Not Quite a Blog

Astronomers have discovered a tenth planet, Lila (see note on name below)... modulo the debate about what is considered a planet; for which I point you to Gibor Basri's great essay: Defining "Planet".

UPDATE [2005-07-30 07:54:47]: This NYT story, "Planet or Not, Pluto Now Has Far-Out Rival", says that the astronomers are informally calling this planet, Xena! (Although Lila is the name they formally submitted to the IAU)

UPDATE [2005-07-31 09:40:31]: The Caltech website has been updated to include a note that the name Lila is not necessarily the name that they submitted to the IAU.

Congratulations to Molly and Robert Van Houweling for accepting professorships at UC Berkeley's Law School and Political Science Department, respectively. They'll both be wonderful additions to the Berkeley faculty. Molly specializes in IP (and teaches a great IP class) and I know of Robert from a paper he co-authored, "How Does Voting Equipment Affect the Racial Gap in Voided Ballots?".

Here are a few brief comments that I have been meaning to blog about but just haven't gotten around to... I could write a page on each of these, but won't:

• Do you check your friends blogs as frequently as your rivals?

• Have you ever had a "why the hell am I clicking on this link?" moment while web surfing?

• I recently posted a craigslist posting to get participants in a study I'm doing. Michelle (my girlfriend) suggested putting the craigslist posting in the "gigs" section. I had though that this was just for musicians and such, but it turns out that this is for one-off jobs in general. What's amazing about this is that she taught me something about the internet where a year or two ago she was calling my computer, in general, the "magic screen". (She now has an iMac and an iPod mini)

• Pat Benatar's "Hell is For Children" is one of the coolest songs of the 80's.

• Fuck George Lucas and the fact that he took out the "yub yub" song that the ewoks sing in Return of the Jedi in the DVD version of the film. That bastard. I don't give a shit if he didn't like the film or that song, but this is such a large part of my childhood... I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forgive him.

Look, MSN Virtual Earth uses a picture taken during a Cal game. Wicked!

If you are a resident of the state of California, please take a minute to let your state assemblyman know that you support SB 682, a bill that would prohibit the use of RFIDs in state-issued ID cards (like driver's licenses and UC student IDs!). The bill is facing stiff resistance from pro-RFID lobbyists in the state assembly. You can use the EFF action center or the ACLU action center for this. (via BoingBoing)

I'm not necessarily the praying type... but I pray for the seven astronauts that just successfully launched into LEO.

Of course, launching isn't the easiest part, but it is not the hardest and it is where much can go wrong. With the previous two shuttle disasters (as I explain in this paper), a draft near the jet-stream layer of our atmosphere caused problems: with Challenger, this draft caused a solid rocket booster to flex, breach and send white hot propellant into the red liquid fuel tank; with Columbia, this draft caused a loose piece of foam to hit the leading wing edge and punch a whole into it.

So, I'll be very interested in two things in the coming days:

• Did the shuttle encounter any peculiar drafts during launch? Some of this can be ascertained from how the exhaust trail breaks up. If it did, the inspection could be very important.

• How useful will the digital imaging inspection tools be? The astronauts will deploy a few different means of inspecting the integrity of the shuttle's outer skin. We'd like to see what they find and how well the tools they use work.

So frequently, I see connections I make come full circle in weird ways... here's a story of finding a picture of a cute kitty for my business card and the social network connections along the way.

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Looks like we're seeing some interdiction of BitTorrent networks: "Difficult time for EZTV".

Apparently, the interdictors are trying to sap the bandwidth of seeding sites and downloaders (whose resources are considerably limited). While this is no problem for the large seeding sites, it's a considerable problem for the downloaders.

"But wait", you say, "I thought the bittorrent protocol involved banning nodes that served up bad data." And it does... however, the interdictors are using way too many IP addresses for this to be effective (essentially, they have a new IP address ready for each downloader). Wow... the war continues.

So, I've started running regularly again... most of you might not know it, but I used to do olympic-distance (1.5 km swim / 40 km bike / 10 km run) triathlons. I loved them... especially the swimming and the running (biking is cool, it just requires a lot of equipment). I've been running about 12 miles total each week with two 3-mile runs and a 6-mile run... using the Google maps pedometer, I can scope out all sorts of runs that meet these parameters in my neighborhood. I must admit, I forgot how much I love running... just getting out there and just going... and it feels good to be healthy and have Michelle say, "You seem skinnier... there's less there to squeeze." As someone who firmly believes in the value of exercise, I suppose I share something in common with George W. Bush ("The (over)exercise of power")... oh dear.

Oh yeah, those are my new shoes... New Balance 998's. If you need a new pair of shoes, I recommend using Roadrunner Sport's ShoeDog tool.

I'm digging the direction and flavor of a new reader using the Bloglines Web Services API: Chameleon Reader. It doesn't piss me off nearly as much as Bloglines does... but you'll still have to use bloglines for maintenence and I still don't really understand how it works. Anyone else out there want to take a shot at something cool with the Bloglines API?

As part of the EFF's 15th anniversary, they are having a blog-a-thon where people describe the "very first step you to took to stand up for your digital rights." It's impossible for me to remember the very first step I took for digital rights... I suppose that's like asking someone to recall their first steps walking; it ain't going to happen.

Instead, I'm going to tell you how fighting for digital rights launched my career.

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Dave Farber just posted this response of mine to his IP list in a thread discussing the recent, quite ridiculous Dvorak article about Creative Commons in PC Magazine:

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As posted by Aaron to the Markdown list:

At a party the other night, the author of a client-side GUI weblog editor with a WYSIWYG editor came up to me. 'Oh, Markdown,' he said. 'Would you believe it? My users are asking me for Markdown support!' I cheered. 'You cheer, perhaps, but what about me? What could they possibly want Markdown for when they already have WYSIWYG?'

Fuck Microsoft and their non-support of CSS in IE.

I really considered myself somewhat of a pizza nerd... I love trying new things and have spent a number of years working on my dough and collecting some tips.

However, this six-year-long effort to reverse engineer Patsy's pies by Jeff Varasano leaves me speechless. Jeff, by the way, held the US record for solving Rubik's cubes at the age of 14... I'm glad his talents have been focused on delivering the best of the best in pizza pies to the masses.

Wow. I need to take a pizza sabbatical someday and do this to the T... Jeff uses a DLX mixer, his own sourdough starter as well as a slightly complicated dough recipe... the kicker is that he has modded his electrical oven to cook on the CLEAN setting. Yes, boys and girls, he has snapped the safety lock off of his oven with gardening shears so that he can get temperatures upwards of 800° F in a conventional oven which cooks his pies in 2-3 minutes.

Did I say, wow?

A belated congratulations to Marc and Ryan et al. for the oh-so cool announcement that Yahoo Research Labs Berkeley is live... (via Ryan's blog)

Danah posts a great analogy for search companies... love it. Here is the gist (taken out of context):

Microsoft is Germany. They did some pretty evil things a while back but you don't remember the details, you just know that you really hate them. Even though they're really no worse than any other large corporpation/country, you can't help but distrust them permanently because, well, you always have.

Yahoo is Japan. It had an economic crisis that almost destroyed it and it plays too nice with all of the other evil empires, supporting the most evil endeavors. It hasn't really innovated for a while, but it tries to improve on known products to support average people. It's currently trying to sell culture in the form of animated cutesy iconic images which you kinda like and kinda despise.

Google is the United States. It has never seen trouble on home turf. It is arrogant and loved by the elite. You know you're supposed to respect them for being better than everyone else, because they think they are, but you actually kinda resent them for being so rich and powerful. Yet, you really appreciate their innovations.

I'm going to publish every "bloglines sucks" letter that I send to them from now on... here's number two:

UPDATE [2005-08-10 09:52:27]: I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way... Doug points to a few other complaints about bloglines in the blogosphere ("More bloglines complaints"). I share Doug's appreciation of the performance of the GMail web service as well... it's amazing that a company could deliver such a reliable, usable and subtantial product and then open it up for the entire public to use for free. And I've only experienced one significant outage of GMail in the early days which has never been repeated. Also, the GMail feature set has stabilized whereas bloglines features come and go depending on the time of day.

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This band, Death By Doll, is really cool... artsy and macabre in just the right ways. I saw them open at the Hemlock for Glass Candy... and it was quite the treat. I especially like the tracks, "The Flame", "Aquaducts" and "Towing Jehova"... I don't know where you'd get their record at. I'll do a podcast later and feature these songs.

So, a while back I complained over in the b2evo Feature Request forum about how the antispam tab in the backend was not optimal. As the size of our self-reported blacklists grow so does the time it takes to render and download the antispam tab. (That particular topic has been locked by a moderator, so I'll have to announce my fix here.)

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So, I'm starting design for a web site for the OSDDDI class this fall taught by Mitch Kapor, Pam Samuelson and Steven Weber.

What I find myself wanting is a very lightweight form of courseware, preferably in php. There are zillions and zillions of examples of open source courseware and software but they all include way, way, way, way too many features.

I just want something that will allow me to enter a syllabus and other information but provide a modular list of neat features typically out of the scope of HTML. Any suggestions? I suppose I could start to write something from scratch...

Person 1: academia seems more and more lame
Person 2: just no different than elsewhere

Doug points to an article ("AC Transit to debut Wi-Fi on buses") that reports that AC Transit (our local East Bay bus company) will start providing WiFi on buses:

AC Transit in Oakland, Calif., plans to outfit about 40 buses with free onboard Wi-Fi access this fall. The agency recently completed a survey that found that riders were very supportive of the plan.

Wow... AC Transit is probably before its time on this one.

Given all the reports of people wearing white earphones getting mugged in the bay area (not killed, though), I'm not about to pull out my notebook computer on an AC transit bus. I've only ever seen two people with laptops on an AC Transit bus and one seemed to be a student who was doing last-minute backbends for one of his classes... and the other a newbie businessman. I can't imagine many more people opening their laptops on the bus.

What about other WiFi-enabled devices? This seems more promising... less of an attraction for those that would steal things, smaller form factor. Damn, another thing to buy...

Are you reading SethF? If not, here's a taste of what you're missing:

O Lord, just give me one more tech bubble, one more collective financial insanity where I might be able to get founder's stock and be bought-out for absurd amounts of money in a ridiculously short time. I promise not to waste it all away this time doing censorware decryption and fighting for net-freedom.

I'm posting a slew of photos I recently took in conjunction with Where 2.0 and putzing about Lake Merritt here in Oakland. Highlights include:

• photos of the Yahoo Local-sponsored Yahootini event at Where 2.0 from the 32nd floor of the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

• A poor attempt at a mosaic of San Francisco from the 32nd floor yahootini event.

• Photos of Lake Merrit including ducks, strange art (A tree planted in a boat floating on the leak).

I'll place the photos below the fold so as to not tax the network...

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Check this out...:

Astrologist sues NASA over crash

MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- A Russian astrologist who says NASA has altered her horoscope by crashing a spacecraft into a comet is suing the U.S. space agency for damages of $300 million, local media has reported.[...]

"It is obvious that elements of the comet's orbit, and correspondingly the ephemeris, will change after the explosion, which interferes with my astrology work and distorts my horoscope," Izvestia daily quoted astrologist Marina Bai as saying in legal documents submitted before Monday's collision.

(Full disclosure: Pam is my adviser)

Via the RSS feed of Pam Samuelson's Papers page comes her forthcoming (Oct. 2005) article for CACM's Legally Speaking column: "Did MGM Really Win the Grokster Case?". Here's the take-away and a comment:

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Man, does this bring back memories... (Chris is my dad).

Chris Hall's Barbecue Sauce

• One large onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 6 T olive oil
• 2 cups catsup
• 3/4 cups light corn syrup
• 1 1/2 T brown sugar
• 3/8 cup lemon juice
• 1 T dry mustard
• 1 1/2 T chili powder
• 1 T oregano
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 cups water

Directions:

1. Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil until limp in 4 quart saucepan.
   

2. Stir in remaining ingredients.
   

3. Simmer an hour or so.
   

"This is one of those moments in American history," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal People for the American Way. "No matter what side you're on, everything you've believed in, everything you've cared about, everything you've fought for is at stake. (From "After a Brief Shock, Advocates on All Sides Quickly Mobilize" by Robin Toner in the NYT)

You can donate to PFAW's efforts.

Courtesy of Doug:

Ezpeer found not guilty in landmark copyright verdict

By Jessie Ho (Taipei Times)

Taiwan's music industry suffered a setback yesterday when the Shihlin District Court found a local peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing operator not guilty of infringing intellectual property rights.

In the nation's first ruling on file-sharing cases, the court found that Weber Wu , president of Ezpeer -- which provides a for-fee platform for subscribers to swap files -- did not engage in reproducing or publicly distributing works of copyright holders.

This just emphasizes the international nature of our networks... there will always be one country that isn't a treaty member or has a more liberal view of intangible property rights. (Of course, I'm ignoring the facts and this could be a very narrow ruling.)