- Wired says that Amazon got around copyright concerns by claiming it never built a library at all, just a digital image archive that can’t be permalinked;
- Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests this upends a few applecarts, particularly with respect to textual studies and the very definition of books;
- I think Amazon, or book publishers, may be in for some trouble here, given that “ professors and their students have to pay through the nose to photocopy sections of copyrighted works for course packets? Those are images rather than machine readable text too, surely, and you can print the page scans from Amazon” (reprinted from my comment at Matt’s site).
- Doc Searls says it’s humbling to see how few times your name is mentioned in print. Reverse ego-surfing?
- Brian Dear points out you can get damn near a whole book for free this way.
- Dare Obasanjo calls it the “world’s shittiest search feature” for how badly the book search results get polluted now, and says, “If ever a feature needed to be turned off by default it is this one.” That means something coming from a Microsoftie. 🙂
Month: October 2003
Cold Mountain
The trailer for Cold Mountain, based on the Charles Frazier book and starring, improbably, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, is up. It looks pretty but sounds terrible. Question to Miramax: How much would it have cost you to send someone to the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee and find out what the authentic mountain accent sounded like? Or even searched the web for references? Clue: It’s not the accent you tried to teach your English and Australian leads.
As someone whose family grew up a few hollers over from Bear Creek, near the supposed action of the movie, I’m sadly disappointed. Somehow I don’t think we’ll be hearing cousin Bascom’s “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” which featured prominently in the book, in the movie either.
Around the blogosphere
A quick note about my blog writing habits. I usually start the morning by scanning my RSS subscriptions in NetNewsWire. I’m no Scoble, but I currently subscribe to 109 feeds, from friends, Microsofties, an assortment of other bloggers, journals, newspapers, etc. Most days I do a quick hit and run, but there are days like today that I end up following almost thirty links, many from the popularity engine Blogdex.
(Aside: Blogdex is one of the ways that I think we can overcome the mental filter of only looking for blogs and news that support our own biases. Blogdex and Technorati both let you see what everyone has written about a particular link, regardless of whether you agree with them or not.)
So, then, today’s around the blogosphere roundup:
- Man goes over Niagara Falls without a barrel and survives, defying “the laws of physics and Canada” (Greg)
- BBC launches iCan, intended to give Britons collective participation in their government (Boing-Boing)
- Ross Mayfield’s SocialText goes 1.0 with a workplace collaboration package that mixes features of wikis and blogs (Joi)
- Glenn Reynolds says that the Rumsfeld memo shouldn’t have been leaked because the resulting furor will discourage critical thought and examination in the future by the military. Glenn also asks “where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak?” Probably it’s too complicated for them to understand it so they aren’t writing about it. Lisa and I talked about this one last night. She thought, at least before the announcement that the memo was leaked by someone other than Rumsfeld, that he was positioning against the growing power that Condi Rice is taking in Iraq. Now it looks like he’s being positioned in another direction… (Blogdex)
- David Pogue reviews Panther in the New York Times and sounds the Microsoft paranoia note: “When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it’s yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you’re using someone else’s toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you” (MacNN)
- Who killed Daniel Pearl? Asra Q. Nomani wonders in Salon whether there was a link between al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, now that 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been linked to Pearl’s murder… and to Omar Saeed Sheikh, who masterminded the murder and has been linked to the ISI. (Salon)
- And, finally, since the press is barred from reporting on the arrival of the bodies of our soldiers from Iraq, I’m going to start picking up the slack by pointing to the list of names of those killed in action. Here’s today’s list.
iTunes for Windows update out
Apple has published a bugfix release for iTunes for Windows (v. 4.1.1) which is apparently aimed at folks who experienced the freezing bug in Windows 2000, such as Patrick Nielson Hayden. No word yet on whether it addresses the “Nomad not working” bug.
Update: From the readme:
What’s new in iTunes 4.1.1
iTunes 4.1.1 includes improved performance when using your iPod, addresses an incompatibility with Windows 2000 and older third-party CD burning software, and improves support for non-standard mp3 files. Also, the “Keep iTunes Music folder organized” preference is now turned off by default.
Taking the easy way out
I was quick-surfing this morning when I caught it out of the corner of my eye on Scary Go Round. “Elliott Smith 1969-2003: I am very sad to hear about the death of one of my favourite musicians, Elliott Smith. A hugely gifted man, but also someone who seemed very fragile. What a waste.” I thought, Oh no. There was nothing in my aggregator, though, and I began hoping it was a rumor.
The Feedster search showed otherwise: along with the eight pages of eulogies, primarily on LiveJournal, were the news stories and encomiums. Elliott Smith, brilliant singer-songwriter whose work spanned guitar rock, orchestral pop, and despairing lyrics; who had five albums including three really brilliant ones; whose work spoke of loneliness and drugs; who apparently stabbed himself with a knife in his LA apartment on Tuesday.
I didn’t listen to Elliott’s music until I was in grad school, but the combination of the sweeping melodies and dark lyrics hit buttons for me then. If the rumors of suicide are true, I’m sadly unsurprised. And angry. Damn it, what a stupid waste of a brilliant mind and voice. But I’ll be listening today and thinking.
Got bitten fingernails and a head full of the past
And everybody’s gone at last
A sweet sweet smile that’s fading fast
Cause everybody’s gone at last
And you don’t get upset about it
No not anymore
There’s nothing wrong
That wasn’t wrong before
Had a second alone with a chance let pass
And everybody’s gone at last
Well i hope you’re not waiting
Waiting around for me
Because i’m not going anywhere
Obviously
Got a broken heart and your name on my cast
And everybody’s gone at last
Everybody’s gone at last
Congratulations
Echoing Scoble, my congratulations to my friends on the Office team, who shipped Office 2003 today. Coordinating that many applications—plus OneNote and InfoPath, and Office LiveMeeting—together into a single release counts as a major accomplishment in anyone’s book.
I won’t comment on the release itself except to say that PowerPoint is now consistently stable for me, and that I love cached mode in Outlook…
Deep linking strategies for iTunes
There appear to be three ways to do deep links on the iTMS without rolling your own URLs: one is to drag any hyperlink (not individual music tracks, but underlined artist or album names) to an application that supports drag and drop. You can also right click on a hyperlink or an individual track and choose the Copy Music Store URL option. That’t how I constructed the links last night. Doing either one results in a hyperlink using HTTP that goes to phobos.apple.com.
The third is the iTMS Link Maker, a web app on phobos.apple.com that walks you through a wizard to build links and gives you a JavaScript-based URL to go to the link. It also incorporates an IE plug-in control called the iTunes Detector that is loaded as part of the JavaScript solution that makes clicked hyperlinks behave “intelligently”—that is, when clicked, the links either open the selection in the iTunes Music Store, or take the user to a download page where they can get iTunes if they don’t already have it installed.
I’m less enthralled with this for a number of reasons. Number one, it requires embedding the script detector in the head of each page that bears the links—not a big deal when all pages on your blog are generated dynamically, but still something of a hassle. Number two, the iTunes Detector may be a lightweight piece of code, but it is not a lightweight user experience. I think I would rather have a link fail than pop an installer dialog over my blog pages.
That said, I’m not sure the direct link methods are any better of a user experience. The page on phobos.apple.com that is opened by these methods calls iTunes and then sends the user back to the calling page on Internet Explorer for Windows; on Safari, it appears to automatically close the calling page or tab. (Verification welcomed; I’ve only tested on my own machine.)
(Updates: See the comment from Greg about pulling a direct link from the deep link tool, and see the expanded version of this post with context at Blogcritics.)
4AD, Too Pure, Beggars Banquet on iTunes
I appear to have been too eager last night when I posted the list of artists whose songs weren’t showing up in the iTunes Music Store. Though I was unable to follow the links I posted to get to actual music from home before 8 am, by the time I got to work they all worked and sent me reliably to fully populated albums. So 4AD, Beggars Banquet, and Too Pure (otherwise known as the Beggars Group) appear to have climbed aboard; I hope this means more Dead Can Dance, Mojave 3, Breeders, and Badly Drawn Boy tracks soon.
4AD on iTunes…maybe
A number of 4AD, Too Pure, and Beggars Banquet releases, including the Pixies, Love and Rockets, Bauhaus, David J, Peter Murphy, Kristin Hersh, Mclusky, Tindersticks, Throwing Muses, This Mortal Coil, and others are showing up in the Just Added lists at the iTunes store, but when you click on the albums there are no songs there. Another Sigur Rós/Radiohead fiasco? Or have they just not quite finished adding the albums yet?
Weekend catchup #3: Date with IKEA
After the Interior Show, we headed south to IKEA. After last weekend’s crush, I didn’t really think I’d get in and out in one piece without killing at least a few people. But thanks to some advance calling, we found the chest of drawers that they were out of last week, got it into our car, and got it home where it sat in two boxes overnight.
On Sunday after church, Lisa and I started assembly at about 10:30 am. We got the skeleton assembled and broke for lunch at about 12:30, then she turned her attention to the first of what would become seven quarts of tomato sauce (if anyone wants tomatoes, come and pick them from our garden. Please) while I assembled the rest of the bureau. With interruptions, the task took until 5:30. Ye gods.
Finally, though, we have enough storage to hold all our clothes, for the first time in our marriage—until now we’ve been limping along on my bachelor four-drawer chest which, though faithful, isn’t really big enough to hold two people’s stuff.
Weekend catchup #2: Interiors
Saturday was the Seattle Interior Show. Since we didn’t get a call, I think it’s safe to say we didn’t win the grand prize drawing of all Kitchenaid major appliances. So I can say without reservation that the show wasn’t what I expected. I was hoping, based on nothing but the grand prize, for lots of appliances and other things that would allow me to revel in the manly side of home improvement. What I got was interior design, and about forty tile and glass vendors. (Aside: am I the only one that doesn’t get the concept of using tile anywhere but in the bathroom, and maybe the kitchen? or of using little glass mosaic tiles anywhere?)
But we had a good time, and came home with a gorgeous blown-glass colored vase by the partnership that made the glass lampshades that appear in Debra Messing’s office on Will and Grace. That was their line; personally I think the inclusion of some of their pieces in the Museum of Glass is a bigger claim to fame, but hey.
I also found that I’m capable of sleeping in public, thanks to Gretchen Schauffler of Devine Color, who committed the cardinal sin of giving a forty-minute lecture about color in a half-darkened seminar room and not showing any colors. It’s nice to hear about all your past careers, dear, but shut up and talk about paint already.
Weekend catchup #1: Intolerable Cruelty
A gray Monday morning here in Seattle, but I don’t mind. I’m too busy trying to shake off the domesticity of the weekend and gird my loins for the week.
On Friday we went to see Intolerable Cruelty, which got the most out-loud laughs of any movie I’ve seen in years in the sold out theatre. The kids on IMDB think it’s the weakest of the Coen Brothers’ movies, and that might be true—the characters aren’t nearly as quirky, the ending too forced. But on the other hand it’s also the Coens’ first movie in ages where the jokes were firmly grounded in something other than dialect humor. (Not that I minded in the earlier films—“them sirens loved him up and turned him into a horny toad!” being a line for which I will wait years, if necessary, for the time when I can drop it into conversation without forcing the setup—but Simon and Garfunkel on the bagpipes was funnier without being cruel.) Lisa liked it too, which is a stricter criterion of greatness—her sense of humor is a lot less forgiving than mine.
Follow up: Windows iTunes and protected music
Despite my hopes yesterday, I didn’t get a chance to try sharing music between Mac and Windows iTunes last night, but I did copy a few songs I bought from the iTunes Music Store using my Mac to my Windows machine this morning. When I asked it to play the first track, it prompted for my music store account information, connected to authorize this machine, and then played that track and the others that were brought over in the same way.
So the downside is that moving tracks from one machine to another is not seamless, requiring you to dig up the files and physically copy them over; the upside is that once they are there, authorizing the other computer is painless.
More mixes
I posted three new mixes over at the Art of the Mix last month that I neglected to point to, partly because I was trying to keep them a secret from the birthday girl. Now that she’s had them for about a month, no reason to hide them any longer. For those who received these mixes on CD from me, here are the missing band names (sorry):
- Your Favorite Scary 80s Songs: A set of stuff that I’m alternately ashamed to admit I listened to and still gleefully do the white man dance to.
- Your Favorite Not-Scary 80s Songs: Stuff that it’s still hard to believe was actually released in the 80s, some of it on major labels.
- a page I was meaning to send her: like the description says, a mix of stuff I happened to be listening to at the end of the summer. One of my favorite mixes to date.
Curses, and then curses
Hot on the heels of the Cubs’ disheartening fall (as so angrily and lyrically covered by Tony Pierce) comes tonight’s 11th inning loss of the Red Sox to the Team That Shall Not Be Named. Three days ago it could have been a World Series to care about, with one or both of the most cursed teams in baseball in the Big Game. After tonight, it’ll be another Yankees series, with the Marlins thrown in for extra-special “who cares” value.
Man.
When I was in Boston for the Patriots’ improbable run to the Superbowl, the town was alive. It shook off its post-September 11 fear and silence to roar in support of its team. In a way, I’m glad I’m not there tonight, but I’m sad too; I could have wandered into any joint in the city, grabbed a Harpoon, and knocked back a few for the Sox, cursing the Bambino at the same time.
Man.
Oh well. At least the Madpony sisters are there to lend some comedic perspective on the whole thing:
some teams in baseball are cursed. one team is cursed because they traded babe ruth and another team is cursed because they wouldn’t let a goat into their game. furthermore, if these two teams play in the world series some say it could mean the coming of the apocalypse. after my lesson on the game’s supernatural elements, i have officially decided that there is more drama in baseball than in daytime tv.