But I was uneasy because I was feeling jaded. I thought it was because of the typical “overdoing it” reason, but there was more to it. It was affecting my ability to think critically/deeply about a subject.

via Twitter vs. Why we can’t concentrate? | Swaroop C H – India, Technology, Life Skills.

Thanks to Sam D. for the tweet.

A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and both its technical staff and outside developers.

via Developer Evangelism – home of the Developer Evangelist Handbook:

Thanks for the pointer @mollydotcom

Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.

via The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real – Anil Dash.

We could just tick off Sprint and call it “Direct Connect”. It’s a lot like the PTT with a group receiving end.

Cleaning Up

From a high level, the Bourne script would essentially ssh into each target machine, do its thing, and then exit. As part of its “thing”, the designer of the framework wanted to make sure the script cleaned up after itself so subsequent runs of the framework would not re-process old data. To accomplish this, one of the enhancements after the initial release was to add two cryptic variables that redundantly contained the project name and the version being tested. Utilizing an unpatched flaw in sudos setup to gain real root access, the script would then do the following as part of the clean up:

rm -rf $var1/$var2

Ordinarily, this worked just fine, but the co-op student was unaware these SPECIFIC variables needed to be set. With them being left blank, the following was the end result upon execution of the script:

rm -rf /

With the script running as root on a setup with NFS which, in turn, granted access to everything on the entire UNIX/Linux network and a few Windows Servers via SAMBA, the script had a chance to do a good bit of damage… and it did. Home directories, file repositories, customer data, test results, all seemingly evaporated into nothingness.

via Bourne Into Oblivion – The Daily WTF.

My favorite shell commands

In a nanocrystalline form, cerium oxide is a powerful antioxidant because its latticework crystal structure has many vacancies that can capture oxygen, and the material has a large surface area. Self showed that nanoceria mimic the activity of superoxide dismutases (SOD), an antioxidant that can stop the deadly chain reactions caused by ROS.

Nanoceria are also able to regenerate their antioxidant abilities. “Due to this catalytic property,” explains Seal, “repeated dosing with nanoceria may not be needed, as it is with certain antioxidant vitamins.”

via Nanoparticles Explored for Preventing Cell Damage – US News and World Report.

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time.

via Facebook | On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information.

Let’s see. I’ll put these few words out there on the internets…cool, my friend just saw it. Not so cool, that creep in the next cubicle is making comments about it. Give it back! Give it back!

Oh noooooooo.

via flipping typical.

There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

via The Energy Challenge – No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in Innovative ‘Passive Houses’ – Series – NYTimes.com.

What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi’s electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark.

Op-Ed Columnist – While Detroit Slept – NYTimes.com.

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

Write or Die : Dr Wicked’s Writing Lab.

Most of us are, by now, familiar with the maps the TV channels and web sites use to show the results of the presidential election:

Election maps.

Date-shifting in iPhoto ‘08

I get a lot of requests to add date-shifting support for iPhoto 08 to my iPhoto AppleScripts. But in most cases, the scripts would be completely unnecessary, iPhoto finally built this feature into the application. Here’s how to use it.

Date-shifting in iPhoto ‘08.

This is a nice and handy thing. I can finally get all of my “web-saved” images into a sensible spot.

The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95.

The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com.

Livescribe :: Press Center.

Metaphors for Presentations

Years before today’s slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. Then, in 1984, a software house developed a presentation package, “Presenter,” which was eventually acquired by Microsoft and turned into PowerPoint.

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003

This history is revealing, for the metaphor behind the PP cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and in marketing (fast pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics). To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. Why should the structure, activities, and values of a large commercial bureaucracy be a useful metaphor for our presentations? Could any metaphor be worse? Voice-mail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

A better metaphor for presentations is good teaching. Teachers seek to explain something with credibility, which is what many presentations are trying to do. The core ideas of teaching—explanation, reasoning, finding things out, questioning, content, evidence, credible authority not patronizing authoritarianism—are contrary to the hierarchical market-pitch approach.

Especially disturbing is the introduction of the PowerPoint cognitive style into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to make client pitches and info-mercials, which is better than encouraging children to smoke. Elementary school PP exercises (as seen in teacher’s guides, and in student work posted on the internet) typically show 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation consisting of 3 to 6 slides—a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Rather than being trained as mini-bureaucrats in PPPhluff and foreshortening of thought, students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to The Exploratorium. Or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

– Edward Tufte, October 16, 2003

9. Keep an Eye on Activity Monitor

There may be other things hogging your processor’s attention or sucking up RAM. How will you know about them? By using Apple’s Activity Monitor, which comes with OS X. Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU usage, RAM requirements, virtual memory usage, and whether a given application is a PowerPC or Intel (Universal) build. Check it occasionally to see if there are any red flags – or keep it running for a few days (with one of the useful Dock icons or floating windows enabled) to keep an eye on when things are spiking.

It’s a fine idea, but could be part of the problem.

I have been running Activity Monitor quite constantly since late January.

the underlying “pmtool” loses memory. a lot of memory. It starts off consuming just over 1MB of “real memory” (1.4MB).

After 18 hours that will be about 80MB of real memory. So if limited memory is the problem, and you keep it running for a few days, well…

What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.

Back a while ago I started to experience “loss of minimize” on my system (after update to 10.4.6). The Minimize button, keyboard shortcut, menu item – all disabled. Mostly only happened with Safari left running a long time. Sometimes (most) it would cause all the other applications to lose Minimize as well.

I switched to Firefox for a while. Decided to try and “fix” Safari. Spent a week finding a “culprit” and finally switched back to Safari full time.

Now comes 10.4.7 – back comes the death of Minimize – with a vengance.

I couldn’t remember any web thing that Firefox wouldn’t do, but I still don’t like the lack of a left-hand margin of sufficient size on the toolbars. It just doesn’t look *great*. But you know? It works! More things work better/differently than with Safari (read that Wordpress editing, phpMyAdmin)

• Safari Bookmark Exporter
• Schubert PDF plugin
• Web Developer add-on
• Sage (RSS)

This comes after? I guess so.

PDF plugin required. Standard QuickTime rendering of PDF is not fun at all. Safari/Preview combination was pretty sweet. Usually I scan (with my eyes) the document in the browser, leaving full reading to Preview. A simple button press gets me the PDF in Preview where I can save/print/whatever.

Web Developer add-on – neat tool. First nugget is “Disable Javascript”. I read online news about squash (the sport). I post links with occasional comment on my blog. I use Wordpress bookmarklets to make things easy. Some sites don’t want this to be. You can “break” the ability to highlight/copy text on a web page via Javascript. sigh. Using Safari I would actually do a View Source, copy the piece of text I wanted, then continued to Wordpress. Now all I have to do is do 1 menu selection to turn off Javascript, highlight text, press-it, turn on Javascript. The first part is now trivial, just need to remember to turn it back on.

Haystack powers allyoucanupload and will soon power all of Webshots (Webshots is a photo sharing community with 19,000,000 members who have uploaded over 375,000,000 photos).  Allyoucanupload is an image hosting service that we built to run alongside Webshots.

by way of Scripting News

I went to look at both allyoucanupload and Webshots.

So how far does my picture actually travel?

Click here to actually see some detail ;-)

When would I decide to “throw” my picture into the cloud?
The only reference that I have is the URL I get back.
I already “lost” a couple of GIF files into the object store.

Interesting.

Central Desktop:

What is it?

Central Desktop: Easy to use  collaboration software.  It can be used it to create custom "extranet" workspaces. It includes tools to manage software deployments, assign tasks, track progress against milestones, document versioning, and more. It just does a whole bunch of stuff pretty darn well.

Reviewed by Doug Mitchell

Looks interesting, wonder if this will help Face??

(Via WorkHappy.net: killer resources for entrepreneurs.)

(Via Sam’s random musings.)

Yes, Sam. This might be exactly what would make a good start. Lots of questions about “getting the data back out”, and about the utility for the novice.

At $99/month it might be easily justified as a “funding a project” cost and run a 6 month experiment.

by François Joseph de Kermadec — iTunes is turning into a slow, ineffective mess of an application. Surprisingly, nobody seems to notice these discrepancies, focusing instead on the brilliant iPod and the Music Store. Let’s not forget iTunes is the center of the puzzle.

Some of us “abuse” our tools.

I just recently created a single frame movie (using iMovie) that has an image in it.

I have copied this movie into iTunes any number of times.

What I do is add metadata that helps me track and find my home-brewed DVD recordings. Each copy of the movie gets the metadata for the movie(s) contained on my DVD.

I have Smart Playlists (in a playlist folder) that allow me to track and catalog my movies.

Yes, my simple list that might be 2K bytes of information has grown (4KB per movie) but what the heck, that’s only 1MB for tracking 250 movies. A small price to pay for the convenience.

If I was really insistent about it I could track down an image for the film (IMDb?) and use that as the single frame.

Import image into iPhoto, create a “slideshow” movie, put the movie into iTunes. That takes about 400K, so it isn’t really an option.

Now if iMovie had some Automator controls…or was AppleScriptable ;-)

Needless to say, the Apple Web isn’t going to put up with that kind of abuse. One of the more friendly responses was from Les Posen, who actually took the time to answer each of Winer’s somewhat rhetorical questions about iTunes. The fact that Posen’s post is so long should alarm people. I think it proves that Winer has a point.

Some would suggest that the terseness of my response to Dave’s questions is a bad thing (see The iPod is too fancy for its own good post on my blog). Length of a response shouldn’t alarm people, except that they might actually have to read something. Here’s a terse answer.

• You can tell if a “tune” is on the iPod by looking in the iTunes. The iPod is listed in the Source panel. Highlight the iPod and the list of tunes shows up on the right. You can tell if a tune is on your computer by looking in the “Library”.
• If you have copied a tune to the iPod you have 2 copies. One on the computer, one on the iPod.
• If you do a “Get Info” on a tune in the Library you are shown where the corresponding file is. You can also use the menu command “Show Song File” to open a Finder window at the location of the file. When tunes are on the iPod the “Show Song File” is disabled, and a “Get Info” does not show the location of the file.
• To delete – highlight the tune and use the delete key, or the menu option “Clear”.

Turns out that the iTunes help covers most of the issues raised. Typing in simple questions in the help system’s “Ask a question” box locates answers quickly, within 1 or 2 entries by rank.

Let’s say I bought an audiobook, it comes on eight CDs, I rip it into eight folders, write a script to name the files 001.mp3, 002.mp3, 003.mp3, etc. From there, if I copy the files to the Archos, it does the right thing when I start playing the first file, it goes to the second, then to the third.
But the iPod can’t be made to care what the filename is, so it plays them in the order of the ID3 info, which is almost completely random because the ripper has no idea that the eight CDs are actually one big document.
So the Archos wins, I can use it to listen to this book because it’s a Really Simple MP3 player. The iPod which adds a layer on top of the filesystem, manages to remove just enough functionality as to make it completely useless for this task.

Hmmm. If I get the same audiobook from Audible – search for The Path Between the Seas – I can save $15 off the list price, I get 1 or 2 files that transfer to the iPod (or any of dozens of players – no Archos) just fine, play intelligently on the iPod, and I can burn CDs if I want to.

If I had 8 CDs and ripped them using iTunes I can add metadata as necessary, and at the minimum collect them into a playlist that I can easily transfer to my iPod.

Dave goes on to ask

When is something on the iPod? How many copies of the music do I have? Where the fcuk are they? How do you delete something?

• You can tell if a “tune” is on the iPod by looking in the iTunes. The iPod is listed in the Source panel. Highlight the iPod and the list of tunes shows up on the right. You can tell if a tune is on your computer by looking in the “Library”.
• If you have copied a tune to the iPod you have 2 copies. One on the computer, one on the iPod.
• If you do a “Get Info” on a tune in the Library you are shown where the corresponding file is. You can also use the menu command “Show Song File” to open a Finder window at the location of the file. When tunes are on the iPod the “Show Song File” is disabled, and a “Get Info” does not show the location of the file.
• To delete – highlight the tune and use the delete key, or the menu option “Clear”.

I must admit that the “Clear” option is confusing with regard to playlists. The command behaves differently. The tune will be “cleared” from the playlist, but not deleted from the Library. You can force a delete by holding down the option key. It’s a matter of “views”

disclaimer: I have used iTunes since forever (meaning SoundJam days). I have used the Mac for as long.
I don’t have a problem taking my DRMed source and converting it to audio CDs. I “triple backup” my “managed tunes”. I don’t backup MP3s made from my CDs. I’ve never tried to use my iPod without iTunes.

Howtoons are cartoons showing kids of all ages “How To” build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all. Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters — fun, creative, and inventive — and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment.