Cover Songs Database
According to the Cover Songs Database The Beatles are the most covered band and Eleanor Rigby is the most covered song. The most sampled song is Bob James' Nautilus….
Uncategorized
382 posts filed under this category, page 2 of 16.
Tom Bridge leaves MacSlash
As of yesterday Tom Bridge stepped down from his role at MacSlash….
How the Mars Rovers phone home
Philip Chien of Wired News interviewed Jet Propulsion Laboratory telecom engineer Andrea Barbieri about how Mars rovers communicate back to Earth….
Mark Pilgrim’s new job
Mark Pilgrim is now an Accessibility Architect in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM. Congratulations Mark!…
Dan Schoenbaum on software worthy of Moore’s Law
Dan Schoenbaum, vice president of strategy for Compuware, writes about ways software teams can work together, and closer to the customer, to create better software. Weblogs are one of the ways software writers can be in direct contact with customers. I could not find Dan's weblog….
Personal publishing to paper
While weblogs and e-books may be seen as personal publishing to some, there is still a large market for publishing-on-demand books. Gayle Feldman of the New York Times takes a look at new ways book publishers are focusing on smaller authors for publishing-on-demand. For $499 the Borders Professional Publication will get you an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), a listing on Amazon, and 5 copies made available on Borders' shelves….
Dinner at Jing Jing
Last night I met Scoble for dinner at Jing Jing in Palo Alto. Don Park and Al Nevarez were also in attendance. Interesting conversations about the past and future of weblogging. Many people seemed to have tried out the trend, but the quality writing seems to have decreased. We discussed better methods of peer review and aggregation. Micah Alpern joined us at University Coffee Cafe. We talked about ways eBay should be preparing for Windows Longhorn. Reputation came up again, this time related to service reputation linked to a friend of friends or community. Does a weblog add eBay reputation?…
Apple Store San Francisco
Apple's new flagship San Francisco store opens tomorrow morning at 10 A.M. Since May 2001 Apple has opened a new store every 13 days. An average of 1000 people visit each Apple retail store daily. Over 50% of purchases are from first time Mac buyers. Employees are trained for 3 to 7 weeks before they come to an Apple store. Apple had 1,352 applicants for the San Francisco store, and hired 70. 35 of these employees are trained in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and similar software. 20% of the people who come into an Apple store visit the Genius Bar….
World snowball fight championships
Showa Shinzan International Yukigassen, the de facto world snowball-fight championship, takes place yearly in Sobetsucho, Japan. Sebastian Moffett profiles the tournament on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal. Players wear white jumpsuits and strap on a helmet for protection from the regulation snowballs between 2.56 and 2.76 inches in diameter. The game is combination dodge ball and capture the flag. Some teams practice year-round….
Security Information for Microsoft Windows XP SP2
Microsoft has a new site online covering the security changes in Windows XP SP2. I installed the new build on my Tablet last night and started poking around. Included in the SP2 builds are Tablet-specific improvements to handwriting recognition as well. When you start the computer for the first time you are presented with an Automatic Updates screen before you even see your desktop. On boot there is a window front and center (similar to Windows Tour) reporting on your computer's current firewall, automatic updates, and anti-virus setup. Security Center is a new control panel, as is Windows Firewall….
President Bush Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage
President Bush announced this morning that he is calling for "an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of man and woman as husband and wife." Some choice quotes from his speech: "After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization." "The union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith. Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a…
PassMark security
PassMark Security is a new company founded by Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and PayPal, to tackle the problem of phishing, or emulating a trusted site. Their approach is to show you a picture you selected at registration to be your relationship identifier. If you choose a horseshoe and receive an e-mail without that horseshoe picture, you know someone is trying to trick you. You can personalize your PassMark or choose from stock images, similar to an instant messaging program's buddy icon. Mr. Harris serves on the boards of Earthlink, Macromedia, eOne Global, Yodlee, XTec, MyVest, and LowerMyBills….
Wired News interviews Viet Dinh, USA Patriot Act author
Kim Zetter of Wired News interviewed Viet Dinh, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy, and primary author of the USA Patriot Act….
Giant video screens at New York Philharmonic
Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times writes about large video screens making their way into some concert halls. A 15-by-20 foot video screen cutting the orchestra in two while they play Wagner and Brahms. How does this make the symphony more user-friendly? "[T]he younger generation is more responsive to visual stimuli" says Benjamin M. Rosen, a Philharmonic trustee who spearheaded and financed the experiment….
CodeCon
I spent my entire weekend at CodeCon here in San Francisco. Most presentations seemed to focus on the different ways we present ourselves to the world. ZeroConf to help others find what you have to share. Social software to define relationships and grant privileges based on those relationships. Anonymizers to hide you from the world. Versioning systems to track your steps. The highlight of my weekend was talking to Donald Knuth on Friday night at the Google party. I also had a chance to talk to Craig Newmark about his ReplayTV battles and his blogging experience….
Comment spam
Last night I had my first massive attack of comment spam. All from 212.199.169.153 over 10 minutes adding up to 10 garbage messages. It would have been more if not for my throttle setup. Annoying, but at least I can delete each one pretty easily. All the posts hit were recent posts, so turning off comments for old posts would not have helped in this case….
Predator remote controlled aircraft
Draganfly Innovation put together a scaled down General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Predator B aircraft for hobbyist use. "[C]an even be equipped with a GPS flight control unit for long distance, pre-programmed reconnaissance missions (20 miles effective range)" Starts at $600 without the camera attachment, or $750 with a wireless video camera and lithium-polymer batteries allowing for a 90 minute flight time….
MediaChest – social networking what you own
MediaChest is a social networking application to hook assets to social trees. A new spin on Distributed Library. Books, CDs, DVDs, and games. The games interface is the strongest and seems to be responsible for most of the early adopters. I would like to see an export as XML feature supporting library standards and the ability to search for friends instead of relying on an e-mail invite. Distributed Library has the edge by allowing users to search for goods based on their location. Check out my MediaChest library….
MozCC Creative Commons examiner
MozCC is an extension for Mozilla-based browsers that adds a button to your toolbar to examine the Creative Commons license of a site where one exists….
Convert Atom to RSS
2RSS.com has a new PHP service (free) that converts Atom feeds to RSS. Since you are passing an Atom feed as a parameter you do not even have to own the feed you are converting. A good way to read all the Blogger weblogs in a RSS aggregator….
Mainsoft Visual MainWin
Mainsoft Visual Mainwin allows Visual Basic and C# developers to compile J2EE bytecode. It also supports ASP.Net and ADO.Net class libraries. Supports BEA Weblogic 8.1, IBM Websphere 5.1 and Tomcat 5….
Apple RSS information page
Apple now has a RSS information page. NetNewsWire and FeedDemon get a mention too….
ConCon aftermath
Tonight I attended ConCon, a one hour briefing of talks and ideas from O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Kevin Marks introduced Technorati's services. Ralf Muehlen introduced me to SFLAN. Cory Doctorow thinks that e-books now are where online music was in 1996: no one saw a reason why anyone would give up the tangible quality of a work. Kevin Burton is working on a plugin for Mozilla to export Orkut data for import into other formats such as FOAF. Scott Draves talked about his Electric Sheep project which is a very cool distributed genetic graphics engine. Tantek gave a quick overview…
The Economist on the science of love
Scientists believe that love is little more than an influx of bonding hormones, namely oxytocin and vasopressin, according to The Economist. "[A] relatively small area of the human brain is active in love, compared with that involved in, say, ordinary friendship." "Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the one responsible for gut feelings, and the ones which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people deeply in love do not look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but instead like those of people snorting coke. Love, in other words, uses the…
O’Reilly Emerging Tech San Francisco
Next week is a small event in San Francisco, ConCon, for all of us who could not go to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference last week. RX Gallery 132 Eddy Street @ Mason Monday, February 16, 7-10 P.M….