Home > Messages from the Ether > June 2010

Where was I?

At the derby last Saturday watching the Dirty South Derby Girls fight the Black Sheep Rollergirls from Cincinnati. With only seeing one game, Lisa & I understand maybe half the rules at this point. Although the DSDGs had a phenomenal comeback after the half, we lost 117-126 to the BSRs, due mostly their "jammer" K Lethal. She was a force to be reckoned with and we were lucky to score what we did. We will definitely be returning for more Saturday nights at the derby. Funfunfun!

Monday night I discovered--apres cold shower--that our dripping A/C unit shorted out our water heater and tripped the breaker and (slightly) smoking up the utility closet. Yipes. We scheduled someone for each unit from the company who replaced our old A/C unit in 2006, Coolray. Tuesday morning both thermostats in the water heater were replaced and normal showering was again possible. This afternoon the drain pipe for the A/C unit was flushed and our steamy sauna-condo returned to its pre-greenhouse state. Although even with the heat, it's been kinda nice having the windows open with the city noises.

Into my 2nd week of dieting after I discovered via scale what I think I knew already via tightpants. My decadent lifestyle and (perhaps) slowwwed metabolism had packed on and extra 15 lbs.

Bug in ListCookieHandler Java class

The ListCookieHandler class is referenced on many web sites and the source code is provided on a subset of those (one instance at java2s). It's credited as coming from the book Java 6 Platform Revealed, however I couldn't find the implementation within that book searching via either Amazon or Google Books. Either way, there's a couple of errors in all of the implementations I've seen where two for-each loops are used with remove methods called on the collection within the loop. This is not allowed for obvious reasons and results in a ConcurrentModificationException being thrown.

Where was I?

Two Fridays ago we revisited movies at The Fox with LC and Alan plus Alicia and Dan. Double feature with Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club but we skipped out on the latter on the general consensus that it's a meh movie and went to Engine 11 for their sliders.

The next night was a great performance at the ASO with new works by Gandolfi and Higdon (those of Spano's Atlanta School of Composers). This was the first Higdon I'd heard and it was phenomenal.

Two Mondays ago, Lisa & I kicked back at Chastain for Kansas (plus Foreigner and Styx). I snapped a video of the first 30-or-so seconds of "Dust in the Wind" if you're not familiar with the song:

The only other time I'd seen Kansas was a great show yearrrrrrs ago at Music Midtown.

The frontier

In Closing the Digital Frontier [ via On the Media: Information Wants to Be Expensive ], Michael Hirschorn argues that the death of advertising (see Bob Garfield's own The Chaos Scenario) has brought about the closed systems that are mobile phones. The iPhone being the worst offender and most adept exploiter. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web to the smart phone signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. Facebook and iPhone are two augurs of the end of a rich frontier.

Video: Technotise: Edit and I

Cool Serbian animation, from the graphic novel Technotise, called Edit and I:

[ via io9: Technotise: What the hell is it and why is Hollywood spending millions to remake it? > io9: Sexy Serbian Vixen Steals McFly's Hoverboard In New Scifi Animation > Quiet Earth: Slick Serbian scifi animation in TECHNOTISE: EDIT AND I (EDIT I JA) ]

The plot is set in Belgrade in 2074. The main character is Edit, a female psychology student. After her sixth failure at the same university exam, she decides to have the chip installed to help her pass. From that moment, her life changes and unusual things start happening to her.

Supposedly, it's getting a live-action remake from Hollywood (yeah, that old thing) and the producers created studio hype by getting someone to make a mock trailer by pasting together clips from other sci-fi flicks. wft?! I'll quote a pithy comment from io9: So let me get this straight - a director used other people's work as a animated storyboard for a trailer to remake an animated film into a live action film? Quite the wtf.

Happy birthday, Vivian Katherine Bao!

5:56 AM this morning. 3 pounds, 7 ounces. And two months (ex-ACT-ly) early to the party!

RadioWave mention by Italian blogger

Italian blogger Andrea (Andy) Lawendel writes out of Milan about all things radio including traditional wireless broadcasts, internet streaming, and newer hardware that takes advantage of broadcast metadata (e.g. HD radio). Recently, he asked me a few questions about my radio schedule aggregator web site RadioWave and published the interview on his Radiopassioni blog. His introduction is in Italian (thank you, internet translator) but the subsequent interview is in my humble native language. There's much going on in the radio world that I wasn't aware of, so hopefully I don't come across as a rube.

One fascinating technology that Andy pointed me to is called RadioDNS. It is a proposal to connect the existing domain name system with standardized web services. This would enable software to link a broadcast stream to the broadcaster's web service which would provide rich metadata such as the station's location and services, current track name and artist, and album cover image. Brilliant.

Review of Wikipedia books

Decided to search for reviews of the Wikipedia/Pediapress books. Learned that this is actually an old feature that has been made available to people without Wikipedia accounts. I'm logged in 90% of the time, so I have no idea why I didn't know of it. I also learned that there is some weird tech-hatred for the feature.

TechCrunch posted a non-descript, press release review on May 6th which garnered snarky comments such as Great, I really wanted a way to pay for Wikipedia content. Gizmodo, less charitably, on May 7th: when you've got to the point in your life where printing pages off from Wikipedia seems like a good idea...you need to be banned from society. Mashable, also on the 6th, gave a more thoughtful review, pointing out that [c]ontent can be customized around any topic or topics the user desires. The ability to curate content is one of the hallmarks of the latest wave of digital creativity. Mashable's readers, arguably more DIY friendly than pop-tech sites, were generally interested in the possibilities.

Compare these to the first comment from a (relatively) non-tech friend when I described the feature: "What a great idea for gifts!" Wikipedia is still a contentious concept, subject to snobbery ("you mean anyone can edit it?!") and divisionism ("liberal bias!"), so any project associated with it will inevitably get skewered with the same attacks. A coworker grudgingly admitted Pediapress books might be useful for non-controversial articles. Just how much of human knowledge is that controversial?! Have we come to believe that every subject is abortion or global warming? Though not without its problems, the value and rarity of much of Wikipedia's content compared with other internet resources is often underappreciated. Where would Google's first page of search results be without Wikipedia?

Holiday weekend, Carnival of Souls at Plaza

Friday after work watched a terrifying storm from inside Marlow's down the street. Hail and sideways rain hit and people started taking pictures of the fact that you couldn't see the other side of the street. Rainpocalypse. Went to the matinée on Saturday and saw one of my favorite old creepy movies!