infobong.com

It's the end of the semester, and I haven't been following the Internets too much in the past week. So, I'll chime in with Bruce Sterling and remind everyone to back up your files. I've had two catastrophic failures since starting grad school, and now I always back up my files at the end of the semester. I know power geeks probably back up twice a week, but, for liberal arts flakes like me, backing up at finals is an easy time to remember.

One of the things I'm writing about is the relatively high level of technical competence needed to contribute effectively to Wikipedia. For example, to flag an article for problems, a user needs to learn a special tag specific to Wikipedia that inserts special notice into the page. From time to time, I'll look down at the bottom of the screen and think, "I've been writing for hours and hours, and I'm still only up to eight pages! How did I get to be such a slow writer?" That is, until a few minutes ago. I just realized that what I thought was the double-space button in MS Word or OS X was, in fact, the one-and-a-half space button. I'm a lot further along than I thought I was.

Grading student papers, I often write comments like "MS Word should automatically insert an em dash here," when I see a hyphen where a dash should be. Years of proofreading and editing probably have me particularly attuned to em-dashes and en-dashes - at one point, I was tasked with measuring the size of periods with a pica ruler - but I don't really understand how these typesetting errors get into student papers. UT has site-wide licenses with Microsoft that extend to students, so they can get MS Office for a nominal cost. I'd be sensitive if a student said she only used Free Software, but, apart from that, there's really no excuse not to use the latest version of Word. But, then again, I apparently don't know how to use the darn application myself!

Despite my suspicions over Google's "don't be evil" maxim, I decided to sign up with their new analytics service because spammers have so overloaded my site, it's hard for me to see legitimate traffic at all. My referrers logs are full of spoofed spam URLs and most of my visits are connections to comments.cgi from spam bots. I'm hoping that Google Analytics will give me a better picture of my traffic. When you sign in with the project, you need to paste some code into the head section of each Web page, which I hope only counts traffic that actually loads HTML pages.

I've checked in with Google analytics a few times over the past few days to see my first report, and each time it tells me my data will be ready in 12 hours. Unless Google has redefined "hours," this message is wrong and quite irritating to see over and over again without explanation. OK Google, why didn't it update during the last 12-hour period? Because I've gotten legitimate comments over the past few days, I know my blog has been getting at least some traffic.

It ran on Wednesday, but I didn't see this NYTimes story about online collaboration until this morning. The article promotes collaboration tools like Wikis as a means to improve communication within businesses, particularly distributed organizations. Much of this was familiar to me from Don's "Knowledge Management Systems" course, but I thought it was interesting the way that it applied the "open-source" label so easily to things that don't seem easily categorized as "open source".

I'm a little tired of seeing "open source" being applied to things that have little to do with compilers, but I've accepted that it's become a metaphor for particular types of information sharing and participation. This article seems pretty sloppy in general (I don't see how blogs are collaborative tools), but I do wish that authors would draw a distinction between "open source" as mode of production and "open source" as metaphor.

I'm over at Mojo's coffeehouse catching up on some reading. When I sat down, I saw man working on a tiny IBM Thinkpad, and I thought, "Wow that guy sure looks like Eric Raymond." After a while, I looked over at him and wondered if it really was him. Another glance revealed he was wearing a "Unix is Sexy" t-shirt, and I decided that it really might be the open-source evangelist. After all, I've chatted with Bruce Sterling at this place before.

annoyance After a bit of apprehension, I walked over and asked in my chipper boy voice, "Are you Eric Raymond?"
He looked confused, and replied, "Yes I am Eric Raymond."
"Oh, wow."
"I do exist," he said, with a bit of awkwardness.

Reporters Without Borders just released a "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents," which looks like a wonderful primer for people interested in blog culture and starting a blog. I like the title; I'd rather be a "cyberdissident," than a "blogger." The pamphlet offers advice on starting a blog, strategies for issues like maintaining anonymity and avoiding censorship, and personal profiles of bloggers from around the world. Reporters Without Borders says the books is available in bookstores for €10, but you can download the whole thing as a .pdf.

Occasionally people ask me about starting a blog or general questions about blogging, and I might start pointing people to this publication. I think you need to understand the operational issues of blogging before you can understand how blogs function socially, so this will be useful for potential blog researchers and bloggers. A fellow grad student asked today if I could guest lecture on blogs in a media literacy class for non-majors, and I think I'll hand out the "Language of Blogging" on pages 8 and nine. It has a nice overview of blog jargon, which can sound repetitive and self-referential to people new to blogs.

Since I live on a limited income, I do my best to avoid lusting after gadgets, but the iPod Nano is so dang cool. I've thought earlier iPod were well designed, and thought an iPod Mini would be nice to have. But, apart from the iPod Shuffle, all of the iPods were based on small hard drives. My main interest in an mp3 player these days is to have music for running, and I'm afraid that I'd be too hard on a device with a spinning platter.

The iPod Nano models use solid-state flash memory, and offer a lot of space for a surprisingly low cost. $249 for a 4GB player is crazy cheap, even if it is way out of my budget. The things are so damn pretty, and most mp3 player interfaces are so hideously bad that paying a premium price for an Apple product seems worth it.

Still, the iPod Nano seems a little delicate. Sooner or later, I would drop it running or getting off the bus, so I was apt to write the player off until I saw Ars Technica's stress-test of the Nano. They took the player through its paces, and the thing survives. The LCD screen didn't crack until they started tossing it out of a moving car. Despite the broken display, it kept playing music, even after running it over with a Volkswagen. If I ever have the dough to buy one of these suckers, I'll feel pretty confident it will last.

I'm over at Showdown Saloon watching OU struggle against Texas Christian. Wireless in Austin is so pervasive that a dive bar with what looks like bullet holes in the men's room has wireless Internet. I see that for this season espn.com has Ajaxamacated their scores page. This is nice since it obviates the need for a reloading script. From the user perspective, it's a bit of an adjustment since I don't known when the scores have been updated, but, on the whole, this seems to be a better way to deliver live data on the Web.

Man, Texas fans are awful, cheering when OU flubs a play. I generally root for Texas in non-OU games, especially in non-conference games, since it makes OU look better for beating Texas. Wouldn't Texas fans think the same way, or are they so single-mindedly elitist, they want the Sooners to lose in every context? OK, the burnt-orange table near my just clapped when an OU player was injured; that's just unsportsmanlike. I took a little revenge on them. When they were all bopping along to some bland R&B, so I just put Serge Gainsbourg's "Melody" on the juke box. I got a good "huh."

Since my previous post deals with hauling with limited-power vehicles, I thought I would point to Michael Bluejay's account of moving across central Austin by bicycle. The hill on Martin Luther King Blvd he describes is pretty steep; hauling his stuff over that stretch is pretty impressive.

I'm sort of fascinated by these little trucks from India. I think their practicality in Austin would be minimal, but it's still fun to fantasize about driving a little scooter-truck. The Oklahoman in me asks, "What would a gal say if you picked her up for a date in one of those?"

The pickup has a 175 cc engine and boasts a "carrying capacity" of 1,052 pounds. I wonder how fast you can haul a half-ton in this micro machine. Shoot, my little 4-cylinder Ford Ranger gets pretty poky with a load of furniture. Judging from the size of the bed, it would be hard to fit a half-ton load unless you were hauling uranium. The Web site says the top speed for the Autorickshaw passenger vehicle is 40 miles per hour. I imagine a loaded pickup would go much slower.

I ran across a specialized USB cable for connecting to Rio mp3 players. The mp3 player is broken, so I wondered if I would ever need the cable again. I remembered that Rio has discontinued production, so I definitely won't be using it again. I almost dropped it in the wastebasket, but then thought that someone who lost theirs might find it at Goodwill Computer Works, a computer thrift store in Austin.

I can't wait for their computer museum to reopen, but just going to the store is a little lesson in recent computer history. The bins are full of connectors, cables, and jacks for plethora of forgotten computer devices. I still sort of regret passing on a Netpliance I-opener I spotted, since I wrote a research paper on I-opener hacking.

Remembering what a wonderful institution Computer Works is I decided to start a bag of things to take to Goodwill. Here's a sampling:

• cheap quart and two-quart plastic bottles. I used to use these to take water to school and around town, but I've finally admitted that the Nalgene-style polycarbonate bottles really are that much better.
  
• grotty PS/2 mouse from the year 2000.
  
• nice PS/2 Dell QuietKey keyboard. Now that I'm using a Mac, I doubt I'll ever use a computer with PS/2 ports again. I probably bought the keyboard at Goodwill in the first place.
  
• crappy landline telephone/answering machine combo. I don't keep a landline anymore.
  
• plastic pitcher that won't fit in my fridge.
  
• Compaq Aero Pocket PC. Dang, this thing uses a serial port. I don't see much point in a handheld device, but I used to download Web sites like NYTimes.com to this to read on the train. I don't ride trains much in Texas.
  Posted by McChris at 01:25 PM | Comments (0)

Today I pointed someone to DavisWiki today, so I thought I might mention it here. I've never been to Davis, California, and frankly the only thing I knew about the town was about its slightly icky fistualted cows. Although I have no familiarity with Davis, a lot of the entries are entertaining. It also seems like it has the potential to be a useful way to share information about the cities. If I were moving there, I would find this page about local coffeeshops useful. The Wiki also includes the entire Davis municipal code. It's also up on the city's Website, but having it in the Wiki could make it easier to integrate into discussions about local issues.

I thought about WikiProject:Seattle, which is a project to create articles in Wikipedia about local issues in Seattle. I wondered why you would want to create a separate Wiki for Davis, rather than start a Wikiproject. One advantage a separate site might provide is that you can nurture a different culture from Wikipedia. Wikipedia's culture is pretty established and pretty rigid. This rigidity might prevent giving the writing a local flavor and might intimidate people who would otherwise find a local wiki a useful tool.

in contrast, DavisWiki emphasizes having fun and nuturing a community that exists on- and off-line. One of the main tabs on each page is a list of individual user pages, where users can list their interests and post photos. Wikipedia offers similar functionality, but it is not a prominent feature. The Wikipedia profiles are geared toward sharing quasi-professional qualifications and interests, while the profiles on DavisWiki tie users to the community. There seems to be an effort by some users to use the site for establishing contacts offline.

DavisWiki doesn't seem to follow the Neutral Point of View policy at Wikipedia. NPOV seems to abate a lot of the flame wars or at least provide a roadmap for resolving disputes. (I'd argue that the policy also generates a fair number of disputes, but those disputes are often interesting.) For a local site, this policy might be too restrictive and limit otherwise useful content. For example, an activist might want to document a protest, but might be too constrained by the policy to share explain the protest and share information.

The norms of Wikipedia would also quash some interesting content. An entertaining section like the one about "Environmental Impact Reduction" in the entry on kegs would be deleted in WIkipedia. This post is sophomoric, but it provides the reader with some flavor of the college town, The Mystery Picture feature would make little sense on an international site like Wikipedia, but here it engages readers with their community. DavisWiki makes an effort to engage with the community, and it could mature into a useful resource for the town.

Here's a documentary about the history of the Roland TB-303 bass generator. I frankly didn't understand the first few minutes of the clip, but I learned some interesting facts about the evolution of electronic dance music. I do like the discussion toward the end about using technology to simulate older technologies.

A few days ago, I was surprised to see IBM's announcement it would it would stop selling OS/2 and only offer support by contract. I was not surprised, mind you, because I thought OS/2 was a vital, growing platform, but because I thought the operating system had died about ten years ago. I wonder about who is still using OS/2, if IBM had sold a lot of big contracts to companies that don't frequently upgrade their systems. I think at one time OS/2 was a popular platform for ATMs, and I could imagine there are plenty of older ATM machines floating around.

Seeing this piece tonight, it struck me as funny that IBM in the business of supporting a lot of funky old platforms. I can understand why customers would want to stick with a proven platform like the AS/400 minicomputer, and why a company would want to keep making money by selling services and support, but IBM's business seems to be structured around a number of different platforms and selling middleware to connect the platforms. I suppose this is one reason IBM has invested heavily in Linux and other open source projects, in order to pave the way for future compatibility, and allow users to maintain their code.

NYTimes has a story about computer users who simply purchase new computers to fix their spyware problems. The story cites a Pew study reporting about how many computer users have had problems with spyware, but its evidence for the computer disposal trend is all anecdotal.

The anecdotes are fairly interesting. Two persons interviewed hold PhDs in computer science who tossed their machines after losing performance to spyware. The article doesn't note whether the infected computers were at the end of their lifecycle; perhaps these cases were simply early upgrades. The story also doesn't mention the environmental hazards improper computer disposal presents.

Dang, Apple moves fast! I submitted a battery exchange request on Friday, and a new (hopefully non-exploding) battery for my iBook just arrived. I thought it might have been shipped from a depot in Austin, but, no, the battery was shipped overnight from California. I see a lot of complaints about Apple's service and support on various blogs, but I wonder if Apple users just expect a higher level of quality. In comparison, my last laptop caught fire, and, when I called their customer service, the seemed completely unconcerned.

In other news, I installed OS X "Tiger" over the weekend. I thought I would wait for the reviews to come back before taking the risk of losing files or gunking up my computer. Actually, I wasn't going to bother with it at all until my students told me a "bare" version is available at the campus computer store for $15, which is a substantial savings over even the $75 student license.

Installation was completely straightforward for me. I think I was thinking of all of the hassles involved in upgrading different versions of Windows, but this is more like a Service Pack, albeit a $129 Service Pack, than a new version of the OS. Unlike upgrading Windows, there aren't any funky new interfaces I have to learn right away, and all of my files are in the right places.

Tiger has given me a modest performance improvement, and that alone is probably worth $15. The two major new features, as everyone has said, are Dashboard and Spotlight.

Dashboard is pretty gimmicky; I installed Konfabulator when I first got my iBook to keep track of memory use, but the application itself is a memory hog. I've got a system monitor running in Dashboard, but pushing "F8" when I want to check memory isn't the most convenient or accurate way to monitor performance. The best thing I've found, is the "Movie Locater" plugin, which will be nice when I want to quickly look up a picture in class. I tried to make a similar widget for searching the UT Library Catalog, but my attention span ran out before I figured out how to get it to work. I'm sure Prentiss or whomever could figure out the code in 10 minutes. I'll make a logo if you do the code...

I can see why people are excited about Spotlight, but I don't usually have a hard time keeping track of my files, except for images, and, unless there's some kind of metadata system for images, I don't see how it will help. But this leads me to the features I wish were included. First, I wish that Apple would include thumbnail views of images in the OS, a la Windows XP, so I don't need to open iPhoto to see thumbnails. In addition, I had read rumors that Tiger would include NTFS support, but I am still unable to write and delete on my old NTFS volumes I've put in external chassis.

Finally, the Safari browser has some nice additions, including the ability to view .pdf documents in the browser. I thought it was a hassle when Safari would download .pdfs to the desktop, and then open them in Preview. This is certainly an improvement. On the other hand, I don't like the fact that when I right-click on the "back" button, it brings up a context menu for customizing the browser bar. I want to see the last ten pages. I know I can left-click-and-hold to get that context menu, but I wish I could switch it back to the old context menu. Finally, Safari's history is still that stupid scrolling menu - I want a tree interface like the one used in Firefox or even IE.

Yikes, that was quite the geek-out, but those of you who haven't seen me in a while, you now know I'm really turning into an Apple guy. I guess I've owned five computers in my life, and three of them have been Apples, so maybe I was just flirting with PC-ness for the last five years.

I just saw this item about Apple's decision to recall certain iBook and PowerBook batteries, and, wouldn't you know, the battery on my machine is in the range of serial numbers recalled. I suppose my computer was no less dangerous a week ago, but I'm glad I didn't quit using the battery while the semester was wrapping up. I used this online form to submit a battery exchange request. Apple says they will ship a new battery out to me, and I am supposed to return my battery using the prepaid mailer. They don't have an ETA, but I hope it doesn't take long.

The new issue of Stay Free! has an interview with "Bill," who takes credit for starting the flash mob phenomenon in New York City. One the issues that he seems to want to dodge is what, if any political aspects there may to flash mobbing. When the craze hit two summers ago, I felt a little distressed that all of this organizational effort went into a purportedly apolitical project; at the time, I suggested it was a celebration of technology. "Bill" says that, while the original New York mobs were a statement on scenesterism, mobs in other cities took on a political component. For example, a mob in Minneapolis seemed to raise issues of public space.

Certainly there are other, more overt, ways to recuperate public space such as Reclaim the Streets! or the Berlin Love Parade, but "Bill" suggests that overtly political messages might have turned off many participants.

Chris pointed me to a rather useful website, batteryuniversity.com, which, as the name suggests, provides useful information about how various types of rechargeable batteries work. This page really helped me understand how batteries lose their life, and the site also has a great table offering the dos and don'ts of battery operation. I can't say that I'm the most responsible battery user, so I found it validating to know that there's little you can do to extend the life of the lithium batteries used in notebook computers and video cameras. The site says a lithium battery "Loses capacity due to aging whether used or not." On the other hand, I was not aware that nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) batteries are as susceptible to "memory" as the older style of nickel-cadmium batteries. I use these for my digital still camera and mp3, so I will be sure to cycle them all the way down before charging them.

Chris also gave me two free tickets to Friday's Caribou concert, which is so awesome of him. I was already excited about seeing them - I haven't seen a touring band since SXSW - and free tickets makes it that much better. Thanks Chris!

Some of my students have asked me about the difference between Final Cut Pro HD and the lower-cost Final Cut Express HD, and Apple's website is profoundly uninformative on this issue. I'm not sure if it's a case of upselling customers to a product they don't need or simply poor information design, but the Princeton campus computer store has a great page devoted to the issue.

At $499 for Pro and $249 for Express, student licenses, it's something of a task to justify the extra cost, but a few features missing in Express make it unattractive for students interested in serious media creation, in particular the lack of timecode support and the lack of keyframing for effects make Express only appropriate for lightweight use.

On the other hand, I do my video editing in our lovely Studio 4B - I'm not particularly excited by the prospect of editing video on a 12" iBook screen. Some students may have fancy Mac desktop systems at home, but, if that's the case, they probably won't begrudge spending the extra $250 for the Pro version.

In related news, I went to the site for UT's campus computer store tonight to find a cheap license for OS X Tiger, and discovered that its URL is campuscomputer.com. On one hand, it makes sense that a computer store for one of the largest campuses in the country would grab that URL, but, on the other hand, it smacks of that Texan presumptuousness.

This tongue-in-cheek internet history timeline came in over a listserv last night. It's not as funny as I would hope, but it might be worth checking out. What is funny and informative is Barry Wellman's "My Forty Years of HCI," which I've been meaning to post for over a year now. Here's a sample:

When we were undergrads, my friend Tom and I went to the bursar's office to pick up our scholarship checks. Tom was about to fold his check and put it in his wallet, when I said, "Oh, you shouldn't fold checks like that."
"Really, why not?"
"Oh, my dad repairs check-sorting machines, and he says that folding these checks lead to a lot of jams he has to fix."
Tom folded his check, and slyly said, "Well, I'm keeping your dad in a job."

It's about time I sounded off on the Adobe-Macromedia merger, considering the impact it may have on my work. Jason Kottke has done a wonderful job rounding up what influential bloggers have to say about the merger, but he doesn't include Dan Gillmor's post, which pretty much echoes my initial reaction.

Another thing I thought of when I first learned of the merger was Adobe's intellectual property lawsuit against Macromedia in 2000 over a tabbed-palette interface design. After the settlement, Macromedia had to drastically redesign the interface for most of their product line, which, for people who don't use digital production tools, may sound inconsequential, but has created a variety a of headaches for me. Even between Studio MX and Studio MX 2004 the interfaces are different enough to cause confusion for me and my TA. For example, the Actions palette in Flash, which was once rather intuitive, is very difficult for new users to understand. Scripting is hard enough for lower-division RTF students to understand, and a wonky interface doesn't help much. At least this merger may bring improved interfaces to Flash and Dreamweaver.

I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere - perhaps its the perspective of a budding historian of technology - but in class yesterday I compared this to the Adobe-Aldus "Aldobe" merger in 1994, which certainly shook up the desktop-publishing world, but times change, as well, and the demands of users change; note how that story doesn't even mention Photoshop, which is certainly Adobe's most well-known product today.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story titled "Knowing When to Log Off" addressing the impacts of email and the Web on scholars and students. It contends that the shift from a book-based to a 'net-based academy has had negative effects on the socialization of students, particularly between students and instructors, and has led to an information-processing quagmire for many professors. Although it doesn't suggest we should abandon the 'net, some of the source advise readers to be more conscious of how they use the 'net and pace themselves accordingly. I should probably take this to heart, considering my current inability to manage email.

This is probably better material for bOINGbOING, but a LiveJournal user has presumably found satellite photos of the famed Area 51 using Google Maps. Area 51 is, of course, where the US Government allegedly keeps its top-secret UFO labs. Some of the comments have suggested that the user is on the wrong trail, but his images largely mirror the ones on this site purporting to be of Area 51.

The "transparent screens," which use desktop images for a neat trompe l'oeil effect, are pretty darn neat, but they're no match for Tano's transparent parking signs.

In other brain-busting developments, I'm not sure what to make of this quote from a Dover, PA parent and pastor related to science education in public schools, "We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture." When you're debating educational practices, vilifying educated people seems to be a rhetorical minefield.

Over on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list, there's a long, multi-threaded discussion of what to call the range of communication practices they study, including email, USENET, the Web, SMS messaging, and chat. As these technologies have been in mainstream use for about a decade, the term "New Media" seems obsolete and "Internet" doesn't quite address the fact that many of these practices like SMS or Intranets don't necessarily occur on the Internet. Some have suggested that the existing terms like "CMC" (computer-mediated communication) and the particularly loathesome "ICTs" (Interactive Communications Technologies) are adequate to describe this range of topics, but I suspect only communication and information studies scholars understand and tolerate these acronyms. Someone even suggested "Cyberspace" is the proper name of the field. Naming a domain that studies rapidly changing technology (Radio-TV-Film?), so it is easy to understand how this exercize is both contentious and incomplete. Therefore I suggest we call it "Interweb Studies" or perhaps "Intarweb Studies," so suggest the silliness of this project.

Glenn Fleishman has a piece intending to parody attempts by telecommunications interests to outlaw municipal wireless projects by comparing broadband to eletricity.

Sadly, Fleishman's thought experiment is quite close to the historical reality. In the early 20th century, Industry groups did make efforts to bar municipalities and governments from generating electricity and, in some cases muscled their way into markets where public and non-profit utilities already existed. When I read Scott Rosenberg's pointer to the entry, I immediately thought of Patrick McGuire and Mark Granovetter's "Business and Bias in Public Policy Formation: The National Civic Federation and Social Construction of Electric Utility Regulation, 1905-1907." Its not the most quotable piece, but here's a sample.

Despite the academic writing style, I think you'll agree that this is pretty much the scenario Fleishman imagines. One of the reasons I'm motivated to pursuse the history of technology as a scholar is the frustration I often feel when technologists and reporters treat a technology as completely new or "apart from history," but as this case shows, this situation has occurred before.

I knew I had been co-opted when one of my stories appeared on Microsoft's PressPass site, so its fair to say l33t speak has hit the mainstream now that the software giant has a page devoted to decoding "teh lingo." I guess our friends in Redmond are one step ahead of the FBI.

This year's South By Southwest Interactive conference is having a mini-track devoted to "Activist Technology,". Although the emphasis may be geared more toward party politics than I might like, the titles of the panels sound interesting.

On a related note, the IndyConference at UT later this month is really coming together. We expecting about 80 IMC activists to come from out of town, and the conference is open to everyone if Austin folks want to come by and check it out. I'll be giving a presentation on "Web-publishing for non-Geeks," which readers of this blog probably won't find useful, and I've agreed to moderate a discussion on trolls, hackers, and spam. We still need volunteers to help out at the conference, so, if you're interested, drop me a line.

I wrote a blog entry on Friday, but apparently I never hit "post." Or maybe MT just didn't like it. On Thursday night, my laptop - my only computer these days - started smoking near the DC-in jack. I called a few places, and the only place that would give me an estimate on replacing the DC-in on the machine said it would be $150-200. Does this sound like a fair price?

When I took it in yesterday, the guy said, "Its smoking? You should just call support and have them service it." He thought that because it was a fire hazard, they would just replace it, to avoid liability issues. Maybe he didn't want to work on it, but he wouldn't take it until I called support. I haven't called support yet because I'm frustrated with this problem.

I checked out an iBook from the College of Communications, but it is so annoying not to have your own computer. It won't connect to my cable modem, and, of course, I don't have my bookmarks or stored files. The school's computer also has only 128MB of RAM, which has reintroduced me to the joys of a grinding hard drive when the RAM maxes out.

Matt Haughey has a really nice post that discusses a way to create and - more importantly - remember high-security passwords. I'm sure this would be useful to many readers who are under requirements to use dictionary-proof passwords. I've seen similar techniques before, when I administered a server here at UT, I was given a password based on a W.C. Fields quote. Another technique I've used with some success is Native American First Nations words and place-names.

I feel a little derelict in my duties as a grad-school new-media blogger because I didn't blog about Michael "Mercedes Divide" Powell's departure from the FCC. I guess I couldn't decide if this was a good thing, since I definitely disagreed with his deregulatory agenda or if was a bad thing, since now the Bush adminstration could install someone even more odious to the post of FCC chairman. Regardless, today's "Boondocks" strip gave me a good chuckle.

The blog "Om Malik on Broadband" has a entry that says Six Apart, the company formed around the blog engine Movable Type, has plans to buy Live Journal which hosts a community with blog-like user pages. I can certainly understand why Live Journal would want to sell out - it began as a hobby, quickly exploded, and has often suffered scalability issues - but I'm not sure what Six Apart would get out of a merger, apart from LJ's vast user base, which it could bring over to its hosted TypePad service, particularly when you consider that the Live Journal backend is open source.

I'd long been dismissive of Live Journal as a source of content. Perhaps I was turned off by the ugly design of the sites or the fact that it attracts a non-technical audience. But, in recent months, I get it. Live Journal is a community of users sharing their experiences in journals, rather than media projects made by individuals. This is a crass generalization, but blogs seem to be more aspirational than Live Journals. Blogs are a tool for authors to share viewpoints and links, while Live Journal is an environment for interacting online. I've become something of a fan of the site for the supportive networks of users it has fostered and the culture of experimentation. Live Journals often look ugly, but there also seems to be less pressure to seem polished or authoritative compared to even Blogger-based blogs.

If Six Apart's aim in acquiring Live Journal is to grab its user base, I doubt it will be able to convert many users into paid TypePad subscribers. Even current paid Live Journal users would miss the non-paying members in their networks, and probably opt out of subscribing, since the primary attractor would be gone. Moreover, an effort to force Live Journal users into TypePad accounts would be a PR blunder on the magnitude of Six Apart's decision to begin charging users of Movable Type, which greatly diminished Six Apart's goodwill in the blog community and led to a mass migration to the WordPress platform.

Dan Gilmor's final column for the San Jose Mercury-News appears today, and he has launched a new blog on TypePad called "Dan Gilmor on Grassroots Journalism."

Everyone who uses Movable Type probably saw this item in the news section of the main admin screen, but I think its worth commenting on. Jay Allen discusses the exploding problem of comment spam, and how comment spam is leading to severe performance problems for many blogs. Some of what he says about how Movable Type is architected surprised me; I would not have guessed MT rebuilds individual entry pages even when MT-Blacklist denies a comment or sends one to moderation. No wonder this site has been slow as mud the past few months. I have noticed that I've been getting a ridiculous amount of traffic on my comments.cgi file. I presume that its automated bots constantly banging on my blog, trying to add links for cheap viagra and online poker. Occasionally, I'll wake up to discover that someone or something has been spamming the site for nine or ten hours, sending 100+ comments to moderation. Although this often happens early Sunday mornings, I do think its a bot. Depressingly, I think about two-thirds of my traffic isn't from friends or fans, but from these spam creeps.

I've been up in Studio 4B, trying to teach myself the 3D animation package Softimage XSI. Obviously, there's only so much I can learn over the break, but its been worth my while. Hopefully, I'll learn enough to get students started working with it in a future semester, if not generate my own projects.

The Danish exchange student was up there, too. He's been trying for weeks to author a PAL-compatible DVD from an NTSC-formatted After Effects project. From the start, I've thought he would have to go about this by either running it through a hardware scan converter and author the DVD from raw video or starting from scratch and adjusting his resolution and frame rates in After Effects. Either way is going to be a hassle and give less-than-optimal results. He has a Quicktime of his movie, and I keep telling him that it'll play on any computer with the plugin, so its probably not worth the effort to try to make it readable on a PAL DVD player.

Regardless, he's been trying to create a PAL DVD in various DVD authoring packages. He was mucking about with the cheesy wizard-based package that came with the DVD drives on our PCs, and I was like, "Um, you should be able to click something and get more granularity."
"What's granularity?"

Its sometimes hard for me when I'm working with non-native speakers when I use weird words in conversation. I don't want to dumb down my discourse, but at the same time, I want to be intelligible. I imagine the Dane and others do want to learn as many English words as possible, but, then again, how often will he run into "granularity"?

I said, "You know how sand is made up of a bunch of little grains?"
He nodded yes.
"Granularity is like you can mess with each of those little grains. If there's more granularity in software, you have more options to manipulate."
"Got it."
Awesome.

I used to hate Microsoft Office's realtime spellcheck and grammar check functionality. I found all the green and red underlining distracting when I was trying to crank out a paper. I used to turn them off when I logged on to a lab machine, but, I think it improved considerably with Office 2000, because I don't remember even noticing the feature after I finished college. Even more frustrating is the Autocorrect feature which seems to refuse to allow me to correctly type "bell hooks" or "ICTs," changing the capitalization even if I correct the correction multiple times.

As I've writing furiously here at the end of the semester, I've noticed that my papers are peppered with egregious typographical errors, and I wondered "How is this happening?" I've had to go back and correct errors that are normally fixed as they happened, and I realized, "I didn't install any spelling or grammar dictionaries when I rebuilt my hard drive." I was trying to keep the Microcruft to a minimum when I did a clean re-install, and as a result, I'm not able to even run a spell check, so now I need to figure out how to install these indispensible featuers.

UpdateAs a sidenote, after I installed the spelling and grammar "dictionaries" to my machine, I quicklly discovered I had to add "blog," "blogs," "blogger," and "blogging" to the local dictionary. "Blog" may be the word of the year for 2004, but Office 2000 thinks its a typo. Does anyone know if Office XP or Office 2003 include "blog"? I'm still using the copy of Office that came with the huge bundle of software Microsoft sent me when I was writing for computer magazines.

My pal Jared appreciated this link to a New York Times Magazine photo feature, so I thought I would blog it. These plaster models were made in 19th-century Germany to illustrate complex trigonometric formulas. They're also pretty. I sent them to Jared, since he makes wild mathematically-driven flash art, and operates out of a similar aesthetic.

On a similar note, I dig this Benjamin Edwards' art based on satellite imaging. I like this one, "Immersion."

Google has launched Google Scholar, a search engine for academic papers. It seems to be geared primarily toward science and engineering folks; in the ten minutes I spent playing with it, I haven't really found a use for it. A search for "Donna Haraway" simply spits out a list of her articles, but I suppose clicking the "cited" link might take me to some interesting pieces. A search for "blog historiography" didn't turn up anything useful and searching for "actor-network blog" turned up nothing at all. Perhaps this simply means there are areas waiting to be explored in media studies, but a search for "Marlene Dietrich," mostly results in articles irrelevant to the well-examined movie star.

Another problem is see with Google Scholar is that it largely points readers to journal articles in commercial databases like ingenta.com, which I need to access through the UT Library into order to pull up articles. This NYTimes story suggests Google may feature advertising on the site at a later date, but I suspect this is a product Google plans to sell to academic libraries for indexing and searching electronic resources in-house. Still, I wonder how successful they will be. According to Don Turnbull, copyright restrictions limit UT's ability to create a comprehensive search feature for the many database systems it subscribes to.

I don't understand why, but there are many spots on campus where I can get a strong WiFi signal on one day, and when I return, the signal is very weak to non-existent. I still haven't found a sweet spot in the College of Communications complex, and the lab where I work has no WiFi whatsoever. A few weeks ago, I found a cluster of carrels in PCL that had consistently strong signals for a few days, but when I returned a few days later, it was completely dead, forcing me to return to my ritual of wandering around the library with my laptop open and booted up. I know from years of experience dealing with IT guys, that I don't think the same way as them, but, gosh, wouldn't you think if you were going to create an "un-wired" campus that the main library would be a priority? Or at least they would provide signage to point WiFi users in the right direction?

I don't usually post about gadgets I wish I had, but I saw the Intego WiFi Locator the other day at Fry's Electronics, and I was like, "need, need, NEED!" Its a little device that fits on your keychain and scans the airwaves for 802.11x signals, indicating their strength. This would at least enable me to wander around the PCL staring at a little gadget, rather than risking my laptop's health in the name of connectivity. It belongs on the Christmas list for all of your university geek friends.

I'm working on a paper where we were assigned to interview someone who remembers the JFK assassination about their experience and how it related to their media consumption habits. I can imagine a few years down the road, I'll ask students to ask their parents or another older person about when they started using the Internet. I suspect the students will ask, "What's the Internet?"

There are a profusion of dead links to Julian H. Scaff's "Art and Authenticity in the age of Digital Reproduction", so I'm posting the link here for future reference. As the title suggests, its a discussion of digital media within in the context of Walter Benjamin's classic "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

I just logged on to Friendster for the first time in what seems like forever. It was a little sad, since my reaction to reading my old profile was, "Man, you used to be funny." I'm happy to see that they've added a feature that allows you to add your RSS feed to your profile. After giving it your feed, Friendster posts the headlines from your blog. Since I use [fragmented] pullquotes as headlines on this site, I'm afraid that the little "My Blog" panel is not going to make much sense.

I recently created a MySpace profile after Melissa mentioned it on her LiveJournal, and I've now had the experience of a student messaging me to say, "I found you!" I'm sure other students have run across my profile on Friendster or whatever before, but now that I work with lower-division students, its a little awkward. Fortunately, I've only listed my educational background on the site.

Friendster was really fun in the summer of 2003, when I used it to track down old college friends, but, gosh, its hard to imagine that these things are the future of Computer-Mediated Communications. Regardless, there's an interested discussion going on over at Many-to-Many over the name "Social Software" and what directions it may lead. I tend to side with the skeptics.

If Loophole was a little disturbed by my idea for prog-rockaraoke, he's going to freak out over the Roland FR-7 I wonder what market need this is supposed to fulfill: an underground micropolka scene? Conceptual Tejano artists?

The New York Times has a story on Damon Dash, head of the Rock-A-Fella record label, and his plans to start a unit, RocBox, which will sell both hard drive- and flash-based mp3 players.

Alright, this is post number 500 on the infobong, so I thought I might try something a little special. I'm posting a few draft questions for today's RTF 319 quiz, and see if readers know the answers.

Click "Yeah... And it don't stop" for the correct answers. 500 posts in a little less than two years is hardly prolific, but that's still not a bad rate of posting... right? The Answers

Willard Uncapher posted an interesting item on the Association of Internet Researchers list lamenting the lack of historical knowledge of communications technology among people in the field. He says, “I like to think about the question as to whether the development of the Internet and CMC during the later 20th century was 'revolutionary' or 'evolutionary' or what.” I do too. Having come of age in the 1990s, reading WiReD, and following new technology with some fervor, I long thought that the Internet was indeed revolutionary and uniquely disrupted social relations. Yet my work writing for computer magazines and my later work in graduate school eventually made me realize that the Internet was only one of many technologies, like the telephone or radio, that seemed to threaten an existing social order until it was comfortably situated within society.

I'm starting to think that my calling might be history of communications technology, and I enrolled in my department's Historiography class. (Here's the syllabus in .pdf) Janet is a historian of some reknown and presumably has some faith in history as a means of sharing knowledge and wisdom, but I am a little disappointed that the class is largely devoted to historiographic theory critical of existing histories; I would rather learn how to write effective histories than debate the nature of reality or discuss the hopelessness of making sense of the past.

I presume some readers share my interest in the history of technology, and I will recommend Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were Newwhich is a highly readable and interesting book with nearly no theoretical mumbo jumbo.

Here's interesting post on the "economics" of RSS from a techie's point of view. Herr Scoble is correct in his assertion that

Sometime this spring the index.rdf overtook the infobong main page as the most frequently-accessed file on this site. In August, the RSS file was access three times as much as the default page. On a low-volume blog like this one, that seems about right, dedicated readers wait for their newsreaders to tell them when this site is updated, so people only visit when there are new posts up.

Inspired by Eyebeam's reBlog, I downloaded the reBlog software and set up my own. Rebong has been up for about a week, but I wanted to futz around with the templates before it went "live." I guess its as close to fit-for-public-consumption as it will ever be. I do think it looks cool when I hold down the PgDn key, but I'm obviously easily entertained. The page is basically a repository for all the items I would like to blog, but would never get around to writing about.

This morning, I had six Gmail invites to hand out, and I decided to indiscriminately hand them out, largely because anyone I know off-line wouldn't really care about Gmail one way or another. First, I sent an email to a listserv for grad students in the Radio-TV-Film department, offering invites to the first people who email me. I got one immediate response, from a student who wanted a good alias. This student, whom I don't know, has a rather foreign-sounding name, and I wondered how quickly her desired alias would be snapped up.

RTF grad students are apparently not too keen on Gmail, as that was the only response I got. Later, I posted the same message to Converge, a mailing list for computer multimedia folks around UT, and the list and my inbox saw a flurry of requests for invites. As soon as I got home from class, I sent out another message saying that I had run out of invites, but I would hang on to the respondents' email addresses for invites down the road.

I learned an important thing today: people who subscribe to technology-related lists are probably more interested in tech stuff like Gmail than people who subscribe to lists that are only tangentially related to technology.