Month: April 2007

Diebold: Why aren’t you content to be assimilated?

Boston Globe: Voting device pact at issue. The municipal election in Arlington today raised this article to my attention. Voting machines by AutoMARK, which use a touchscreen to produce a paper ballot as part of a disabled voter assistance measure, were in use in some precincts in Arlington today. And Diebold would have liked to stop them: they’ve filed suit against the state for choosing the wrong product.

Yes, seriously.

I hope that AutoMARK’s machines passed some of the tests that Diebold’s have failed, such as not being able to be opened using an ordinary file cabinet key and not being able to be arbitrarily manipulated to rig an election. But even if that level of testing hasn’t been conducted, the premise of the suit is pretty hysterical. After all, why wouldn’t one want to purchase insecure, hackable voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail?

Today’s links

AnywhereCD: MP3 Albums and CDs. Kind of like the major label version of eMusic, without the rich metadata and recommendations features. Worth it? Well, if you wanted to get DRM-free recordings of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from Elektra, for instance …

UVA: Largest single gift to UVA funds new school. Alum Frank Batten Sr. gives $100 million for a school of leadership and public policy. Wow. That could have bought a lot of scholarships.

Isn’t that convenient?

Plan for a cover-up:

  1. Get a job at the White House, on the taxpayers’ dime, doing hard political work for the RNC.
  2. Send over 90% of your work email through RNC servers rather than government servers, thus (apparently) evading government document retention laws and thereby ducking future prosecution for any acts one might commit.
  3. Realize that you screwed up, since emails sent on an RNC email account cannot possibly be covered by claims of executive privilege.
  4. Today, conveniently, White House “loses” sensitive emails sent on illegal RNC server.

Hmm.

Another Googlegänger

I got a Google alert today that I was on Real Networks’ Rhapsody—as an artist. It’s not me, of course. Apparently there’s a connection through Ted Jarrett, one of the first African-American record producers, who started some of the classic Nashville R&B labels (Champion, Calvert, Cherokee) and worked later with Poncello and other labels. Turns out there’s even a Poncello collection on eMusic. Makes me wonder how that Tim Jarrett, who is on that anthology, is connected to him—relative? Brother? The all-knowing Wikipedia is silent on the subject.

Today’s links

MemeCode: Undocumented command line parameters for WinZip32.exe. God only knows how old this document is; it references cc:Mail. But this works, in my testing, on WinZip 9.0. Note that Corel would like to get you to upgrade to the Pro version of WinZip 10 or later so that you can download an addin that accomplishes much the same thing.

MIT: Science Trivia Challenge. Would that I were younger I’d feel a little odd now fielding a trivia team, even if it was an “open division.”

Easter feaster

Relatively light Easter meals yesterday. It was just the family at home, so we took it easy. We went to the early service at Old South, came back, and had fried eggs with prosciutto and hot cross buns for a late breakfast. Then I made my wasabi deviled eggs (recipe below) and White Lily biscuits, Lisa prepared some asparagus, and together Lisa and I baked a ham. But really: that, plus a chocolate cake that was lying around, plus Easter marshmallows (not Peeps) and some pretty spectacular sauvignon blanc: who needed anything else?

The wasabi deviled eggs, by the way, are dead easy. I use the recipe for deviled eggs from the late 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking, scaling it up for a dozen eggs, then add two tablespoons of dry wasabi powder that have been mixed with two tablespoons water. That, plus adjusting the other spices to taste, is really it. Sometimes I get aggressive and add more wasabi, but at the proportions above it’s just about right. I got the idea one year when I was trying to replicate my dad’s eggs, which use horseradish, but the only thing I could find at the store was wasabi.

Smack my Mac up

Yes, I know: Sudden Motion Sensor hacks are passé. But I finally got around to playing with one that invokes Exposé, and now I’m hooked. I ended up modifying it to invoke Dashboard instead, which required changing the script to call key code 111 for the F12 key.

So what does this do? Basically, if I want to see my Dashboard–which has weather and a couple other useful things on it, as well as some truly useless ones–I just tap the side of my laptop. Another tap dismisses it. Like I said: useless. (But very, very fun.)

Friday Random 10: Not much like Easter edition

The holiest of the church seasons has really sneaked up on me this year. It doesn’t help that it snowed another three inches earlier this week, making it feel extremely unlike April. Today, though, with the office quiet, I simply started taking this Random 10 in midstream, and was delighted to find a number of selections from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—topical, what? There will be repeat artists, because I left it on Shuffle by Album.

  1. Tears for Fears, “Year of the Knife” (The Seeds of Love)
  2. The States, “Parade” (Multiply Not Divide)
  3. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Blute Nur, Du Liebes Herz!” (Matthäus-Passion)
  4. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vienna Philharmonic (J.S. Bach, composer), “Ach, Nun Ist Mein Jesus Hin!/Mit Chor: Wo Ist Denn Dein Freund Hingegangen?” (Matthäus-Passion)
  5. The Tallis Scholars (Manuel Cardoso, composer), “Magnificat (Secundi Toni 5vv)” (Cardoso: Requiem)
  6. The Reindeer Section, “The Day We All Died” (Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear?)
  7. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Gomni” (Talking Timbuktu)
  8. Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré, “Amandrai” (Talking Timbuktu)
  9. Lou Reed, “Lisa Says” (Between Thought and Expression)
  10. Lou Reed, “Rock and Roll Heart” (Between Thought and Expression)

QTN™: Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze

It’s been a while since I posted a Quick Tasting Note, but the Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze merited a note. Blended, as all gueuzes are, from multiple lambics—spontaneously fermented beers—the style is usually a little sour, a little acetic, and wild. This one is no exception, except that it’s a lot sour, a lot acetic, a lot wild: as a taster on BeerAdvocate notes, the beer has a “raw yeastiness that allows me to finally comprehend…the term ‘barnyard’ to describe a beer’s nose…” And it’s barnyard in a good way. The most amazing thing is that it’s appetizing. It makes me hungry. This one was a 2004 bottle that turned up in Warehouse Wine and Spirits in Framingham. I might have to go back and pick up a few more.

Problem = opportunity

If one feels schadenfreude when reading about the IRS’s problems with missing computers (or rage, for that matter), consider this: there is really no excuse today for laptops simply “going missing” and no one finding out about it for months or years. Any asset management technology worth its salt can scan for laptops and raise all sorts of alarms when they don’t check in.

Thinking about this sort of issue systematically is one of the benefits that process frameworks like ITIL bring. Once one gets beyond the basic service desk processes, and starts thinking seriously about configuration and change management, it becomes apparent that intelligent application of the tools in this market segment is important for so many more reasons than simple fixed asset management. Consider:

  • Intellectual property control
  • Change auditing
  • Sarbanes Oxley compliance
  • Software license management
  • Hardware/software upgrade planning
  • Protecting customer data

…and on, and on. Pretty soon the organizations that have not made the proper investments in configuration management processes and tools are going to get some very public black eyes—not just for embarrassing issues like this but also for their lack of management and foresight.

You might notice something different today…

Today is CSS Naked Day 2007, a day when some thousand-plus web sites have cast off their styling to illustrate their semantically-beautiful bones beneath.

Which is why my site looks, um, weird. All the normal styling has been stripped out.

We do this to illustrate that the Web ain’t all pretty colors; at its root, it’s about markup that is easy to read and portable across multiple devices. It’s all about separating style from content, baby.

Hat tip to Zalm, who turned me on to this concept, and whose markup is just fine.

IKEA hacking 2: wraparound counter

We wrapped another kitchen/dining room project this weekend. Where prior projects had put cabinetry on the opening between the dining room and the kitchen, this new project put a wall + base cabinet combo around the corner, in the dining room. The placement echoes the corner cabinet directly opposite, but doesn’t try to be a corner cabinet. But we did want to keep continuity with the kitchen cabinetry. Specifically, I wanted to use a single countertop surface that would wrap around the outside corner from the existing cabinets to the new ones.

This turned out to be a little more challenging than I thought. I had to construct it in two pieces, and had to do a fair amount of trimming. We are using very narrow base cabinets (really just wall cabinets mounted on legs and hung so that they stand on the floor), so I had to trim the IKEA butcher block countertop that I had purchased. Fortunately, I had already done this for the doggy bench, so it was just a question of getting enough crap cleaned out of the garage so I could set up the sawhorses and run the circular saw. This time I managed to make the cut straight and clean, so I was able to rough it in pretty quickly.

The challenging part was the transition. I saw three options: a mitered cut that would come to a point, a straight line transition that would have left a triangle of linking surface between the two cabinet tops, or a curved transition. Lisa wanted the curve, so I gulped and worked it out. I used a piece of string stretched between an awl (for a fixed point) and a pencil to draw the semicircle, then bullied my poor SkilSaw, which really isn’t intended to cut one-inch butcher block, into negotiating the curve. Amazingly it turned out pretty well, especially after I sanded it down with the orbital sander.

I have a few things left to do before I post pictures: I want to put a piece of trim on the back of the countertop to mask the fact that the wall isn’t square; use some putty or something to mask the transition between the pieces; and put the plinth on the base. But the whole project was a strict weekend: hang two cabinets, doors and hardware, and cut and mount the butcher board including the transition. It was actually kind of fun.

Well, I guessed right…

…unfortunately, it wasn’t my most radical guess that got the brass ring. But I’m very glad to see, just a short time after Steve Jobs’s jab at DRM, that the vision is starting to come true with this new deal with EMI (higher quality, DRM free downloads at $1.25 a pop).

What’s not to like about this deal? Even at 256 kbps encoding, you’re paying for lossy copies of the music; for a typical 10-song album, that’s $12.50 for essentially a lo-fi version. But how lo-fi is it? I’d like to see the acoustic research; most of the benchmarking I’ve seen has only looked at 128 kbps AAC. And of course the fact that it’s unrestricted is the key.

Even better for all concerned, it comes with a 30 cent a song upconversion option. I’d better watch my wallet. I don’t have that many iTunes store purchases, but I could easily see a large bill if I just blanket-upgraded everything. (Not to mention the hit on my wallet for Complete My Album, but that’s another story.)

So now the remaining question is: how fast will the other labels follow suit in fleeing DRM?

EMI and Apple?

New York Times: Speculation Is in the Air Over EMI and Apple. The obvious answer is: tomorrow, the Beatles will be on the iTunes Store. The not obvious answers are:

  • DRM free downloads?
  • A Yellow Submarine themed iPod?
  • Apple buys its first music company?

…What? After all, EMI’s hoped for private equity white knight backed out back in December. And they were asking $4.9 billion then. According to their last 10Q, Apple had more than $7 billion in the bank—more than enough to pay for EMI the old fashioned way.

Hopefully it won’t happen. We’ve all seen what happens to tech companies that buy content businesses. But stranger things have happened.