjoyed higher survival rates because of it. Wolf is talking about the NIST report on Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications (warning: PDFs). There’s also this executive summary and this looks like […] » about 300 words

Japanese Government Employees Extremely Troubled By Summer Casual Dress Code

Today is the first day of summer, according to Japan’s Environmental Ministry, and that means it’s time to take off the ties and suit jackets and put on “casual” clothes. The ministry has been leading a charge to reduce energy consumption and ease global warming by asking all government employees to leave their neckties at […] » about 300 words

Take A Picture, Get Hassled By The Man

Alan Wexelblat at Copyfight pointed out this story that talks about increasing limits on public photography.

If you’re standing on public property, you can shoot anything the naked eye can see, explains Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.

…But that apparently doesn’t stop security guards, cops, and others from intimidating and sometimes arresting those who try it.

Lawrence Lessig had a little bit to say about this in Free Culture, though his real point there was about copyright issues related to photography. Here, at the bottom of page 33, he makes the point that I’m getting at:

[E]arly in the history of photography, there was a series of judicial decisions that could well have changed the course of photography[…]. Courts were asked whether the photographer, amateur or professional, required permission before he could capture and print whatever image he wanted. Their answer was no.

Various forces have been chipping away at this basic presumption of freedom to photograph ever since, but Lessig rightly credits this early decision with creating the cover necessary for consumer photography to emerge and boom as it did.

Theme change…

Theme change not yet complete, but looking good. It’s a widened version of Clemens Orth’s Relaxation_3column, itself a derivitive of John Wrana‘s two columned Relaxation theme. I found it on the WordPress Codex, and though it was among the first group I looked at, I dutifully clicked through to every other three-columned theme listed there.

Anyway, expect the banner to change, and I’m working on how I want to handle the width on smaller monitors (where “smaller” actually equals anything narrower than 1280px). Eh, life goes on.

Bad Movie, Verboten Subject?

I’m embarrassed to be in the middle of Fantasy Mission Force, a kung fu movie that demonstrates a brand of Asian humor that I haven’t yet learned to appreciate. I’m watching it because I’m a sucker for Jackie Chan flicks and Netflix makes it too easy to queue up bad movies. David Chute wrote the […] » about 400 words

Lunch at Burdick’s

Treated Mom to lunch at L.A. Burdick’s in Walpole today. The food at Burdick’s is always remarkable, but this time I got a decent photo of it. I’m calling the plate in front a real tuna salad. Yes, those are strips of medium-rare tuna, but it’s the pickled onions that delighted me. In the middle […] » about 200 words

WordPress Stats Goodness

Work on my bstats plugin continues. I’ve added recently commented posts tracking, begun work on a usage graph, as requested by Richard Akerman, and put together an interesting way to track usage of the Google ads. I’m using the Google ads to figure out how to best use them on another project later. I think […] » about 300 words

Of WordPress Tags, Keywords, XML-RPC, and the MovableType API

WordPress’s XML-RPC support looks pretty good. Heck, it supports a half dozen APIs and works well with ecto … except for tag support, which is my only complaint with it so far.

The Movable Type API supports a “keywords” field that I’m thinking can be hijacked as a “tags” field instead, but while ecto sends the goods — I can see them in the XML-RPC data that gets sent out, WordPress seems to ignore them upon receipt. So I’m looking around the WordPress plugin API docs for a solution, but all I can find is an undocumented mention of xmlrpc_methods in Skippy’s list of plugin hooks.

Nuclear Test Site Tour

The above image is my followup to my Nevada Test Site Tour post from last month and comes courtesy of Adam Schneider’s very useful GPS Visualizer (you really need to see it full-sized, though). I still don’t have a cable to connect the ancient Magellan GPS I used to a computer, so I manually entered […] » about 200 words

…And Then You Realize You Wasted Your Life

I think I’ve been avoiding commenting on this issue for weeks because it hits so close to home. First I read it in BiblioAcid, then Jenny Levine picked it up, then Richard Ackerman picked it up at the Science Library Pad: library catalogs are broken, and there’s no amount of adding pictures or fiddling with […] » about 500 words

Vonage CEO Interview Makes Me Feel Old

Engadget’s interview with Jeffrey Citron, chairman and CEO of Vonage gives an interesting peak into the world of the baby bells, through the eyes of an upstart. Citron dishes about the competition, stomping AT&T, working deals with the bells to make 911 services work, and a possible Palm version of their softphone. Most interestingly is […] » about 300 words

Blog Software Switched

I’m almost ready to call the first stage of my WordPress migration done, except it looks like the comment submission forms aren’t working. While I’m working on that, please note the new feed URLs: RSS 0.9x, RSS 2.0, and atom.

Update: Found a reference to the comment bug on the WP support site and in their bug tracking system. I didn’t find the answer there, though, so this is still a problem. I did, however, discover that one of my spam-blocking plugins, WPSpamAssasin 0.6.2, was blocking the comments from ever getting into the database. Strictly speaking, comments are now working, but the UI isn’t working consistently. Still working on it.

Casey Bisson

Switching Blog Software…

I think I’ve finally decided to go to WordPress after all. I tried doing it too quickly last time and it almost worked, but I switched back when I realized I might need more than 15 minutes to figure out how to use WordPress in production. Since then I’ve found a set of plugins that […] » about 400 words

Casey Bisson

Crime and Privacy on Google Maps

Annalee Newitz last week posted a column on people’s fear of privacy loss as a result of Google Maps. Her point: So while all these people are wringing their hands over how simple it is for strangers to discover the color of their roof on Google, we forget that we can already be tracked everywhere […] » about 500 words

Casey Bisson