Arc v' February 2004

I wish I had seen this: Ralph Nader on Hardball. This is by no means an endorsement of Nader (yet), but I really like a lot of what he said.

Take this bit of dialog for example [added emphasis is mine]:

MATTHEWS:  It will be the first house you‘ve ever lived in since you were a kid.  You live in an apartment.  You don‘t have a car.  You‘re not married.  You live a life that‘s about as responsible as what‘s on the movies tonight.  I mean, that‘s all you have to worry about. 

And you‘re going to be president of the United States, and you‘re knocking President Bush for not being mature enough?

NADER:  Chris, no wonder they parody you on “SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.”

First - I love Nader's response. But I have to give a pleasant little "fuck you!" to Chris Matthews here. I live in an apartment, I don't have a car, and I'm not married. What does owning a house and driving a car have to do with maturity?

I also like this bit of dialog [which comes right before the bit I just quoted]:

NADER:  I know.  Listen.  Wait a minute, listen.  Wait a minute.  I‘ve done a lot to make cars safer and more fuel efficient and less polluting. 

MATTHEWS:  Which car is safe enough for you to drive?

NADER:  A Volvo is a good car. 

MATTHEWS:  So you don‘t mind international trade?

NADER:  It‘s owned by Ford. 

MATTHEWS:  OK.  That‘s not right.  You don‘t have a problem with foreign cars?  Just American cars?

NADER:  No.  There are some good American cars. 

MATTHEWS:  Why don‘t you own one?

NADER:  I don‘t need one.  I don‘t live in the suburbs.  Why should I spend my time looking for a parking space and adding to the fumes that the people breathe? 

A-bloody-men! I heartily agree. Riding my bike in the summertime on busy city streets is one quick reminder of how bad those fumes can get. And in winter time, the Salt Lake (and neighboring) valleys get stuck in inversions. During an inversion, all of the pollutants - primarily from cars - are trapped in the valley. We had many days here last month when it was considered hazardous to jog outside, the air was so bad. I remember having to climb a hill on the way home one year during an inversion, and how sick I felt by the time I got to the top. At sidewalk cafe's in this country, smokers are being chastised for smoking outside, while cars and trucks stream by on the street, each one coughing out bits of toxic smoke. Car exhaust can actually kill you pretty quickly in a closed environment, much more than second hand smoke. Yet - the cars are OK. I don't really have anything against cars, but for the most part, I've been able to get by just fine without one. I live close to where I work, close to where I can buy groceries, and very close to a decent mass transit system [that I can even use to go skiing]. How is it immature of me not to spend two to four hours a day in traffic getting to and from work, adding to my financial burden and subtracting from air quality?

My halloween costume this year basically consisted of wearing my increasingly beloved Holga over my everyday clothes. These are some grabs from the night. The blonde in the first picture is me, as taken by the girl in the second picture. More stunning [non] debut images behind the click.

Kuro5hin takes a look at tiling window managers, which organize windows in non overlapping ways. It's an interesting system of management. I can find no real use for it myself under most circumstances, especially on my large work monitor. There, I do employ tiling-esque techniques, and I imagine a lot of others do without realizing it - at least, in the Mac world which doesn't suffer from the MDI dichotomy that Windows has, where Word tends to open up a new Big System Window for every document but Excel tends to keep spreadsheets managed inside the big Excel window. Access and many other programs suffer from this too. On the Mac, a window is a window is a window, and organization is pretty easy.

Apple has made working with windows even better in Mac OS X. On top of the Exposé window switching system, which can thumbnail all visible windows rapidly for context switching, a favorite little feature of mine has been the near-omnipresent adoption of the "Hide Others" command and key shortcut, "Option-Command-H". A similar feature in Windows is the "Minimize All" feature in the context menu of the Windows Taskbar. But unlike 'Minimize All', 'Hide Others' keeps your current application and window and cursor on top and in the same position. It's a great key chord to hit when there are too many distractions on the screen, and it's one of the few major Mac OS X actions without animations - other applications just hide, and you keep on doing what you're doing with hardly a second thought - just the quiet peace of a clean screen. Even minimized windows of other applications disappear from the dock (there is a brief animation for this, but never distracting). I've found it more effective than any "virtual desktop" system, which I've always found to be worse than the usual window clutter, as I have a hard time keeping up with all my desktops. And, for some reason, the context switching between desktops has always been jarring for me. Having a single desktop, especially now with Expose, keeps me relatively free of the "where did I put that logtail window?" games.

Last weekend, and through the weeks leading up to it, I suffered a spectacular crash of the mood variety. This past week, which has flown by, I've been finding my way out of it. I feel different. Deeply so. I don't know what it all portends - maybe this year will be as rich and active as initially envisioned. Maybe it's just chemicals correcting themselves.

One significant factor has been a return to visual arts, sped along by the Redbox CD process. Last night, I ran the 50 linoleum prints on the transparent paper that will be the top layer of the cover art. So each box, limited to 50 [obviously], has hand made elements to it. Plus, I've long wanted to do a real block print run, but have never done more than a handful in the past. Of course, most of my past experiments had gone wrong due to missing some critical steps (resulting, however, in some still interesting output).

It's been an interesting year, so far. And enough items happened on / near the year transition time that I can say that comfortably. A lot rougher than I expected, but the year I'm so nostalgic for started out the same way (but different).

The final elements are falling into place for the aodl 2CD, Redbox. The boxes that will house the CD's came in today. Chunky! A white vinyl box, 6-5/8 by 6-1/4 by 13/16" when closed, looking like an old betamax box (according to one person I showed it to). I expect there to be cassettes or a reel-to-reel, um, reel inside of it. Or film (which probably would go nicely inside). It's got a great tactile response that I think goes well with the material inside.

Much of that material, and the name Redbox, came from the initial plans to release this material as a collection of tapes. One plan was for each tape to be unique - either by having all new improvisational material on it, and/or by using "Recycled" tapes (a really cool series from RRR), copied over used tapes from thrift stores (ie - the 'Cocktail' soundtrack, etc), each having a unique time duration. The first two tracks of the first disc come entirely from those sessions [aka 'double live concrete']

Other pieces of material stem from earlier recordings, primarily from last summer, some of which were commissioned for an interactive installation piece, Sleep Experiments, by a long time friend. These are a bit more composed than the improvisational structure of this winters analog-focused sessions. Python even makes an appearance on the disc 2 opener, Quetzal Honeydew Fossil, running the rs'aodl algorithm which generated a work a few years ago (published under the Eucci name) that was the seed for the current aodl project.

Now, it's time to get to work on the cover art, which I hope will have a hand-touched element for each box. I picked up some red block printing ink on the way home, now it's time to start carving...

Because a bottle of whiskey keeps you warm, lifts you up, and is just a better mistress in general... Whiskey Valentines [big analog noise and stolen conversations]

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After much delay, snickering, and awe, Zope 2.7 final is out. I looked at beta 1 last July and liked what I saw. I haven't really used it since then because I like to keep a policy of not running on beta software (especially one with such a stretched out time table), but the general big new features remain the same.

I'm just looking forward to being able to finally use Python 2.3 libraries in our products. "New style classes" cannot be stored in the ZODB yet, but support for that should be coming shortly.

As the Apple Turns covers the list of purchasable songs of 'silence' available for single song purchase on the iTunes music store. At this moment, John Cage's famous 4'33" is not one of them.

Curiously, this morning I was doing some final edits on a new Eucci track for an online label to check out, and somehow managed to zero out all the audio - producing nearly 14 minutes of silence. It's not as much as this guy offers [iTunes Link], but I did make ask if he was interested in it.

(The original piece is in fine shape at the studio)

There's some mad beautiful but light (wet) snow falling throughout the city tonight, and the walk home was excellent. Overlaying the city sounds was Ryoji Ikeda'a composition for strings, op.

I've touched on "op." before. It's an excellent album. In my first mention of it, I talked about fitting it in with John Zorn's beautiful Duras: Duchamp and other releases. It's fit in to those perfectly, along with The Hafler Trio's long warm drone work, Cleave: 9 Great Openings (part of a trilogy I need to complete). Together (and maybe combined with some Glenn Gould or my/our own Dust Concerto pieces), it all makes for some excellent snow music. Or snow+rain music. Great for sitting in the apartment reading and writing listening to the sounds of wet traffic in the streets below.

As I was climbing up the stairs to the apartment, the iPod switched over to Fennesz' Field Recordings album - a collection of unreleased and rare works 1995-2002. Fennesz is a great composer and performer of modern electro-acoustic, using guitars and environments like Max/MSP to break apart and rebuild sounds in real time. I got to seem him perform with Kaffe Matthews at Earational 2001 (a great event that I was delighted to be a part of). It's been too long since I've paid attention to this album, which has many beautiful parts, including a string done (reminiscent of "op.") which occasionally falls apart into glitches. Not necessarily a snow album, but its got some great snow moments.

mmmm, quiet evenings....

Mark Pilgrim has a good overview of the incompatibilities between the nine different flavors of RSS. They're all small things, but with significant impact - especially because the RSS 0.91-0.94 and RSS 2.0 flavors seem to stem from Dave Winer's whims (including his preferred way of capitalizing). While "death by committee" is bad (and is what makes SOAP such a terrifying experience, in my view), common formats based on the whims of one man who seems to pay little attention to the world outside his own are equally bad.

It's not like I think I could ever do better. And while I'm not really fond of RSS 2.0, its support of XML namespaces was - to me - a good thing (that RSS 1.0 seemed to already offer). This is what allowed me to separate the content of a post from the description - because, by gods (if you choose to believe in such things), there's a difference! A pretty significant difference, in my view.

I still hope that Atom can find that cozy place between the whims of one man and death-by-committee.

I've decided that one of the more enjoyable things in this computing life is watching fights between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer. For what it's worth, I'm with Mark in the debate.

I dropped so-called RSS 2.0 (and 0.9x) from this site a long time ago. One of the main reasons why is that I was frustrated with the abuse of the description element. Some people like to write their weblogs in short little snippets. There's rarely a need to fill in a separate description element there. Others prefer writing short (or even long) articles. On the other side, some people prefer to read entire entries in their desktop RSS reader while others like to see short entries and prefer to keep an eye on general trends and go directly to entries they find interesting. I myself do a mixture: I run NetNewsWire on my desktop, but also keep an eye on sites like Python Programmer Weblogs which are mass topical aggregators, and obviously can't display long-winded posts (well, it can, but wisely doesn't).

RSS continues to be strange, especially since Winer co-opted it and made it into RSS 2.0, a weekend project that really didn't make the spec (all the 0.9x versions of it) all that much better. It didn't take into account the different uses of RSS. BBC News deploys a nice RSS 0.91 feed - just titles and descriptions, linking back to the full article. This is how big news sites use RSS, and it's all they really seem to need. It works nicely into portal style sites (which, I believe, RSS was initially made for when Netscape wrote it) to let you see current headlines from various sources. That's very different from the weblog and personal RSS newsreader world, where I doubt there's a consensus over just what the RSS acronym means (Remote Site Syndication? Really Simple Syndication?).

I really like that Atom formally goes after the weblog market - trying to take care of both the authoring and distribution angle (which is nice, because the XML-RPC API's are annoying and a subject that I'm not going to go back into... Suffice it to say that Dave Winer, as usual, under-specced XML-RPC to be a neutered protocol). It deals with how to encode and deploy the HTML content of weblog posts, separate from the description (granted, you can do this in RSS by using the 'content' namespace/module, as I do in my RSS 1.0 feed, but the Atom way is nicely integrated into the core spec). And I like that Atom is a community spec that has (so far) seemed to avoid the problems that plague many internet spec:

• It's not under-specified and weak (XML-RPC, early LDAP, etc), and it's not a weekend "I decided that RSS 1.0 is funky but I'm not going to tell you what funky means" project.
• It's not over-specified and convoluted and impossible to use (SOAP/WSDL, modern LDAP (only in relation to the fact that the 'L' stands for 'Lightweight', but it's basically become as heavy as X.500 but without the reliability), etc)

Hopefully, Atom will stay clean but effective as it approaches 1.0.

In any case, the dialog between Mark Pilgrim and Dave Winer is certainly enterntaining.

Yesterday, we saw the first public release of a radically new web browser for Mac OS X, the public beta of OmniWeb 5. On the surface, the OmniWeb interface remains familiar (more so than Opera), but now that the OmniGroup is relatively freed from writing their own HTML engine, they've been able to focus on the user interface.

Thus, there is now a real power user class web browser for Mac OS X. While Mozilla (and its smaller siblings Firebird and Camino) have long existed on the Mac platform, they've suffered from not being native. The Camino project was started as a way of addressing that issue by putting a native Cocoa wrapper around the Gecko engine, but the KHTML based Safari has taken most of its thunder away. (For a good overview of the choice of KHTML, read this message from the Safari engineering manager introducing himself to the KHTML community).

I'm not going to go into all of what makes OmniWeb 5 interesting. John Gruber has already gone into that, and quite well. The only point I disagree with John on is on bookmark management. Safari uses the same browser window to edit/use bookmarks. I like this feature. OmniWeb 5 allows for both the Safari Way and the "Separate Window Way." Granted, with window management systems such as Expose, finding bookmark windows is easier now than before. But I (personally) like knowing in which window and tab my bookmark will open, and Safari accomplishes this by keeping the bookmarks in the same tab as where you're browsing (you still have options to open bookmarks in new tabs and windows, etc).

Speaking of new browsers, yesterday also saw the release of Safari 1.2, which fixes some annoying problems from Safari 1.1 (particularly one which affected editing code in the Zope Management Interface), and has a long overdue "Save As..." option for downloading files and images to places besides the configured downloads folder. (OmniWeb still has this beat with their site by site preferences, which allow you to store downloads from vim.org in a different place than from VersionTracker). What makes Safari stand out is its engine. Yes, OmniWeb uses Safari's engine - but it's using an older version (for reasons spelled out in Gruber's article). Safari marches ahead with a fast OS X friendly CSS2 and beyond implementation.

First, good effort by Carolina (except for their last kickoff). Their offense (at least, from the point in which I joined in the second quarter) remained cool. So close....

In any case: if, like me and some friends, you've been fascinated by the "first down stripe," I've found a Wired News article about it from 1999. I don't know if it's changed much since then. It fits one of the theories I've had in my head for a while, which is that a 3D representation of the stadium must come into play so that the line moves with the cameras by knowing where the current camera in use is and which way it's pointing.