Month: September 2003

Alan Simpson: Marriage amendment a conservative power grab

Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, the honorary chair of the Republican Unity Coalition, writes in today’s New York Times against the proposed constitutional amendment attacking gay marriage. He argues that the real purpose of the proposed constitutional amendment to define marriage as being “a union between a man and a woman” has nothing to do with strengthening families but would tear them apart, and that it represents a power grab on the part of conservatives for the federal government. Which is ironic, as Simpson points out, because conservatives usually argue violently when the federal government tries to “usurp” “issues better left to the states, like abortion or gun control.” It’s a brilliantly written argument that rings all the conservative chords and points them solely against those who argue that destroying the lives of gays somehow “preserves families.”

Doing iPodectomies

After reading my tale of iPod woe, MacArtisan sent in a link (via TrackBack) about opening up the iPod. Unfortunately, it’s about opening second generation iPods, but a little Googling found me this illustrated guide to opening the iPod case on a battery replacement manufacturer’s site, which looks more directly applicable to my first generation model.

I think before I undertake any surgery, or especially soldering, I might stop by Bellevue Square first. You never know…

Common sense 2: Time-out for the FCC

I’m a little late on posting this one, but I had to link to another judicial victory for common sense over conservative ideology: Court blocks US media rules. On Wednesday—a day before new rules that would allow a single company to own TV stations that reach 45% of the national market and to own radio, TV, and newspaper outlets in the same city would have gone into effect—a federal court blocked the rules pending a full judicial review, citing irretrievable harm to the petitioner, the Prometheus Radio Project.

One question that might be asked of FCC commissioner Powell: what was the damned hurry in the first place? These rules, the most sweeping revision of media ownership laws in recent memory, were pushed through with no public debate and, until folks like MoveOn squawked, no congressional inquiry. I’ve said it before: thank God for the common sense of the court, who both noted the possibility that there would be someone harmed and that the big media giants could certainly wait while the review was conducted.

I hadn’t heard of the Prometheus Radio Project before, but reading their stay motion—which notes that the Congress is moving to overturn the FCC ruling, that the FCC acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner by failing to analyze fully the impact of their actions, that their limited analysis is contradictory, that they didn’t include the public, in fact everything but that they quartered large bodies of troops among us—I like them a lot.

Thanks to MediaMouse for the links.

Pucker Up and Blow: How an ad flak revolutionized hip hop

At Waxy.org: Double Dee and Steinski’s “The Lesson.” Masterworks of sampling from the early 80s, done by Doug DeFranco (Double Dee, a sound engineer in a commercial studio) and Steinski (Steve Stein, a TV producer who worked for an ad agency). The article helpfully points not only to a Village Voice article from 1986 about the pair, but also MP3s of all three classic “Lessons,” which are notorious for being basically one sample from beginning to end and therefore having no chance of being released legally. The pair were so influential that there are Lessons 4, 5, and 6, recorded by DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, and Jurassic 5.

I think I remember hearing Lesson 2 or Lesson 3 in middle school on the bus—they certainly punch some buttons in my memory. But mostly the lessons are just jaw droppingly amazing, including Lesson 3’s transition from Mae West’s injunction to “pucker up and blow” into the Human Beat Box. Go get ’em before they disappear…

No trouble like iPod trouble

I noticed this afternoon that my original 5GB iPod wasn’t charging in my car (I have a cigarette lighter to FireWire adapter, one of those insane gadgets that you think you’ll never need—until the right moment comes along and then it’s indispensable). I tried the adapter in another outlet: nothing. I finally jiggled the cord a little and the charging bars started moving. Huh, I thought. Time to plug it in overnight.

I brought it home and connected it to my PowerBook. As it started to sync with iTunes, I remembered I hadn’t set it up with iSync yet on this machine. I started iSync, scanned and found the iPod, double-clicked—and then iSync froze. And iTunes was frozen. I noticed the iPod looked like it was back to its menu screen, so I unplugged it. Bam. Kernel panic.

I rebooted the PowerBook and tried to get the iPod to connect. No joy. I can’t even force it into FireWire drive mode, though it passes all the diagnostics. I think the problem is the physical FireWire connector on the iPod. Anyone know how to open one up?

Is everyone gone now?

Funny couple of days with so much traffic coming from Dave’s link on Monday. Now that everyone is gone, I don’t know what to say, but I feel better.


Quiet here the last couple of days with Lisa on the east coast. She gets back tonight, fortunately. Quiet in the keiretsu, too; Esta has started her new part-time job at the seminary in advance of classes, Greg is just returning after a short battery charging hiatus, Craig appears to have gone dark after his whirlwind user acceptance testing tour, George has been busy in his woodshop, Adam is too busy with his new son to post, Tin Man has been rediscovering Lord of the Rings; and in Seattle, Beth has been at Bumbershoot AND Radiohead AND is quitting smoking and Tara has been posting some magnificent past life stories.

More Microsoft.com Web Service goodness

When one talented programmer succeeds in implementing something, you can be sure another is a step behind making improvements. Sam Ruby provides a stripped down version of Phillip’s Python wrapper for the Microsoft.com Web Service that doesn’t depend on a toolkit or XML parser and supports one operation: Top 10 Popular US Downloads.

Looking at the implementations these guys have done, it’s clear that the bulk of the work on non-.NET platforms is implementing WS-Security. It strikes me as a worthwhile challenge to try it out. I wonder how easy it is to get Apple’s SOAP libraries to support the headers required.

Other notes: Both a human-readable description of the web service and a WSDL description are available.

Question of the Week: Will Schaub play?

Virginia football had a great starter against Duke, shutting them out 27-0. The victory was soured by only two things: Duke hasn’t won a football game since approximately the Pleistocene Era, and Heisman Trophy candidate Matt Schaub injured his shoulder. How severely is difficult to say, as Al Groh isn’t talking. So the big question is: Will Schaub play in Saturday’s game against South Carolina?

Incidentally, it sounds from this article like South Carolina is still smarting from last year’s smackdown (seven turnovers?) and is spoiling for a fight. Should be a fun game.

More about Microsoft.com Web Services 1.0

Dave asks for more details about the Microsoft.com Web Services release I discussed earlier. I can’t really give too many more details other than what’s in the MSDN announcement linked above, but the key is in the name, Microsoft.com Web Services (which I’ve corrected in my post
below).

This is a web service layer on Microsoft.com, which is intended, as the release says, to “enable you to integrate information and services from MSDN, Technet, other Microsoft.com sites, and Microsoft Support.” Version 1.0, which is a proof of concept and shakedown for the infrastructure, provides an API via SOAP that allows accessing a designated set of Microsoft.com content, the Top Downloads on the site. Future releases, the release indicates, will allow you to access other Microsoft.com content, including presumably info from Support, MSDN, and Technet.

“Sounds like RSS—so why isn’t it RSS?” you cry. Good question. I’ll see if I can find out. But the key point is that this is kind of analogous to the Amazon SOAP API or the Google API: a way to programmatically access certain content on Microsoft.com. Potentially this could be of interest to Microsoft’s partners and content providers in the Microsoft community, who might want to selectively expose some of Microsoft.com’s content without having to send their users blindly to us.

Obligatory disclaimer courtesy our legal folks: This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Microsoft.com Web Services v. 1.0

Mark Pilgrim points to the 1.0 release of Microsoft.com Web Services. This is kind of a big deal at Microsoft.com (where I work), because it is a publicly-visible hook into a new publishing model for us. Of course, it inevitably raises some snags too; Mark does a good job of highlighting the problems with our registration process and the fact that the documentation is only available if you already have one of the recent versions of Visual Studio.

Maybe I’ll play with trying an AppleScript wrapper for the service, which will almost certainly grow in usefulness beyond listing Top Downloads. Of course, I’ll have to be very careful about doing so in accordance with the license terms, which among other things prohibit redistributing the documentation off my premises or distributing modified sample code that does not run on the Windows platform.

Update: It’s Microsoft.com Web Services, not just Microsoft Web Services as I incorrectly indicated earlier; my apologies for the confusion.

One year ago today

September 2, 2002: Sonic Youth at Bumbershoot 2002. Still one of my favorite pieces of concert writing to date, in a sort of Hemingway-esque way: “The band went offstage, then came back on and played ‘Disconnection Notice.’ After the rest of the set, it felt somber and almost valedictory. This was the last set of their tour. Wind came up into Lee’s hair. They left the stage. I left the stadium and drove home.”

Bumbershoot 2003 (4): R.E.M., at their most beautiful

After Jeff and Wilco had left the stage, we waited anxiously for the set to change over. While I was waiting, I heard the teenage girl behind me saying, “I’m going to call my mom as soon as a song comes on that she’ll recognize. I remember hearing her play all those albums when I was growing up. I hope it’s a greatest hits type show.” I turned around and said, “Actually, I heard they’ll be playing all the songs off their new album.” “Oh,” she said; “well, that’d be cool too.”

Soon the stage was full. Michael Stipe, wearing a jean jacket over a pink polo shirt and wraparound sunglasses, bounded out followed by the rest of R.E.M. in 2003: Peter Buck, Mike Mills (with a white cloud of hair), and guests Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows and the Minus Five, Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, and Barrett Martin on drums. The band wasted no time, jumping right into “Begin the Begin” (from Life’s Rich Pageant) as though the song were written yesterday. Michael was all over the place, tilting the mic stand to the floor like Joe Strummer, doing the spastic dance that earned him derision and a thousand spastic teenage imitators in the late 80s (including, of course, myself and my one-time roommate), shedding the jacket and then the polo to reveal a t-shirt that read, “I am vibrating at the speed of light.” The band moved immediately into “Finest Worksong,” and then, improbably, “Maps and Legends.”

While Peter Buck and Mike Mills were workmanlike (though Mike grinned from ear to ear during most of the numbers), Michael was chatty (he introduced the band by saying, “Except for me and Mike Mills, the whole band tonight is from Seattle, either native or transplanted”), grinning like crazy, joking around (he told a long story about performing “I Got You, Babe” as a joke at a charity gig headlined by U2’s Bono (“because you never pronounce his name Boh-noh”) and having “fucking Cher!” walk on half way through to do a duet), and of course dancing. In between the jokes and posing, the band worked through a tight set of old and new songs, including “Animal” and “Bad Day,” from the forthcoming greatest hits album (oh yeah—that’s what I meant when I told the teenager about the set list. Hope she forgives me someday), “Fall On Me,” “Drive,” “Exhuming McCarthy” (!), “Electrolite,” “New Test Leper,” “Imitation of Life,” “I’ve Been High,” “Losing My Religion,” “The One I Love,” “At My Most Beautiful,” “Daysleeper,” “Nightswimming,” “She Just Wants to Be,” “Walk Unafraid,” and “Man on the Moon.”

Through it all, Michael joked, danced, did dramatic interpretation, saluted, marched, and generally had a blast, but it was increasingly clear that the real musical leaders of the band were Mike and especially Peter, who without saying a word to the crowd managed the many changes of instruments, songs, and keys, and rocked hard doing it. Many of the later songs benefitted enormously from live performance, particularly “Imitation of Life” and “Walk Unafraid,” which transformed into a rocking affirmation.

With the crowd screaming itself raw, the band returned and played “Everybody Hurts,” “World Leader Pretend” (with Michael starting by saying, “This will be the second time we’ve played this since 1989; the last time, I blew a few lyrics, so I’m going to have to read it” before glancing once at the music stand and doing the rest from memory), “Get Up,” and closing with “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” I slipped out of the crowd during “Get Up,” not wanting to wait for hours in the parking lot, and as “End of the World” floated over the stadium walls I watched young and old kids dancing on the sidewalk.

R.E.M. may have fans that grew up listening to their songs as well as those of us who first heard them in middle school, but their live performances are as vital and inspiring as ever, and all the better for Michael’s loose, joking spontaneity. I hope another studio album follows In Time, because the band still rocks too hard to fade away.