Still going after all these years.
Today, a prize in the cereal bowl that is my daily webcomic reading: a fractal space map of the IPv4 address space. Cool stuff: check out the big blocks in the upper left corner that are owned by Net pioneers, including DISA, IBM, Apple, and MIT. And, interestingly, Halliburton.
This site, for what it’s worth, is located near Google in the left middle portion of the map.
Techcrunch: Swivel aims to become the Internet Archive for data. Normally the stuff on Techcrunch washes over me—a lot of it feels like the next Pets.com—but Swivel (coming later this week) looks interesting. I for one have felt the pain of not having good ways to share large data sets, when I was doing the Weblogs.com data experiment, and this might be an ideal way to make data sharing sexy, which is of course no mean feat.
A good link for everyone who read and enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver: a scan of the 18th century work Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, aus dem 16ten und 17ten Jahrhundert (Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians from the 16th and 17th Centuries). Gorgeous book even if one doesn’t speak German—and isn’t an occult philosopher. Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.
Good translations via Adam McLean at the Alchemy Web Site, including a set of illustrations that probably inspired the producers of the late TV show Millennium. I particularly remember seeing an image like the one on the right on that show a few times.
Today’s link round-up thanks major players in our lives for working to make things better for us:
I’m looking forward to seeing Dave Winer’s next trick. The clues (the space above his couch, an RSS feed with medium to high resolution images) suggest that he’s preparing a new application that reformats the image content of RSS for widescreen displays—with the original application being news images. Am I close, Dave?
I’d happily get on board this train if I’m right and if it’s easy to get working—and doesn’t require a Windows Media PC.
New York Times: Princeton Stops Its Early Admissions, Joining Movement to Make Process Fairer. This change hits oddly close to home. I was a beneficiary of one of Princeton’s early admission processes. At that point they came in two flavors: early decision, which was a binding agreement that you would go to the school if they accepted you, and early action, in which the college announced its decision early and you had until spring to decide to accept the offer. It’s not clear whether one or both of these options was discontinued.
It’s also interesting to me that Princeton is following this road so soon after Harvard’s decision. It wasn’t that long ago that major university admissions organizations were in trouble for collusion when they made major changes to their admissions systems. I’ll be curious to see how this goes, since it looks like the trend is definitely spreading beyond the few schools that started this process.
I have to confess, though, that I was surprised to see the link between early admission and disadvantage for lower income students. I never felt at a disadvantage in the process, perhaps because I was insulated from it—I only knew one other student who was applying to Princeton. But I think that the college admissions consulting industry has gotten much stronger since then as well.
Thanks to a link on Fark for this: Billy and the Boingers MP3s. I owned the book that contained the flexidisc with these songs, but we could only play it on my childhood portable record player. Hope these sound better than they did on that record player; I had to weight the flexidisc with a penny to keep it from slipping, and it still didn’t rotate at a consistent rate which lent a warbly quality to the music. If these sound halfway decent, they’re a shoo-in for my next 80 mix.
I love the lamest edit wars page on Wikipedia. It’s academic humor writ large, and is a microcosm of politics, geekdom, transliteration, and other hair-splitting pursuits. Was Copernicus Polish, German, or Prussian? If Nikolai Tesla was born in a part of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Croatia, was he Austrian, Hungarian, or Croat? More seriously, should Hong Kong literature be categorized under Chinese literature or just linked to it? The Death Star: “Is it 120km or 160km in diameter? Who cares?” (Thanks, Boing Boing.)
The title Spam + Blogs = Trouble is a rare understatement from Wired, but the article is a good examination of the dangers of splogs—sites that look like blogs but are constructed entirely of links to get-rich-quick sites, link forests that artificially inflate the PageRank of pages within them, and “male enhancement” or phentermine ads.
The most insidious part of the spam blogger’s arsenal comes when they try to get people to link to the sites. Since no one will do that voluntarily, spam bloggers abuse the comments features on sites like mine, using automated tools or low-paid labor. How bad is it? I’m routinely deleting upwards of fifty comments a night and my site doesn’t even get that much traffic any more. I will most likely crack my 10,000th message in my site’s Manila discussion group this week (all comments, along with my posts and any images I upload, are stored in the discussion group), and I’d guess that something like 40% of the total message count has been spam messages.
In fact, spam is the number one reason that I will likely move off this blogging platform as soon as I find a way to migrate my content. Spam is an arms race, and with my site host not upgrading to the latest version of Manila—which doesn’t see frequent updates anyway—I’m badly underarmed. The Boycott Sony blog probably gets as many spam comments if not more in spite of its not having been updated in seven months, but they go into a holding tank for approval, and if I upgraded to the latest WordPress version, the vast archive of spam already flagged would serve to educate my spam filter to keep more comments from coming in.
Achewood’s brilliant series of Great Moments in Cinema, “brought to you by Roomba! the Robotic Floor Vac,” just tripped across that great Christian Slater teen film. You have to see it to believe it—and perhaps you have to have seen the movie to get the last panel, but oh boy, Samantha Mathis should be blushing somewhere.
Other wonderful moments in the series:
Special bonus: the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as brought to you by Roomba! the Robotic Floor Vac.
I’ve been plagued by intermittent stuttering in iTunes playback on my work machine. Until today I lived with it, figuring it was just a bug or a problem with my machine. But today on a hunch I Googled the problem and found what appears to be the fix: switching to “Safe mode (waveout only)” in the Audio tab of the QuickTime preferences. This fix for stuttering iTunes for Windows playback comes courtesy of Technovia, where the comments also have some more advanced things to try, including the DMA settings on the hard drive.
I should note one caution: in my tests, I didn’t close iTunes before I changed the setting. After changing the setting, iTunes finished playing the song and then closed abruptly. After reopening, it has been stutter-free. I would suggest closing iTunes first as a general rule.
Catching my breath for the first time this week, and there are some interesting things going on out there:
Universal Hub: Where’s Mel Gibson now?. Making moments like this live forever on teh Intarweb was why God created YouTube. This is worthy of my first-ever YouTube embed, in fact:
I don’t mind telling you, I laughed so hard I cried a little. (It’s a good day for that.)
Hot on the heels of my MacBook Pro battery recall (mini-update: still waiting) is a recall from the other side of the force, so to speak. Dell, as reported in dozens of news outlets (Boing Boing, NY Times (who win for the best picture, of a burnt out pickup cab where an overheated battery exploded and touched off live ammo(!), and the gas tank(!)), Business Week, BBC), is recalling potentially as many as 4 million lithium ion laptop batteries because they are potentially explosive (imho, a very good reason for a recall). The BBC gets points for being the only one of the news sources I link above to actually mention the URL at which you can see if your battery is affected. They didn’t actually link it, of course, so I will: dellbatteryprogram.com.
I followed a pointer from BoingBoing and discovered a webcomic that I should already have been reading: Wondermark. The concept—Victorian engravings as “clip art” plus snarky speech bubbles—is like a turn-of-the-century version of Get Your War On. But it can be even funnier. And the technique works even with the strip’s guest artists, as M. Zole’s spit-take on “My Humps” shows.
And yeah, I can’t help but think that the planners of last week’s foiled attempt were sitting around going, “What are US flyers still allowed to do on planes that is fun?” and answering “Drink water and listen to iPods.”