Lifehacker Pack 2009: Our List of Essential Free Windows Downloads

Another version of things to load up immediately on a Windows PC. Lifehacker, by the way is a quality publication that comes up with many useful ideas and apps.

My friend Tom is an avid cyclist. When I came back from Florida I mentioned several websites that I have been using to map various routes, as well as tracks from my various GPS tracking devices. He send me his findings as well as this update:

Here's an update: http://www.bikemap.net is still the best I've found, although all of them have warts. My maps are at http://www.bikemap.net/user/tomfortmann/routes. Don't forget to hover your cursor over the elevation plot, and note the full-screen mode. Those two features put it ahead of the others.

Two others I found recently are

http://www.bikely.com Similar to bikemap.net but no dynamic elevation or full-screen mode

http://www.trimbleoutdoors.com Pretty good; multiple tracks; tiny editing and display windows are a big drawback

And as I told you before, mapmyride.com is a nonstarter for various reasons.

Worldmapper

For those who like Maps, this is a tour de force in maps. There are many themes followed in the same format: a web page with explanations accompanied by a PDF suitable for posting on a bulletin board. In addition, they back up their maps with the data used to produce them.

tipjoy | the easiest way to give and make money online

What a great idea: you set up a small fund (say $5) and give small tips (one guy askedfor just $0.10 and had amased $246) to people who provide services or information that you like.

MagicJack far from enchanting - The Boston Globe

Actually, the review is much better than the headline would suggest. My major problem with this is that I don't make that many long-distance calls and so I wouldn't save that much money. But, if I were willing to let go of my regular telephone, I could connect this to a spare old computer and eliminate the charge for the phone.

Here is a very disturbing graph of unemployment that has been published by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.
When I sent this to my friend Richard Homonoff, he replied:

You might want to take a look at William J Polley's blog post titled, "Employment losses continue to be in line with 1981-82 recession."

He looks at the eleven recessions since WWII.

He has a chart that is more comprehensive than Pelosi's.

In the chart below from that reference, the current unemployment line is in orange, is situated about in the middle of the pack and ends at 12 months.



It does appear to me that the Speaker is simplifying things to support her arguments in an unfair way. I don't think either side of the debate should do this -- even it if fits my own leanings. That only weakens your argument once smart people (like Richard) start digging deeper.

Don't click on the start button below if you are offended by profanity. If, on the other hand you find the use of profanity at times the last effective means of expressing your outrage or excitement, then click on...

Charles Kuralt: We listened to Charles Kural's America on the way down to Florida.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kuralt
• http://www.rememberingcharleskuralt.com/editorial.htm
• http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0102/14/lkl.00.html
• http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=charles+kuralt

Alan Berliner: Early Sunday morning, we saw part of a documentary by Alan Berliner on Sleeplessness. It was fascinating and this guy is a very good documentary film director/producer.

• http://www.alanberliner.com/index.html
• http://store.hbo.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2646795&cp=1890186
• http://www.slate.com/id/2166758/

EasyBloom: Very clever device for measuring environmental conditions for growing plants. Came from a discussion on xBBN about devices for measuring sunlight.

• http://www.easybloom.com/buy/overview.html

BirdCam: Nice sealed camera case that shoots automatically when it detects motion. Put right in front of your bird feeder for terrific closeups.

• http://www.wingscapes.com/
• http://www.keenzo.com/showproduct.asp?M=WINGSCAPES&ID=3514159&ref=GB

I did not run across the groundhog today.

While I wasn't looking, Google has made some major improvements to their spreadsheets. One impressive capability is the ability to generate charts from dynamic data. Here are some examples:



Here is a more complex trig function charted:



And of course, the ever present pie chart. Google documents appears to be practically all I need from Excel in terms of charts.



Of course, the real payoff is when you can chart dynamic data retrieved from sources of data on the web. Here is the temperatures this month in Boston derived from numeric values on a web site generated by the National Weather Service and charted by me in Google Spreadsheets. As the days go on, new entries will appear in the website and be appropriately added to the end of the chart, all without me lifting a finger...

Here is an amazing website and several animations I just ran across. It boggles the mind to think how much time must have gone into creating the first 6 minute film.




Here is the explanation of the video:



Here is the video:


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Here is another video by BLU:

Internet marketing essentials: Change order of Blogger Posts

This is a really useful set of instructions to change the order in which blogger entries are listed -- FIFO or LIFO. This is a great example were an open system like Blogger (open in the sense that you can change a lot of things) permits you to make it work better than the implementers were able to make it work. A corollary to the rule that a group of people is always smarter than any of the individuals in the group.

FIFO Order

LIFO Order

What have I been doing? Well, I have spent most of my waking hours working on LexMedia the non-profit corporation that runs the Public Access cable channels in Lexington, MA. In the last year we have completely reinvented LexMedia by:

1. Getting rid of the last Executive Director who was on a course of making LexMedia fail
2. Recruiting a new Executive Director who brings a lot of talents to LexMedia that we don't already have, and is a pleasure to work with. What a change!
3. Building a new studio at Kline Hall in the Avalon Lexington Hills residential complex.
4. Outfitting that studio with a completely new all digital broadcast system.

As Chairman of LexMedia, I have tried to foster an open organization where there are no pockets of unwarranted private information -- the kind of information inept people use to insure their job security. Rather we value people by what they accomplish.

Having said that, I represent my work at LexMedia by our website (lexmedia.org) which I manage. Take a look, and if you live in Lexington, check out the three channels we produce.

AntennaWeb

This is a very nice web site which answers the question that some people will be asking in the coming months: With the switch-over to digital TV next February, if I want to receive television over the air (as opposed via cable or satellite) what kind of antenna should I get and in what direction should I point it. If you click on the "choose an antenna" button, you will be asked for your street address. From this information, the website will determine your location, including elevation and sight line to the various television transmitters in your area. It will then tell you two things: Which stations you can expect to receive, what type of antenna you will need to receive those stations, and which direction you should point that antenna. Very nice site.

Science and technology information from Scientific American

I just got an email message from Scientific American asking me survey questions about their website. After completing the survey, I went over to the website and discovered that it was seriously modified and improved from what I had seen before. Very nice, and I recommend it to you.

Now the reason for writing this entry: Most Popular Stories. I see this kind of list appearing in more and more websites (NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, ...), and I am attracted to it on each. In many respects, it is an organic, populist recommendation service that helps me sift through the average article and find the gems. It's a good example of social networking as opposed to the banal use of this concept in the MySpace's of the world.

But, now my concern: What is others are doing the exact same as I? I.e., not taking the time to explore the complete sea of articles and picking out the ones that I want to read? By using these lists, I am not only failing my fellow readers, but also contributing to a second order effect of reading a recommended article, thus sending it "popularity" even higher -- with the possible effect of swamping an excellent article, but one that by chance got washed to the side by people like me who only look at the most popular articles.

Having said this, I am now suitably self-warned not to just use the "most popular" lists. God, I sound like my mother warning me not to just seek out the popular kids in Jr. High School...

Postscript: My friend Richard wrote me a response which I find very interesting:

Dear Harry,

Too bad Sciam doesn't keep a month by month "most popular" list so we
can go back.

Your point about relying on others to monitor news sources will lop
off some unseen gems has a parallel in the efficient (stock) market
hypothesis. EMH suggests that there is no point in individuals doing
research to test/explore whether a stock is under- or over-valued
because the current prices reflect the combined knowledge/wisdom of
the market participants. But if everyone assumes that stocks are
efficiently priced and if no one does the analysis, the prices will no
longer be "efficiently-priced." And I guess that is why some
investors still hire some people to do securities analysis;
presumably, those securities analysts pick up enough gems to pay for
their time and effort.

Regards,
Richard

Unlike PCs, the standard Macintosh software (e.g., iMovie) does not provide a command or document how to import the contents of an even non-copy protected DVD into a program running on the Macintosh. It turns out that you can do with with standard issue Macintosh programs, you just have to know what to do. Here is a set of steps needed to perform this action that I found using Google.

1. Insert DVD.
2. Open Disk Utility.
3. Select the disk and then select “New Image”. Save the disk image wherever is convenient, such as the desktop.
4. Once the disk image is written, open iMovie 08.
5. Mount the new disk image. A “Camera Detected, Scanning Contents” window will appear in iMovie 08, followed by an import window. You can now import the DVD contents and start editing away.

I wish iMovie would just say, “Hey, this DVD doesn’t have copy protection, it must be yours, so I’ll import it for you!” Alas, this is not the case, making the process more cumbersome than it needs to be. I can image that the idea of importing straight from a DVD was shot down by Apple’s legal team… sigh

On The Media: Prank Calling

Professional hoaxer Alan Abel has spent a lifetime pulling pranks on the media, like his campaign to clothe naked animals or his character Omar the Beggar. Abel’s antics are preserved in the documentary, now on DVD, Abel Raises Cain.

Photography and The Law: Know Your Rights

There are several issues that arise when I decide whether or not I feel comfortable taking a picture. These issues usually arise when people are included in the scene. This article lays out the legal rules and rights you have as a photographer, but I find that frequently my own sense of respecting someone's privacy takes precedence. But, it is good to know the law before you start defending yourself against heavy handed "authorities".

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3 ™

I have searched for years for a backup system that would work for me. I bet I'm not that unusual in my "requirements" -- these are not particularly difficult ones and some of them relate to my behaviors, which again, I believe are not very unusual (at least with regards to backing up my computer data...)

For me, to be useful, a backup system has to be:

1. Automatic: This is why I am looking for a "system" rather than just doing it myself every time I create something new a valuable.
   
   
2. Reliable: What's the purpose of using a backup system if it isn't reliable. I think many people have a false sense of security with their backup systems because they rarely try to recover files.
   
   
3. Easy -- both to backup and recover: The backup system ought to be as "easy" as using the file management capabilities of the operating system -- and hopefully just an extension of that OS.
   
   
4. Inexpensive: Even though I know that my data is very valuable, somehow I still think the backup system ought to be inexpensive.
   
   
5. Done in the background: Again, even though it is important, backing up files doesn't seem like it ought to interfere with my use of the computer. I wish some virus protection systems would exhibit the same characteristics.
   
   
6. Cross-platform: Although I have one principal computer I use, my family and I make use of several laptops, both PCs and Macs, as well as several servers. All of these machines should be backed up, not just my primary PC.

After stumbling along for many years, I have finally found a system that does all of this: JungleDisk. There are two really good parts of this system: The multiplatform client program that implements the logic of when and what to backup, and the backend storage component (Amazon's S3) which is a very inexpensive storage system charged for by the high integrity billing system of Amazon.

The net effect is that for the first time, I now have my pictures backed up properly -- in fact so well that as I travel, take pictures and download them to my laptop, to my delight these pictures are backed up to the Amazon file storage while I sleep. And, did I mention inexpensive? After the initial upload to the file server when I am charged for network bandwidth (not very much), all of my pictures from 2007 and 2008 (42Gbytes) are now being backed up for about $6.50/month which seems pretty good to me.

Petition-them.com

The internet has proven itself to be the most effective way at informing people about issues that matter to them. Once people are informed, they want to act -- and many times the appropriate action is to let another person or organization your support for a position.

This website is a free service offered to users of the Internet to collect and organize signatures on a petition. It uses the standard "interpret this image" challenge to insure that the petition is being signed by a human. By packaging the signing activity into one frequently used service, all of the standard pitfalls that activists could fall into are avoided.

Similar, even more sophisticated services for accepting donations on behalf of an organization or cause, are also available on the web. Both of these services allow the activist to concentrate on informing people about the issue at hand, and to not have to worry about the mechanisms for achieving a mass effect in support of the issue.

A quarter-century of innovation that changed the way government works and how people live

A friend of mine, JF Mergin, wrote a section of this article in which he said:

What individual had the biggest impact on your work in the government or the work of government?

In the late 1980s a fellow named Harry Forsdick was working at BBN Technologies on early Internet applications. No one really understood what he was doing and he was exploring and area where no one had gone before. One particular application was called (as I remember) the PIN or Personal Internet Newspaper. Using a scripting language that foreshadowed Java Script and Google scripting, one could build an automatically generated newspaper based on the content of very large number of sites. When this was shown to a number of potential customers, there was almost a universal lack of understanding. However, it really made me think about how little we know of the potential of this growing network and it obliterated a number of conceptual walls.

At the time, it seemed obvious to me, but if people as smart as JF's potential customers were mystified, I must admit that my powers of explanation were not as good as my ability to think up and build new Internet applications... [The Personal Internet Newspaper was known as the PINPaper. When I moved to CMGI with this technology, the product was known as Echo].

WardMaps.com - Cambridge, MA

There is a new map store in Harvard Square. For years, there has been a map store on Church St in the Square. I'm not sure if it is still there. Now another.

Here is a nice example from Ward Maps of a map around Fresh Pond where BBN was located.

I find that the .FLV format is the best one to include on web pages. So do most of the Internet video sites. When converting video to .FLV format, there are certain tools that are needed to create usable video productions. Here is a list of the ones that I am currently using.

martijndevisser.com FLV Player This is a very clean, standalone .FLV player.
GoGo DVD To flash flv Converter This is a wonderful one button click conversion from a DVD to a .FLV file. You get to adjust enough of the encoding parameters to create exactly the quality of .FLV you want.
JW FLV Player This is the component I use for embedding .FLVs in web pages. It has a playlist facility for playing multiple .FLVs with very flexible ways to display the playlist. If you want to just show one video, you use a playlist with one element.

Photo Widgets and Slideshows - Good Widgets
Click on the top photo to see another.

Move over Facebook. Dogster is upon us...

Virtual CD-RW burner converts DRM protected M4P to MP3, M4B to MP3, M4A to WMA

This is the most reliable tool I have encountered for converting iTunes to mp3s. The authors of this tool have been thinking out of the box about this solution to converting one format to another.

By AMOL SHARMA
November 14, 2007, WSJ

Craig McCaw got rich betting on cellphones when they were still brick-size gadgets with just 30 minutes of battery life. These days, he's rolling the dice on another untested concept: a nationwide high-speed wireless network based on WiMax technology.

His company, Clearwire Corp., is trying to cobble together a network to give customers fast, affordable Internet access for laptops and mobile devices in their homes, cars, commuter trains -- almost anywhere. "Nobody has fulfilled the dream of what mobile broadband could be," says Mr. McCaw, 58 years old, who has been working at it for more than a decade.

It's proving a formidable challenge. WiMax -- a longer-range cousin of the Wi-Fi technology that creates Internet hot spots in homes and coffee shops -- is unproven for large-scale use. Clearwire needs to buy up radio spectrum and erect towers all over the country, which will likely cost billions of dollars. Right now, what Mr. McCaw needs most is a deep-pocketed corporate partner.

Last week, his plans on that front were dealt a blow. Sprint Nextel Corp., which is working on its own WiMax network, scrapped a preliminary agreement to join forces with Clearwire to build a national one. A separate plan to spin off Sprint's broadband unit and merge it with Clearwire was rejected by Sprint's board last week, people familiar with the situation say. The two companies are continuing to talk, these people say.

Mr. McCaw might have other options. Computer-chip maker Intel Corp., cable operator Comcast Corp., Google Inc. and at least one satellite-TV company had all been considering investing in a Sprint-Clearwire joint venture, people close to the matter say. Clearwire has been holding discussions with some of those parties about a direct partnership, these people say.

Key Dates: Craig McCaw's career

• Mr. McCaw has ties to most of today's major wireless carriers through his own investments or colleagues from his early McCaw Cellular venture.
• AT&T Inc.: In 1994, Craig McCaw sold his early cellphone venture, McCaw Cellular, to AT&T Corp. for $11.5 billion. AT&T's wireless assets were subsequently acquired by Cingular Wireless and are now part of the behemoth carrier AT&T Inc.
• T-Mobile USA: One of McCaw's key lieutenants on McCaw Cellular was John W. Stanton. He went on to found another cellphone company called Western Wireless, which then spun off a venture called VoiceStream Wireless in 1998. Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG purchased VoiceStream in 2000 and renamed it T-Mobile USA.
• Alltel Corp.: Mr. Stanton's Western Wireless was ultimately purchased by Alltel Corp. for $6 billion in 2005. Alltel, the nation's fifth-largest wireless carrier, is being taken private by TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs for $24.7 billion.

Sprint Nextel Corp.: McCaw invested in Nextel in the mid-1990s and brought in a new management team into the company. Nextel was purchased by Sprint for $35 billion in 2005, resulting in Sprint Nextel, the nation's third-largest carrier.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119498643110891751.html

There are several web-based shared information systems that seem to have achieved enough critical mass and polish that it is time to seriously consider them when setting up a small company or organization. Two that I will talk about in subsequent articles are are GoogleDocs and CentralDesktop.

Technology Review: New Tricks for Online Photo Editing

This is more than a trick. It appears to me to be a significantly better way to think about reshaping a photograph because it doesn't loose any of the original "message of the photograph". In the illustration to the left, notice that the aspect ratio of the photograph has been changed from landscape to portrait -- without loosing any of the balloons of the landscape version. For me, that is the amazing part of this method.

Check out the video below to hear an explanation about how this is done and then go to the website, rsizr.com to try for yourself.

This morning I awoke listening to Chicago by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, written by Graham Nash in 1970. Although it has been 37 years since this was written, I am struck by two things: First, the world has changed since 1970 -- some for the good (the populist Internet) and some for the bad (almost everything done by the G. W. Bush administration). And second, I still believe in the sentiment of the song. Change happens by the actions of lots of people reaching consensus and showing up to demand change. I particularly like the ending of this particular recording which adds a section of people singing the last refrain.

Chicago by Graham Nash sung by CSNY (4:01) Though your brother's bound and gagged And they've chained him to a chair Won't you please come to Chicago Just to sing In a land that's known as freedom How can such a thing be fair Won't you please come to Chicago For the help we can bring We can change the world - Re-arrange the world It's dying - to get better Politicians sit yourself down, There's nothing for you here Won't you please come to Chicago For a ride Don't ask Jack to help you Cause he'll turn the other ear Won't you please come to Chicago Or else join the other side We can change the world - Re-arrange the world It's dying - if you believe in justice It's dying - and if you believe in freedom It's dying - let a man live it's own life It's dying - rules and regulations, who needs them Open up the door Somehow people must be free I hope the day comes soon Won't you please come to Chicago Show your face From the bottom to the ocean To the mountains of the moon Won't you please come to Chicago No one else can take your place We can change the world - Re-arrange the world It's dying - if you believe in justice It's dying - and if you believe in freedom It's dying - let a man live it's own life It's dying - rules and regulations, who needs them Open up the door We can change the world

Finally, here is a YouTube version that has a lot of the images of the times. I think emphasizes why change was needed in a visceral manner. There is less evidence here that we can change the world. The bits and pieces of the world that were changed can only be seen with the perspective of looking back 30 years and noting things that are for the better today as well as things that are not as good.

What Music Has Changed Your Life?

Last night while listening to Weekend All Things Considered while driving, I heard a "Reader Assignment" which was to write about a piece of music that has changed your life. The first piece of music that entered my mind was a performance by The Band of Up on Cripple Creek which I heard coming out of the kitchen at an AMC Hut in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Why that tune at that place? Who knows. I'm just reporting what first came into mind. (Of course, as I write this, other pieces of music come to mind: Stravinsky's The Right of Spring, Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay, Crosby Stills Nash and Young's Ohio, Mozart's Requiem). But the first thing I thought of was The Band's Up on Cripple Creek.

Of course the hard part is trying to figure out why that song was the first thing to pop into my mind. A little background on the scene. From June 1969 right after I graduated from Yale through June 1971, right before I started at MIT, I worked for two years. One weekend during this period (either Summer of 1969 or Summer of 1970) I hiked with a group of friends in the White Mountains. Our route took us by one of the Appalachian Mountain Club Huts. These huts provide rather comfortable overnight accommodations in picturesque locations along the mountain trails. (We didn't stay in the Hut -- rather camped in tents near the hut -- a lot cheaper).

I remember arriving at the Hut -- the end of our hike for that day -- pretty wiped out. Our usual pattern was to set up our tent for the night and then go explore around the campsite. I decided to just sit back and enjoy the scene from in front of the Hut. In addition to lodging, the crew of the Hut cooks dinner for the paying guests.

The AMC crews were usually larger than life hikers -- people who could carry 80 pound packs along the trail and not seem to get exhausted. Since everything in the Hut had to be carried in and out, this was an essential skill to be on a Hut crew. So, here I was resting after a strenuous hike for me thinking about these guys who seemed to enjoy carrying up at least twice the load that I was carrying, wondering about what was different between them and me.

Shortly, as I am in my contemplative state, I hear, coming out of the kitchen, the sounds of The Band singing Up on Cripple Creek, the perfect song for this location. It just seemed right, and forever after when I hear that song, I think of that beautiful place with its wonderful vista over the mountains.

"When I get off of this mountain
You know where I want to go
Straight down the mississippi river
To the gulf of mexico
To lake charles, louisiana
Little bessie, a girl that I once knew
And she told me just to come on by
If theres anything she could do

Up on cripple creek she sends me
If I spring a leak she mends me
I dont have to speak she defends me
A drunkards dream if I ever did see one

Good luck had just stung me
To the race track I did go
She bet on one horse to win
And I bet on another to show
Odds were in my favor
I had him five to one
When that nag to win came around the track
Sure enough he had won

I took up all of my winnings
and I gave my little bessie half
And she tore it up and blew it in my face
Just for a laugh
Now theres one thing in the whole wide world
I sure would like to see
Thats when that little love of mine
Dips her doughnut in my tea

Now me and my mate were back at the shack
We had spike jones on the box
She said, I cant take the way he sings
But I love to hear him talk
Now that just gave my heart a fall
To the bottom of my feet
And I swore as I took another pull
My bessie cant be beat

Now, its hot in california
And up north its freezing cold
And this living off the road
Is getting pretty old
So I guess Ill call up my big mama
Tell her Ill be rolling in
Bet you know, deep down, Im kinda tempted
To go and see my bessie again"

What is/was it about this song that I liked hearing wafting out of the kitchen of that Hut? Perhaps it was the contrast between the beautiful serene scene I was looking out on and the honky tonk sounds of the song. Here we were in this wonderful location and the song was talking about all of the things I was going to do "When I get off of this mountain..." (I wish: although I was young, unfortunately my love life was not as robust as the singer of this song). Perhaps it was the concluding lines about "this living off the road is getting pretty old" picking up on my feeling hot and sweaty after a hike and a little bit of artistic exaggeration about who I was. I also just liked the sound of not particularly polished song about a scruffy guy mirroring my image of the Hut crew members.

In any case, it has stuck with me and I remember that scene when ever I hear that song.

Maybe not as life changing as some events, but here, after 40 years, I can remember that moment vividly. There must have been some change going on at that moment.

Labels: hope, music, Music Lifts Me Up, musical groups

It's a Kind of a Family. It's a Kind of Insanity.: This Isn't L.A., It's Boston

With 250 candidates running for president of Red Sox Nation, it is pretty hard to predict who will win -- and so, you really have to vote for a person who captures your heart, mind and imagination trusting your own opinion, not the opinions of pundits or the publicity machine of "big name" candidates. So, I'm backing a grass roots candidate named Rob Crawford.

Why? Well, I read an article on Rob's MLBBlog where he describes his values and what he would do if President of Red Sox Nation. His focus is people: About helping people who are down due to illness and don't have easy access to getting Red Sox Tickets. About helping people who are kids and would really love to attend a Red Sox game but can't find a way. For both of these groups, Rob proposed mechanisms for getting these people tickets to games that would change their lives. And finally, about helping people feel good about the Red Sox and themselves by singing. Rob's I’m A Member of Red Sox Nation is a wonderful song that sticks in your head and the music video below is fun to watch.

So, how can you find out about Rob and vote for him? Time is of the essence. Rob has already made the cut -- he is one of the top 11 vote getting finalists. The next two days will narrow the 11 finalists (down from 2500) to a group of 3 who will then have a run-off election. The judges will use two criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff:

1. The number of visitors to each candidate's Red Sox blog, and
2. The number and quality/tone of comments on each candidate's Red Sox blogs.
   

To advance this cause, I invite you to click on Rob's blog:


By simply clicking on this link and thus visiting Rob's blog, your interest will be registered by the "officials" who will determine which candidates advance. Thus, clicking on this link is like a vote for Rob.

And if you would like to have an even greater impact, add a positive comment to Rob's blog. (Apparently the judges are READING all the comments to help them decide!)

Last Wednesday night Rob attended a speak-out for the candidates. His comments began with these words:

Hi. My name is Rob Crawford, and I'm not famous. I'm not a TV baseball personality. I've never played for the Red Sox. My face is not on a plaque in Cooperstown. I have not won a Pulitzer Prize. And I don't have a column in the New York Daily News. I have devoted my career to teaching kids, coaching kids, and raising money to support teachers and kids. . . . [read more on Rob's blog].

October 5 Update: I'm sad to report that Rob did not win the Presidency. But, I still believe in his ideals and hope that he continues to spread his message. Please see my comment on Rob's blog.

Labels: boston, folk music, hope, inspiration, music, Music Lifts Me Up

WSJ Video about Last Lecture

Complete Last Lecture (at end of this article)

Randy Pauch's Website

from the Wall Street Journal:

CMU has a lecture series entitled "Last Lecture Series," in which top professors are asked to think deeply about what matters to them and to give hypothetical final talks. For the audience, the question to be mulled is this: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?

It can be an intriguing hour, watching healthy professors consider their demise and ruminate over subjects dear to them. At the University of Northern Iowa, instructor Penny O'Connor recently titled her lecture "Get Over Yourself." At Cornell, Ellis Hanson, who teaches a course titled "Desire," spoke about sex and technology.

At Carnegie Mellon, however, Dr. Pausch's speech was more than just an academic exercise. The 46-year-old father of three has pancreatic cancer and expects to live for just a few months. His lecture, using images on a giant screen, turned out to be a rollicking and riveting journey through the lessons of his life.

See the short 2 minute video here. Read the article here. Below is the full video, 1 hour 44 minutes. That is long, but if you need some inspiration, watch it in increments.

Labels: hope, innovation, inspiration

Saving History: Revolution in Boston

Below is a preview of a documentary developed by our Lexington friend Rick Beyer.

If you look closely right after the 50 second mark you can see Marsha (blue) and Rick's daughter Bobbie (red) off to the right. Marsha and Bobbie were extras on Rick's shoot in downtown Boston in August. You may also see Marsha's back in the full program, looking at a display case.

The program is airing on the History Channel starting this Saturday September 22, 2007 at 8PM.

Labels: history, video

Across The Universe

Did you grow up in the '60s? Do you like the Beatles? Have I left anybody out? If you answered no to both questions, skip to your next activity.

For the rest of you survivors, make a date to see Across the Universe, Julie Taymore's wonderful fantasy musical weaving of a '60s love story using the songs of the Beatles. This isn't a particularly complex story -- sort of like Romeo and Juliet mixed with Hippies, Greenwich Village, Viet Nam, 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, and the Beatles.

If you are like me, you may want to try to sit away from others in the theater so that you can enjoy yourself and hum along. The actors themselves do all of the singing of the songs and their performances are really good. Shows you how wonderful the Beatles song are. This is the type of film that you can see more than once -- in the same sense that you can see a Shakespeare play more than once or listen to a music album more than once.

Clearly an Oscar contender. Marsha and I loved it -- especially seeing it Saturday night in the Harvard Square Theater where I also saw Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Review in the 1970s...

Labels: film, music, Music Lifts Me Up, musical groups

CedarSeed

I was looking around the web today (that sort of like saying I was looking around the world today) and ran across this beautiful web site by an Lebanese artist / designer that I find delightful. Poke around and you will see some wonderful little pieces of art, craft, and design.

Labels: design, handdrawn

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

There is a fine line between hoarding and collecting. Collecting at least gives you an excuse / explanation.

This is a website devoted to lists of books -- as well as interrelationships between books. In addition it seems to have a large collection of discussion lists about books.

Perhaps you have detected a trend with my pleasure with lists? It's true, I admit it that I have a fascination with lists -- especially complete ones.

Time to stop, I have already revealed enough of my private obsessions...

Labels: lists, organization

From: Harry Forsdick
Date: Sep 3, 2007 1:46 PM
Subject: Quechup: Avoid it like the plague
To: Friends

Friends,

Yesterday, I signed up for a social networking group called Quechup. Due to some ambiguous wording on the website's part, I thought that they would just be checking my address book to see if people on it were already members of Quechup. But noooo, they just went ahead and spammed my entire address book of more than 2000 entries with an invitation forged from me asking people to join this wretched website.

Many people have signed up and responded to me that they have taken my advice since I follow this stuff. Needless to say, I am very upset that I have spent my reputation with you on this matter. See the Post Script to this message to read an explanation about how this happened.

If you did sign up, you can cancel your membership by logging in and then looking for something like "membership" menu. At the bottom of the menu is the cancel operation. I can't be more precise since I have already canceled my membership and can't see the user interface.

To see another explanation about all of this please see:

Extra Spam, Hold the Quechup | Wise Bread

and read the comments on this blog entry:

Quechup And Mass Hysteria

Some people have observed that now that Quechup has my address book, they can use it (and all of the other lists they have collected) to send spam whenever they want. Although this is true, I think people are kidding themselves if they think that their email address is not already on one or more spam address lists.

But, if you are that special someone who has never gotten spam, and you suddenly start to get spam, I apologize in advance for my misstep.

Someone called me up today and said that after she received "my invitation" her AOL system stopped working. She was unable to login to AOL. In addition, when she called up her husband and her daughter, they were also unable to login to AOL. What should she do to fix this?

Needless to say, something like this causes people to assign the cause of every subsequent mishap in their life to the most recent one that has been uncovered and explained.

Although I am willing to apologize for some things, I am only willing to assume a certain amount of responsibility for the failures you may encounter in the rest of your life :-)

-- Harry

P.S. On some further reflection about how I fell for this, here are some observations:

1. I purposely sign up for new websites (or at least new to me) to see what they are all about. Part of my MO is to try stuff out and take some chances. This strategy has always worked well for me, but there are some risks that I usually avoid.
   
   
2. The mechanism for finding people on many social networking sites is one that Quechup is using. The idea behind the mechanism is to see if people with the same email address as is in your address book already belong to the social networking site. If they do, you can link up to those people, if you want. Quechup asks you if you want to use this mechanism using the same descriptions as other social networking sites use. There are two differences in Quechup's mechanism: they don't ask you if you want to invite anyone, and they just send messages to the unfortunate people on your address list.
   
   
3. To complicate matters, lots of my friends pay attention to my recommendations because I keep up to date on these matters -- or should I say, used to pay attention... When I go through my thought patterns on this incident, that's actually what happened to me. A classmate from Yale got caught up in this mess and he Quechup spammed everybody on the list. I saw the invitation and figuring that this guy was reliable, signed up to see what he was excited about. The rest is history.

So, as a result of this experience, I have added the following item to the list of things I think about when dealing with the Internet:

• Before signing up for a website, go to Google and search for it's name. If I had done that, I would have discovered in the first 4 hits the SPAMing of Quechup.
  

I frequently get asked what software should I install on my PC. I also frequently set up machines for people. In either case, here is the checklist I use when advising or installing software on a new PC. I never save copies of free software, rather opting for downloading the latest copy at the time of installation. There are no URLs in this list, but if you search Google for the names in bold font, you will find the latest and greatest reference to the item on the web.

1. □ AVG, an excellent free Virus Protection system. It's the one that I use. Better than the commercial virus protections because it is simple. This is the very first thing I make sure is running. Actually, on Windows XP, there is a firewall that runs as soon as the machine is started so that when you first connect to the Internet, you machine will be protected.
   
   
2. □ Ad-aware, an excellent free anti-spyware program I use. Run this once a month or more frequently if you feel besieged by spontaneous ads appearing in windows on your machine. There are a variety of pop up ad blockers in place, but you don't need to worry about them.
   
   
3. □ Update to the latest version of Windows XP or Vista using the Microsoft Windows Update site. I also do a little tuning of the desktop and toolbars. I usually make the desktop a solid color because it is less confusing. I enable the quickstart toolbar (left side of the bottom toolbar) and add several vital applications and remove all others. I also create a new toolbar typically named "stuff" and put it at the top of the display. This is where I put shortcuts to more frequently used applications. You can add shorts here just by dragging them to the toolbar. I usually make that toolbar autohide so that it isn't in the way -- just move your mouse to the top of the screen and it will appear. If the machine has a small display, I also make the bottom toolbar autohide.
   
   
4. □ Several small improvements to Windows UI for control freaks like me:
   
1. □ Single click to open is a setting for windows that changes the normal double click to open making the entire user interface more like that of the web. I find it much better to have one paradigm for getting things done, rather than having to think Do I double click or single click? all the time.
2. □ Allsnap will help you keep your desktop tidy by urging icons and windows towards a grid.
3. □ Power Menu adds some useful functions to the menu you get when you right click on the icon in the upper left corner of a window. Two that I particularly like are 1) the ability to keep a window on top of everything else and 2) the ability to reduce a window to the tray as a small icon rather than in the list of running applications in the task bar.
4. □ Task Shuffle allows you to rearrange the horizontal list of running apps in the task bar: drag the app to the position you want.
5. □ Tweak how your task bar appears: This is a list of useful tweaks to make the controls on your Windows XP machine (Start menu, task bar) be just what you want them to be.
6. □ TweakUI: This is one of the unofficial WIndows XP powertools that allows you to change a number of the settings used in controlling Windows XP. There are some other interesting tools in the "powertools" set that you can get on the Microsoft Website.
   
   
5. □ Foxit Reader PDF Reader: Better than Adobe Reader
   
   
6. □ PDFCreator: A great tool for creating PDF's from any application that can print. Essential.
   
   
7. □ Adobe Flash: Essential
   
   
8. □ Firefox and configure it with several Firefox extensions that I find very useful:
1. □ Add Bookmark Here 2: Allows you to add a bookmark to a folder in your Firefox bookmarks
   
2. □ Dictionary Search: Allows you to highlight text on a web page and right click choose this and get a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary
3. □ Forecastfox Enhanced: Puts weather information at the bottom of your Firefox browser
   
4. □ Go Up: A simple addition in the top toolbar which allows you to go up on level in a web site's directory structure. Useful if you go to a page and then wonder what else is at this web site.
   
5. □ IE Tab: Allows you to say "Always show this web site in a tab that runs the Internet Explorer browser engine. Useful for web sites that only work with IE.
   
6. □ IE View: Allows you to start up IE showing the current page (Right Click to invoke)
7. □ SearchBar Autosizer: The search bar (Google, or which ever search you prefer (it's configurable)) at the top right of the Browser display will expand as needed when you type characters of a search string
   
8. □ Tab Mix Plus: Additional functions which allow you to change the behavior of how tabs are controlled and created.
9. □ Tiny Menu: Makes the menu at the top of the browser take up much less space.
10. □ XMarks: Synchronizes book marks between multiple computers.
    
    
9. □ MS Office 2000 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint)
   
   
10. □ iTunes, essential
    
    
11. □ Google Earth, magical application
    
    
12. □ Stickies, small notes you can leave for yourself. In this version, there is an alarm system so you can leave notes for yourself that pop up at a given time. Just to be clear, they come from http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/
    
    
13. □ Yahoo Widgets, desktop widgets. Although it says desktop I find that my desktop gets pretty cluttered and so I opt for hiding them in a toolbar which is docked on the right side of the screen. Slide your mouse over to the right edge to see them. I usually download and enable the following widgets:
    
1. □ Clock
2. □ WiFi meter
3. □ CPU load
   
   
14. □ Google ScreenSaver along with some nice images. This screen saver has two great features. First, it is almost as good as the Macintosh OSX panning/zooming screensaver -- the best version of this I've ever seen on a PC. Second -- and this is better than the Mac OSX screensaver -- is that this screensaver allows you to draw images from a wide variety of sources and reference styles, including images in your file system (pretty standard) as well as the really innovative Photo RSS feeds. I have initialized the feed to draw from a flickr.com RSS feed. To change where images come from, right click on the desktop and choose screensaver. The rest is obvious.
    

Labels: lists, PCs, software

NYTimes Art Review: To See the World in Ballpoint Pen

San Jose Museum of Art - IL LEE: BALLPOINT ABSTRACTIONS

Being a doodler, I had to check out this review and website that told something about this exhibit. I was also fascinated by the video below that showed how Il Lee did these drawings.

Labels: art, design, handdrawn

My friend, Lexington resident Rick Beyer, has just told me about a very interesting project he is working on: A documentary film about the Ghost Army: a unit that used all sorts of tricks and artistic talents to create the impression that the Allied forces were operating in much different ways than was actually the truth. More on that later.

I am a firm believer in supporting artists and writers with upfront (tax deductible) cash donations and this message is an appeal for you to do the same. Marsha and I have already donated $100 to the "The Center For Independent Documentary" a non-profit organization that will be funding Rick's current work on the Ghost Army and at the end of this message I am going to ask you to consider giving a donation to this worthy effort. Again, more on that later, but I wanted to make sure you understood what I was asking you to consider up front.


Rick Beyer is an historian, author and film director. He has written three books in a "The Greatest Stories Never Told:" series that are both wonderful to read and beautifully illustrated:

http://rickbeyer.net/stories1/books.html


As his books show, Rick is not just a story teller, but also a talented graphics / visual artist.

Combine these talents together and add time and motion, and you get to his work in documentary films. Rick's company, Plate of Peas Productions has created 6 documentaries which have shown on channels such as The History Channel and A&E:

http://www.plateofpeas.com/ourwork.html

Recently, Marsha had a non-speaking role as a member of the rowdy crowd (typecasting?) in a film about the historical reconstruction of The Old State House is Boston.


Rick's current project, the film documentary, "The Ghost Army", tells a story of deception, art, and showmanship kept secret for nearly 50 years. It is about an extraordinary US Army unit whose mission was to impersonate other army units on the battlefields of Europe in order to fool the enemy. From Normandy to the Rhine they used rubber tanks, sound trucks, and all sorts of tricks to stage a traveling road show of deception.

And that's only half the story. Many of the soldiers were artists recruited from NY and Philadelphia art schools. They literally sketched and painted their way across Europe, creating a unique a highly personal visual record of the war. Here is a trailer that Rick created to generate support for the film:

You can find out more about the Ghost Army at Rick's project website:

http://www.ghostarmy.org

This project has already started and to date Rick and his organization has interviewed more than 20 Ghost Army veterans on camera, and collected more than 500 photographs and artworks for possible use in the film. But they still have a long way to go.

And that is where you can help. I would like to ask you to support Rick in this effort.

There is a really interesting organization named SixDegrees.org who's subtitle is

"It's a small world. You can make a difference"

It's no secret that government funding for the Arts has been decimated in the last 20 years. So, if we can't participate in supporting artists through our taxes, then the only way is to make donations directly to them. In a way, this is more compelling since you can direct your support to projects you really like. And, you will see the difference you will make when Rick's film is completed and shown on TV channels such as the History Channel.

How?

I'm glad you asked:

1. Go to: The Network for Good
2. You will see a "badge". Click on the Donate button.
   
3. Fill out the form making sure you enter "The Ghost Army" in the "Designation (Optional)" field -- this is important if your support is going to get to Rick.
   

It's that easy.

I thank you in advance, as does Rick, for considering this request and for your donation to this good cause for the Arts.

Regards,

Harry

Meosphere

Lists: you either love them or hate them. I have to admit that I have a fascination with them. At times I am a little defensive about this because they reduce understanding of a subject to a rather syntactic recitation of facts rather than deep insight. But, checking off what you have done is an objective way to measure progress.

Read Walt Mossberg's All Things Digital comments.

Check out my Meosphere.

Labels: lists

Wealthiest Americans Ever...
Interactive Feature: The Money Race

Here are two great examples about how to present information using the interactive capabilities of the Internet. The display of the Wealthiest Americans Ever... is great for two reasons: First, it is always important to understand modern "facts" in the context of history. This puts Bill Gates, Warren Buffet's and Sam Walton's fortunes into historical perspective. Second, it is an excellent example about how to show off data in a compact form using the benefits of the interactive Internet.

The second example Interactive Feature: The Money Race (published the next day by the New York Times: way to go NYT) improves on the first example by adding animation so that you can see how candidates raise money over time.

Labels: "information presentation"

Coonamessett Farm

We went out to dinner at Coonamessett Farm near Falmouth, MA. It was wonderful. Here's the deal: CF is a working farm growing veggies and fruit on the Cape. Among other things, the farm is one of those cooperative farms where families can buy a share of the output of the farm for a fixed price per year. In addition, CF offers produce to non-members at normal farm-stand prices. From looking around the web a bit, I can see that one of the big draws is a variety of farm animals present. Naturally, these are popular with animal lovers in general and kids in particular.

But the really unique thing about CF are the dinners they offer on Friday and Wednesday evenings. We went on Friday for the Vegetarian Buffet Dinner. Although I am not a vegetarian, I really enjoyed the meal: several different soups including veggi chili, a complete salad bar with homemade red potato salad and curried couscous, and three more significant entries including Eggplant Parmesan, Broccoli Quiche, and Spinach and Feta Pizza. There is also a Jamaican Buffet and Grill Dinner on Wednesdays. An added element is that they have a large deck area where the tables overlook the fields and buildings of the Farm.

The dinners aren't really cheap ($13 or $18 for adults, half price for kids) but they are decent. And, the entire scene is a wonderful place to go with a group for a relaxing al fresco dinner.

Labels: Restaurants

One of the funnier programs on TV (for me) is the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Normally I wouldn't see it, but because I have a TiVo I can record the program and watch it later. Craig is Scottish and brings all of the humor of Scotland combined with the zaniness of Hollywood to the show.

It is one of those shows (like Letterman) where you have to watch it a while to get the in jokes. Having made that investment, I have spent many pleasant lunchtimes watching while I eat my lunch.

One of the skits that repeats on the show is one where Craig impersonates Prince Charles. These clips crack me up every time I watch them.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson: Prince Charles

Posted Nov 14, 2005

The Hyannis Sound

We went to a wonderful concert last night and I want to share this with you and hope that you get to see them this Summer on Cape Cod. The group is The Hyannis Sound, an a cappella singing group. They perform regularly 4 nights a week at 4 different locations (Falmouth, Hyannis, Chatham and Brewster) Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, through the middle of August (see their Schedule).

This group attracts men in their early 20s from college a cappella singing groups. The group has been performing on the Cape for about 15 years. Each year a couple of new members are added as vacancies happen in the 10 man group. The guys live in one house and appear to have a great time on the Cape. Tim Bongiovanni, a graduate of Lexington High School and Berklee College of Music is a member of the group this year.

Their show is very entertaining as they interleave singing with humorous stories about their lives. I was blown away by their rendition of James Taylor's "Walk Down That Road". In addition, several members of the group have really excellent solo voices, including Micah Christian who has a wonderful high, but light tenor voice, and Cooper Cerulo, the musical director this year, whose Tenor/Baritone voice was rich and mature.

All in all, a wonderful group, and a great concert for all ages and levels of appreciation for a cappella singing. Go see them!

P.S. I should also mention a brother group, The Vinyard Sound, started by the same person who started The Hyannis Sound. If you are on Martha's Vinyard, check them out. They have a similar performance schedule as Hyannis Sound. The Vinyard Sound web site and click on Schedule on the right side of the menu bar.

Labels: music, Music Lifts Me Up, musical groups

Adobe - Lightroom

Every once in a while I have come across a piece of software that just does the right thing with a clear interface. Intuit's Quicken is one such example. Adobe Lightroom is a new example of such an application.

If you are just getting started in digital photography, or if you haven't noticed many differences between how you take pictures in the digital world from the film world, you probably don't even know that you need an application to do the things that Lightroom does.

Lightroom helps you follow a process or workflow -- the steps you must take after you take a digital photograph until you arrive at rendering the photograph in whatever medium (print, slideshow, web) you choose to use. You may not be aware that you are doing this, and you may not currently be doing the same set of steps every time. You should. Why? Because that is the only way you can improve your technique of going from the camera to the ultimate presentation of your photos.

Lightroom helps you follow a standard set of steps you should take with every photograph you take:

1. Off load the pictures from your camera
2. Catalog them according to a standard naming and filing convention.
   
3. Make "mechanical" improvements to a photo such as rotation and cropping
4. Make "subjective" improvements, such as brightness, contrast, color balancing, and a whole host of other possible picture quality improvements
5. Allow you to add labels, titles, captions, tags to photos. Allow you to examine and compare photos and form collections of selected photos.
6. Render a photo or collection of photos in one or more ways including prints, slide shows, and web pages.
7. And, do this all in a completely non-destructive way to the original photo that came from your camera. This is important because mistakes do happen and you never want to modify your original.

And, finally, did I mention that Lightroom is designed to works with the thousands of photos a digital photographer finds s/he has to manage. It has been built with a lot of input from professional photographers who take and process a lot of photos. You may say, well, I am not a professional, so I don't need this. But before long, you will face the same problems that professionals face and the strategies worked out in Lightroom will support you also.

For me, Lightroom has answered a set of needs I have had for quite some time.

How much does it cost? A pretty hefty $300. But wait: are you in school or do you have a child in school? If so, you can get this for $100 through the academic discount.

Labels: photography

Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen

GapMinder.Org

From TED.Org:
Hans Rosling
Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.more ...

GapMinder.Org is a web site where Rosling makes many of the displays and tools available for viewing. It's a lot of fun to interact with the displays.

I discovered Rosling through the TED conference (see below) videos.

From the web site:
About this Talk
You've never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world" using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling's hands, global trends -- life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates -- become clear, intuitive and even playful.

Labels: "information presentation", design, innovation, TED, video

TED: Ideas worth spreading

My friend Joe Walters reminded me about the TED conference, and the wonderful videos of talks given at the conference that are available on the web. From the web site:

"TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers
and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 100 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under
a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted."

I will be posting some talks here as I watch them. They are really very impressive and worth the time spent watching them.

Labels: innovation, TED, video

River Idyll GeoCache
Charles DeGaulle Travel Bug

Several years ago, I bought a Garmin eTrex Vista GPS device and started playing with it. Soon I learned about the whole world of GeoCaching: essentially playing hide and go seek where the clues are a combination of latitude/longitude coordinates and some additional hints if needed. It is a sport in the sense that it gets you out hiking to find a little boxes of trinkets (a cache) hidden in the woods. It is a two part sport in the sense that you can both look for caches as well as create and hide them.

After first trying to find caches with varying degrees of success, on August 31, 2004 I created my first cache out near our summer house in the Birkshires -- a cache named River Idyll. It is situated in a lovely spot overlooking the East Branch of the Westfield River.

At the same time, I placed a travel bug in the cache. A travel bug is a tag attached to some artifact which has a goal. A travel bug is placed in a GeoCache. The idea is when you discover a cache with a travel bug to take the bug and advance it to its goal. My Charles DeGaulle travel bug is a picture of General DeGaulle and his mission is to make it back to Paris, France.

Well, that may be his goal, but over the last 2 3/4 years he has made a little progress, but still has a long way to go. Today I received notice that someone had retrieved my travel bug and was going to move it somewhere else. Over the period that Gen. DeGualle has been traveling back to Paris, he has already traveled 3036 miles!, but is still somewhere near Fayetteville, NC. I was very hopeful when he made it to the Atlanta Hartsville Airport, figuring that he would be taken to France by some traveler going from Atlanta to France. But, no such luck. In any case, it has been fun to watch him knock about the southeast on is random travels. Below is a map of where he has been in the last 2 3/4 years:

Labels: geocaching, gps, travel

TiVo Swivel Search

Background

People have continually predicted that TiVo was toast as the Cable Companies began to bring out inexpensive DVRs. The theory was that although TiVo was a pioneer, like many pioneers they would be overtaken by the second wave of companies that were more nimble and cost conscious than TiVo, who would become complacent and slow to innovate a second time.

I have to admit that I actually fell for the Motorola DVR from my cable company (RCN) -- a cheap DVR for the HDTV in my. Actually at the time, I had no choice because the MOTO DVR was the only DVR that I knew of that could record HDTV. But I was sorely disappointed by the only game in town: Having been a TiVo user for years, the MOTO DVR was vastly inferior in my view. Not only was it unreliable (requiring frequent reboots) but the program listings were vastly inferior -- one of the most annoying things was that they only went out ahead four days, where as TiVo's listing went out two weeks.

After a while, TiVo came out with the Series 3 machine which was capable of recording HDTV, but it cost an arm and a leg ($800)! I was in a dilemma: Was I being too picky, was my experience with the MOTO DVR unusual? Then I read an article by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal (The HDTV Dilemma: Pay for TiVo’s Recorder Or Settle for Cable’s?) that advised people to dump their Moto HD DVRs, bite the bullet and move over to the TiVo Series 3. This was all I needed and, combined with TiVo's offer to transfer my lifetime subscription to the new machine, I ordered immediately ordered one. I haven't been disappointed!

The TiVo Series 3 is a wonderful machine: it does everything my old TiVos have done in a seamless way for both SDTV and HDTV. Very smooth.

But, now back to the concern I had heard by many pundits that low priced DVRs from vendors like Motorola would eventually overtake TiVo. You have to take these analyses seriously because they are based on experience with many comsumer products, not just TiVos. The argument was that TiVo was like Betamax -- high-end, really good, but you didn't need really good, you would be just as happy with a more universal VHS quality product.

And then I read an article by David Pogue (TiVo Plays a Trump Card: Web Smarts - New York Times) which indicated that TiVo had some cards up its sleeve that would distance itself ahead of the pack of wolves nipping at it tail. In particular, it was taking advantage of the Web to make the TiVo box be the true Living Room Media Controller. All sorts of innovations were coming to TiVos in the near future. Well, that was a long introduction to the subject of this entry...

TiVo Swivel Search

There have been several recent additions to TiVo features that I have passed up on using: I don't really have need to watch a TiVo program recorded by one TiVo on a TV connected to another TiVo -- or on my PC. Also I'm unwilling to pay Verizon to allow me to watch recordings on my TiVo on my cell phone -- I just don't find myself in places where the only way I can access TV is on a cell phone. But, there are two services (one old, one new) that I do use and these along justify using TiVo. The old one allows me to access photographs and music from a variety of sources on the internet, including my own PC. In addition, it allows me to access other sources of information (Yahoo Weather, Traffic) on the Internet - -but not a complete browser. And finally it supports a small number of games -- a capability that I like when I'm really interested in pushing in the clutch. In addition, I find that simple games on the TV in the living room (rather than on a PC in the home office) is reminiscent of the old days with parlor games: you can actually play with multiple people sitting in comfortable chairs.

But, (finally) the new feature that I really like, and think is a huge improvement, is Universal Swivel Search (wow, they must have been desperate for a unique name: I think they could have left out the in the title, and captured the entire sense of the feature). Currently TiVo searches a database of listings of upcoming TV programs. In what must have been a test, a while back they added some product review and video blog Video streams from the Web to the database. If you selected one of these, TiVo would download the video using it's internet connection.

Today, my TiVo informed me that I has just received the latest update which included Swivel Search, a generalization of the previous test capability. Now I the database is augmented with both free video on the Internet as well as paid downloads from Amazon. Just as important as being able to search this expanded database is the integration of this in with the capability of examining an existing program that you have recorded on your TiVo and ask to see related programs -- related by subject, actors, directors, etc.

For example, I had a recording where Chris Cooper was one of the stars. I asked to see more programs with Chris Cooper and I found Syriana. I'd already seen Syriana and liked it, so I asked to see more like the subject of Syriana and came across The Good Shepherd, a film I had wanted to see, but didn't. I clicked on it and discovered that I could download it from Amazon for $1 to be able to play it one time or $15 to own it. This is really a big thing because it allows me the same sense of searching the web and with a couple of button clicks to be able to download for a very reasonable price a video.

TiVo as usual is way ahead of the pack.

Labels: DVR, TiVo

This is a great list of annoying interactions that go on between clients and web designers. Even in my limited experience, I have experienced almost all of them. In our enthusiasm and can-do attitude, I am afraid that part of the problem is that web designers/implementers have created this impression of the web. The only solution is to be willing to decline to get involved when you suspect that you will be hearing too many of these annoyances: that may be the most important skill in being a web designer/implenter.

Music Lifts Me Up. Recently when our local State Representative held a night of favorite protest songs, I was unjustly disappointed that more of my favorites weren't played. This was clearly his show. I should get my own of I want my stuff played.

So, I am about to launch a series of entries in my blog discussing and playing my own favorites. The title of the series: Music Lifts Me Up. To see the complete collection (click on the tag below with the series name).

Labels: Music Lifts Me Up

Today's recollection is a folk singer named Fred Neil. I have no idea where I first heard Fred Neil, but his rich, deep voice, his wide variety of musical styles featuring slow ballads through loud upbeat songs accompanied by his 12-string guitar has left a lasting audio impression on me. Recently I tracked down a number of recordings that brought back great memories. I present them for your listening pleasure.

1. The Other Side of This Life
2. Travelin' Shoes
3. Gone Again
4. A Little Bit of Rain
5. The Water is Wide
   

While you are listening, here are a couple of articles about Fred Neil:

• Talkin' Picture
• Fred Neil (1936-2001)
  

And finally, here is a video with Fred Neil's The Dolphins as the soundtrack:

Labels: folk music, music, Music Lifts Me Up, musical groups

Saturday night we met Alex and Kathy in Newburyport to hear The Roches. For those of you not familiar with this group, let me try to characterize them: Bell-like high voice (Terre), clear middle range voice (Suzzy) and deep low voice (Maggie) singing in the close harmony that only people who have sung together for a long time can accomplish. Combine with that a sense of values influenced by the '60s, New York City, and a good dose of zaniness, and you have my impression of the Roaches.

They have a nice MySpace page that has some good samples of how they sound (or at least sounded in their prime) Hammond Song is a great example of their close harmony and No Shoes shows off a little bit of their zaniness. Like us all, their voices have aged and the highs are harder to get to. But the values haven't changed. We had a great time.

The opening act from Ipswitch MA native Jake Armerding we a really nice surprise. I'll talk about his performance in another entry.

Labels: folk music, music, Music Lifts Me Up, musical groups

Here is a very funny video from Saturday Night Live: funny because Walken's answers to the census taker's questions are answers a little off topic...

Labels: humor, video

YouTube - Time Lapse Video of Guy Driving Across the Country

I am about to start learning about time lapse photography. It turns out that while it used to take a lot of special purpose expensive equipment to do this, today with digital cameras and computers it is relatively easy. Now you can focus on technique rather than equipment.

Labels: photography, time lapse, video

My mother used to work for the New York Times. Every once in a while, she used to bring home a newsletter published by Theodore Bernstein, managing editor of The New York Times, entitled Winners and Sinners containing examples of good writing and headlines, as well as mistakes that made it into the paper. This is an example of the type of item that would be labeled a Winner:

Headline in the New York Times on the article Seeking the Keys to Sexual Desire

Birds Do It. Bees Do It. People Seek the Keys to It

Labels: humor

ColorJack

ColorJack: Sphere (Color Theory Visualizer)

I love color! Here is a very interesting web site devoted to understanding color. The Sphere is a very interesting web application which can help you create sets of complementary colors.

Labels: color

GeoURL (2.0)
Tell the world about your web site in terms of where you are located. Beautiful map showing registered web sites:

Labels: gps, mapping, web

I receive several excellent free digital photography newsletters:

1. Photojojo
2. Digital Photography School

Labels: photography

There are more and more examples of applications that are using cellphones for input and output and web apps and email as the engine. Here are two WSJ articles describing two kinds of cellphone based apps:

1. Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration - WSJ.com This one is about marrying cell phone txt messaging to web micro blogs


2. Making Voice Mail More Like Email - WSJ.com This one is about marrying cellphone voice messages to email.

Labels: cellphones, webapps

Yahoo! Pipes and The Web As Database

My number one interest has always been reuse of existing programs in new uses. This interest is based on my love of programming -- which, after all, is continual reuse of various snippets of patterns for doing things strung together with the connective tissue of the programming language. When I managed the development of the PINPaper (Personal Internet Newspaper) in 1995 the main premise was that there was a lot of news information available on the Internet but I was only interested in a certain focused set of topics. So, we developed special purpose programs to sift through all of this information to pick out only those articles that satisfied a keyword search for the topic.

Last week, Yahoo announced Yahoo Pipes, a general purpose system with a nice visual interface for programming such extractions and recombinations of information on the Web. Although I haven't built anything with this system yet, I believe it is a good contribution to the activity of reuse.

Labels: programming, webapps

Visited Countries

Nice, simple site that helps you generate a map of the countries in the world which you have visited. Here's mine:


There is a companion site for US states, Visited States. Here's mine:

Labels: travel, webapps

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field - New York Times

This is a beautiful article about a team, a coach and a mother. The team is composed of refugee/immigrant boys who are bound together by their love of soccer. The coach is a tough Jordanian woman coach who teaches her team that complacency and indifference do not belong on the soccer field. The mother, Beatrice Ziaty, is a refugee from the Ivory Coast who managed to bring her children all the way to Clarkston, GA, a town that has been changed by the settlement of immigrants who now make up more than 50% of the town's population.

If you read this article, make sure you view the multimedia slide show.

Labels: hope

Deep South 2007

Marsha and I are leaving on January 22 for an 8 week trip to the Deep South -- through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. We'd love for you to follow along on our trip at Deep South 2007.

Labels: travel

Open House

Tonight Marsha, Will and I attended Jay Kaufman's Open House -- a once a month meeting he holds addressing different topics of interest to his constituents. This month the topic was The Music of Politics, the Politics of Music. The guest was Lexington resident Marilyn Beyer host of WUBM folk radio.

Although I enjoyed the meeting, somehow I left wanting something different. I thought there was a little bit too much Folk and not enough Politics. When Jay asked for people's lists of protest songs, mine included:

• Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Ohio
• The Who: Won't Get Fooled Again
• Bob Dylan: Masters of War
• Bob Dylan: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
• Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A'Changing
• Bob Dylan: With God on Our Side
• Phil Ochs: I Ain't Marching Anymore
• Barry McGuire: Eve of Destruction
• Billy Holiday: Strange Fruit
• Marvin Gaye: What's Goin' On

I can understand with Marylin being the guest that the selection got vectored off toward mostly Folk, but I felt that there were many important Protest songs that weren't exactly Folk and weren't represented. On the other hand, I thought Marylin's selections were comprehensive in that they went from the very old (Civil War) to very new (reaction to 9/11 written in 2006) and were probably more representative than my Vietnam Era selection.

One of the highlights of the evening was when Lexington resident Sam Berman was identified as the first person (long before the Kingston Trio) who sang "Charlie and the MTA". After the song, Sam was asked to explain: He talked about how he and his singing group had conversation where they imagined what would happen if someone got on the subway without the extra nickel to cover the fair increase put into effect by the opponent of their candidate for Mayor of Boston. Sam's future sister-in-law wrote the lyrics and the rest is history. On a little further research, I found the following version of the story:

Walter A. O'Brien died last month. The Boston Globe, Thursday, July 9, 1998, pp. B1 & B6 carried an appreciation of the man and his association with the song "Charlie on the MTA." The article credits the idea for the song to Sam Berman and Arnold Berman. The song itself was written by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes using the melody of "The Wreck of Old 97." Jacqueline Steiner wrote to the Globe on July 18, 1998, p. A14, with several corrections of fact in the article. She says that O'Brien's name was changed to George O'Brien when the song was recorded, because, according to his family, the recording company "did not want to make a 'hero' of a man who had been associated with the Progressive Party." The July 9 article says that O'Brien was denounced as a Communist by the Massachusetts version of the House Un-American Committee. The election song was written for the 1949 Boston Mayoral election in which James Michael Curley lost to John Hynes. In 1957 O'Brien returned to his home state of Maine and became a school-librarian and book store owner.

Henry Scannell
Reference Librarian
Microtext & Newspaper Dept.
Boston Public Library

It was great to meet Sam in person after he and many others on the lex-polrel list have tried to keep the Progressive spirit and message alive in Lexington throughout the Bush administration. Lately it's been getting easier as Bush continues his quest to become the most inept President the US has ever had... There, I said it, and added a little more Politics to the evening.

Labels: lexington, music

Remember the World Almanac? I used to love leafing through its pages at the various articles. One type that I've always loved are timelines: history, science -- events of all types. Well it still exists as a printed book, doing as well as it ever did, I guess. But, unfortunately they haven't figured out how to put their material online and make money off it. So, I resort to Wikipedia.

I stumbled across an article about events in October of 2006 and loved reading the descriptive paragraph summarizing October 2006. I was hoping to capture 12 such paragraphs and put them together into a narrative for the year.

October 2006 was a month with thirty-one days, like all Octobers, that began on a Sunday. The month was marked by a nuclear test by North Korea that prompted that passing of Resolution 1718 by the United Nations Security Council. Also at the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon was elected to succeed Kofi Annan as the secretary-general and Belgium, Indonesia, Italy and South Africa were elected to two-year terms on the Security Council; the four nations and Ban Ki-moon are expected to begin their tenures in January 2007. A fifth temporary on the Security Council was still up for grabs at the end of the month. The Nobel Prizes for the year were awarded, with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Lesotho adopted a new flag, Several national elections took place around the world during October 2006 and a scandal involving former United States Congressman Mark Foley was at the forefront just ahead of November elections in the United States. Microsoft Corporation released version 7 of its Internet Explorer internet browser software.

Unfortunately, not all of the months have such lead off paragraphs. Instead, I direct you to the article in Wikipedia about 2006 with its links to the 12 month articles about last year.

Labels: history, timelines

Stranger Than Fiction

Labels: film

There is great confusion about focal lengths of lenses on digital cameras. The numbers quotes in specs for digital cameras are difficult to relate to the 35mm film camera world because if you rely on the strict measurements of focal length, then you have to take into consideration the dimensions of the digital sensor which varies from camera to camera and is almost always different than the dimensions of a 35mm film camera. Frequently you will see two numbers: one the optical zoom factor -- say 3x or 10x -- and the 35mm equivalent focal length. But to really make sure you understand your lens, you need to understand the relevant parameters that need to be considered when trying to characterize the focal length of a (zoom) lens in the digital camera world:

1. Focal length
2. 35mm equivalent focal length
3. Minimum focus range
4. Macro focus range
5. Optical zoom

The easiest way for people to understand the focal lengths of digital cameras with their varying sensor sizes is to use what the focal length would be if the sensor was the same as on "35mm Cameras". Of course that term isn't really accurate. It really refers to "135 film" where the image dimensions (i.e., the "sensor") is 36mm x 24mm.

Labels: photography

Here is a time lapse video of how Picasso painted a picture found by my frequent source, Richard Homonoff. I find it fascinating how Picasso really changed things as time goes on. Clearly the canvas is where he did his thinking.

Labels: art

Munich

We rented Munich from NetFlix and enjoyed it. Again, like the Sleeper Cell series on ShowTime, this film shows the mistakes, messy botched operations that must go on all of the time in covert operations.

This is the story of what happened after the 1972 Munich Olympic Terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic Team. There were 11 terrorists identified by the Mosad who had a primary role in the hostage taking. Israel wanted all 11 assassinated and this movie is the story of that operation that spanned over the next 5 years.

This picture leaves you with a lot of questions about what went on, whether it was justified, and wondering what would happen in the future to the assassins.

Labels: film

This is a very useful blog where the author gives little recipes for doing things on / for / using your computer and the Internet. This is is Tips & Tricks or How do you do ... type of site. Here is an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article about Lifehacker and Ms. Trapani:

Gina Trapani is always looking for a clever shortcut -- from a better way to organize her email inbox to keeping track of her Web passwords. So, it seems, are plenty of other computer users.

Ms. Trapani, 31 years old, is the editor of the Lifehacker technology blog, which dispenses do-it-yourself advice and time-saving computing tips. Traffic to the site, one of several blogs published by Gawker Media, has surged since its launch two years ago as it has become a must-read for many computer novices and geeks alike.

"She focuses on information that'll make her readers' lives more productive," said Robert Scoble, author of the Scobleizer blog and a former Microsoft Corp. blogger. "That's quite different from other bloggers who share gossip, give opinions or break news."

Ms. Trapani fills her blog with tips and shortcuts -- or "life hacks" -- on addressing the kinds of problems that, increasingly, technology novices try to solve -- everything from setting up a home network to migrating from a Windows computer to a Mac. Other topics, such as how to use a cellphone to send and receive money, cater to a more savvy crowd, but contain the same sort of detailed, step-by-step instructions. Two of the most popular articles on the site have been about creating automatic hard-drive backups and transferring music from an iPod to a computer (instead of from computer to iPod).

Ms. Trapani, who manages a staff of three writers, is something of an anomaly among bloggers. She avoids writing about herself and her posts are free of the sarcasm and snarky attitude that other blogs -- particularly those on technology -- use as calling cards. The former software programmer says she prefers to stay out of the limelight. Any publicity about herself, instead of the site, "makes me want to climb under my desk and hide," she said. "But that's just my inner geek."

Labels: web

Sleeper Cell

As those of you who know me, I am a big fan of espionage stories -- but since the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11, there has been quite a shift in stories of that genre. I can find occasional TV series like MI-5 and I know about, but have never watched the popular Alias TV series and its excuse for looking at Jennifer Garner...

Recently, I started viewing Sleeper Cell on ShowTime and I like it a lot. It's timely, informative and scary. Timely as in you occasionally hear about the concept of a sleeper cell in the USA -- usually from some of the more alarmist news outlets. Informative in the sense that in addition to intrigue there is a lot of background on the motivation behind terrorist attacks. Scary in that it isn't too hard to imagine something like this happening. Of course it is a bit over the top, and that is to be expected for any television drama.

One of the things I also liked is that it is messy -- i.e., it is like real life. Not everything works out. The operations frequently fall apart as they would in real life.

In any case, if you get a chance to view this, give it a shot.

Labels: film

Dexter

This was the first series I committed to watching on ShowTime. It turns out that ShowTime (owned by CBS) is a pretty good cable channel.

When I describe this to people, they must wonder about me... Dexter is a serial killer who works for the Miami Police CSI Unit. The series tells the story in three time periods -- when Dexter was a young boy, when he was a teenager and now, when he is in his late 20's early 30's.

When he was a young boy, his father Harry, a Miami police officer who had adopted him, recognized certain traits relating to killing animals that he understood were the precursors of the profiles of serial killers. Harry worked to instill into Dexter a code of behavior so that Dexter could channel his obsession to result in as little harm as possible.

As a result, Dexter has become a Blood Spatter expert for the Miami CSI for his day job. In his spare time, he pursues his avocations by making sure that criminals he encounters in his day job who might otherwise escape capture and punishment do not get away... Thus the channeling his obsession to do good (for some value of good...).

Of course he is always vulnerable to getting caught so this adds to the suspense. In addition, there are several other suspense generating mechanisms in play.

Once you get by the blood, this is an excellent television series. There have been two seasons which you can still see and there is another season planned for the future.

Finally, here is an interview with the author, Jeff Lindsay.

Labels: film

We Are Marshall

I am not ashamed to say I had to wipe away the tears during this emotional, moving film. It was, in fact, a reaffirmation to me that I still had empathy for people in pain and grief. After all of the outrageous language and accusations that have gone on in the last 6 years, I sometimes wondered if the outrage had made me uncaring for others. Glad to say my sensitivity is still intact.

In any case, back to the film. First, it is a true story: they are always better. The acting is excellent too: nothing glamorized. Matthew McConaughey is charming, unwilling to give up and unshaven. Matthew Fox is believable as the brooding assistant coach who missed the plane that crashed. And David Strathairn fits the image of a small town college president.

This is a great picture for parents to see with their kids.

Labels: film

Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell: Amazing Tap Dancing

I was going to title this first entry for the new year as "In Defense of TV", but I realized that it wasn't television that I wanted to praise, but rather the reproduction of real events by the use of video and sound.

Frequently people cast aspersions on the amount of TV we Americans watch -- and probably justifiably so. But this video shows that the medium is fine -- and in fact sometimes superior -- its, as Marshall McLuhan said, the medium that is the significant part.

This video clip (of the film) which was shot in one take, illustrates my point. My friend Tom Fortmann found it and let me know about it. Although possible, and perhaps that would be the artistic challenge, it would be difficult to come up with words that left me with the impression that this video engenders.

To see more Fred Astaire videos, go here for a collection of videos assembled by my friend Richard Homonoff.

Labels: video, web

Yesterday, I wrote about Jumpcut. This morning, I tried to see how easy it is to create and publish one of these videos on my own web site. Here is the results of about 15 minutes of work in my pajamas this morning...





Of course the real time is taken in one of these apps when you go to improve it slightly: you can triple the time if you go for perfection...

Labels: video, web

Jumpcut - Make Amazing Movies Online

A while back, I wrote the following message to friends: Hello Television Networks...? The gist of that article is that soon we will have the tools to pull together clips from all sorts of sources into compilations which approximate shows.

Well, it took about 1.5 months for me to come across several tools that are headed in that direction. Jumpcut is a tool that allows you to create such a compilation online out of media you have on your PC. I say "media" because you can upload video, music and still images to jumpcut.com and put the clips together with titles and transitions to produce a pretty sophisticated flash movie.

This is like having iMovie in your browser: and jumpcut does the hosting! No download of your results yet, but they have got to be thinking about how to do that. Even if they charged me a couple of bucks to download the video I created with their tools, I would gladly pay: it is certainly a lot easier than installing the tools and hosting the video myself (and I am usually against such approaches, preferring to do everything myself). Jumpcut is so easy to use, video compilations should start jumping out at us -- either from Jumpcut or any of several others in this space.

Labels: video, web

Digital Picture Frames

The web site above is a very nice survey article about digital picture frames.

For quite some time, we have had a iMac in our kitchen which we use for both a computer, but also as a digital picture frame. By using the excellent Macintosh screen saver, we get a wonderful slide slow which runs when we are not using the computer. I point the screen saver at the pictures I have taken from our latest trip.

Inspired by our kitchen display, a friend and his son built a digital picture frame out of a flat panel display and an old PC running Linux. He mounted the picture frame on the outside wall of a closet and put the computer in the closet. Unfortunately, the computer is not connected to the network and so he has to load new pictures to his frame using a CD.

A while back, when I was trying to use gadgets to keep in contact with my aging mother, I bought a Cevia frame which was pretty cool. You subscribed to their rather expensive service and the picture frame would dial up the service each night and download pictures that you could leave for it using a web interface.

It worked quite well, but the telephone hookup was a little annoying to rely on and the web interface was a little too difficult to use very often.

Inspired by all of this, I have come back to the idea of building a large digital picture frame based on an inexpensive HDTV as the computer monitor and a small wireless PC which could be connected to via the web (or via FTP) for downloading photos or photo shows to be displayed. The parts and the software exist to build a 20x30" flat panel display which could show a continuous presentation of digital photos -- or any other type of presentation you could show on your computer monitor.

All that I need to do is to take the time to build it. More on this later...

Labels: digital, photography

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
JavaScript

For the past 10 years, I have concentrated my programming activities in JavaScript, a scripting language in which programs run inside a client browser. Since I have been focusing primarily on what the user sees on the web, this has served me well. But there were always limitations.

Recently, I have gotten interested in Wikis, which is a particular style of web that allows for both reading and writing. To support writing, it must have a content management system -- a system to hold the contents of a web page and which allows updating that content. I choose to focus on pmWiki because it seems to be a Wiki system which encouraged extensions -- which has turned out to be extremely useful in getting a basic mechanism to do what I want it to do. pmWiki is written in PHP, another scripting language. Unlike JavaScript, PHP scripts run on a server and can produce results (html code) that is shown in a browser.

So, why two scripting languages? Why isn't there a JavaScript that can run on a server? Why isn't there a PHP that can run on a client? For a long time, I couldn't figure out the answers to these questions. Finally, I think I have figured this out.

The differences have to do with the original purpose of the two scripting languages, and the major influences on each of them. In reality, there really isn't any difference between them -- or for that matter between them and Perl, Python and a bunch of others (see Scripting Language). The difference is due to the focus of JavaScript on running in the user's browser -- on the client side, rather than in the service provider's server -- on the server side.

If a script runs on the client side, then it must be prevented from violating the security of the user's computer: with client-side scripts, the script is downloaded from some other source -- whose motives are unknown. To prevent harm from being done, JavaScript has all sorts of restrictions placed on what can be done. One big one is, no interactions with the client computer's file system. This has such a big influence on the language that almost no one thinks of running JavaScript on the server side because it has no way to change the state of anything other than the bounded environment in which it runs. This is not because it couldn't be, but because the developers of JavaScript spent all of their creative energies working in an environment where they were just focused on activities they could perform in a web browser.

The developers of PHP focused their energies on all of the functionality you must have to be a general purpose programming language which can access all of the resources of an Internet connected computer system: they did not spend any time thinking about how to restrict PHP so that it could run client side.

And that is the difference.

I must admit that I am still somewhat surprised that someone hasn't made a bigger effort to develop a version of JavaScript that is fully competitive with PHP, Perl and the host of other server side scripting languages. There are some implementations of JavaScript that run on the server side, but they don't seem to be very popular -- PHP and Perl dominate server side scripting.

Labels: javascript, php, programming, web

Worth100

There are lots of examples of photographs that have been hacked to put the head of one person on the body of another. Usually you can tell.

Worth100 is a web site dedicated to professional artists who can do wonders with photoshop. Today I received several images, shown below that are both comical but also a testimony what you can do in this area.

Labels: humor, photography

VistaPrint

For several years (maybe 5-7) I have used a web-based service for printing business cards. VistaPrint offers a fully automated authoring, management and ordering web site where you can produce beautiful cards. They have a rather aggressive sales strategy where they offer "free" business cards -- followed by an active "upselling" experience. In any case, they are pretty good and I recommend them.

Here are some samples of cards that I have created in the past.

Labels: webservices

Technology Review: Hyperlinking Reality via Phones

"Nokia researchers are working on a system that allows physical objects to be identified and connected to the Internet through mobile-phone screens.

"A Nokia research project could one day make it easier to navigate the real world by superimposing virtual information on an image of your surroundings. The new software, called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), is designed to identify objects viewed on the screen of a camera phone.

"The Nokia research team has demonstrated a prototype phone equipped with MARA software and the appropriate hardware: a global positioning system (GPS), an accelerometer, and a compass. The souped-up phone is able to identify restaurants, hotels, and landmarks and provide Web links and basic information about these objects on the phone's screen. In addition, says David Murphy, an engineer at Nokia Research Center, in Helsinki, Finland, who works on the project, the system can also be used to find nearby friends who have phones with GPS and the appropriate software."

Labels: advtech, cellphones, gps

Geonames reverse address geocoding

What is that? You know about typing an address and having Google Maps show you where the address is? Well, the reverse of that is looking at a Google Map and having a program tell you the street address. This Google Maps mashup allows you to navigate around a map and when you have found the place you want, click on the map and it will tell you the street address that corresponds to the place -- or at least one street address since many times there are multiple ways of looking at a point on a map.

Reverse address geocoding is just one of the many things done at www.geonames.org.

Labels: mapping

From: Harry Forsdick
Date: Oct 27, 2006 3:55 AM
Subject: Hello, traditional TV Networks...?
To: Friends

I ran across something yesterday on CNet that I think is very appealing and answers the questions many people are asking about Video on the Web, such as "I don't understand the appeal of 2-3 minute snippets of video. Who is going to watch that stuff?"

Well, check out:

http://www.cnettv.com/9710-1_53-24285.html

With NBC already downsizing their news department, and CBS, and ABC not far behind, I thinking this example shows how people will want to get their multisegment TV shows in the future. Like everything else on the Internet, instead of a small number of nightly news shows, or weekly magazine shows ( e.g., 60 Minutes), this approach allows hundreds of thousands of people to participate in collecting and ordering multiple 2-3 minutes segments together into a half hour or hour show.

And furthermore, with the index on the right side of the screen, the viewer gets to decide what s/he wants to see.

This is why YouTube is worth $1.6Billion to Google. Like the Blog world, these compilations will produce a lot of junk, but there will be the standouts that get widely read because they contain superior content -- or selection of content from the millions of 2-3 minute video segments produced each day and hosted by the GTubes on the Internet. In addition there will be a lot of compilations that have appeal to smaller, focused audiences.

So, although I can imagine the major networks will start making use of this, I can also see millions of the following multisegment shows available on the Internet:

• This Week in Lexington: Highlights from various (Board of Selectmen, School Committee, Carey Lecture Series, High School Football game) town public meetings and events.
• Watch Your Baby Grow: Monthly advice for new parents including segments on the audience's actual kids as they grow up.
• (A smaller audience) Smith Family 2006 Year in Review: A month by month set of slide shows and video clips.
• ...
  

As important as the ability to string together multiple short clips (which, after all is how most news shows are structured) is the preservation of the structure of compilation, and the ability for the viewer to choose what is viewed: remember the promise of Interactive TV? Well, I think this is an example of what we were talking about.

I don't know enough about YouTube to understand whether there is already such a facility in that system. In any case, I think you will see Google starting to make use of these sorts of ideas with GTube.

Labels: video

Hoarding and Clutter

For the past week or so, I have been unable to work on two projects which I need to get done in order to move on. I have trouble understanding why I am doing this.

This reminds me of another problem issue I have: hanging on to things that I might need someday which is usually called hoarding. This association caused me to remember a wonderful radio program I heard (and saved, naturally) from The Infinite Mind. I don't think I am as far gone as some of the people described on that program -- but I can understand all of the feelings those people talk about. In any case, I offer this excellent, hour-long discussion of Hoarding and Clutter.

Now, I am going to look for something to handle my procrastination problem. I may or may not be successful, but at least it postpones having to work on the boring projects that need to get done :-)

Labels: hope

The Boston Harborwalk

This is something new to me. It is a walking tour of the Boston waterfront. It isn't complete yet, but it is a great idea. It goes from Deer Island in the North to the Kennedy Library in the south. There is a downloadable Audio Guide of the central Boston part of the walk. The website identifies all of the sites along this route. Clearly a multi-day activity (as in it would take a week to do it if you traveled the entire distance).

Labels: boston, travel

I received this as part of a message this morning:

3 bedroom House for Rent- Belmont, MA We are taking a year-long sabbatical from summer '07 through summer '08 and would like to rent our house to a wonderful family or couple. 8 rooms: 3 br, 2 1/2 baths; kid-quiet, friendly neighborhood; excellent school district, close to playgrounds, library, 1 mile from Belmont Center. For further information, please contact Audrey Ades.

Always a dreamer, I got curious about what this person did to be able to take a year-long sabbatical. So, I started searching the web to see what I could find out. It didn't take long for me to discover that Audrey Ades was a therapist working in Boston. Since this was not an academic position, I still wondered if the word "sabbatical" was being used to refer to a leave of absense from an academic job, so I looked further -- as in the next listing on Google. It was a reference from the Johns Hopkins Magazine which said:

Paul and his wife of 10 years, Audrey Ades, adopted their son from Korea last May.

Interesting, so I clicked on the link and discovered that there was a lot more to this Google reference than I initially realized -- because Paul Friedman had died on 9/11.

Suddenly, this story took a left turn into 9/11. Not that I should be surprised, but I realized the profound effect 9/11 still has on our national psyche. I forgot about finding the academic connection to sabbatical, who the "we" in the original article referred to, but rather proceeded to find out more information about Paul Friedman, who he was, how he died. There is also a nice article on the Remember: September 11, 2001 web site

I wonder how long we will continue to run across these connections. I suspect for the rest of my life, and then some. Like the Sinking of the Titanic, Pearl Harbor and ... 9/11.

Have a wonderful sabbatical, Audrey.

Labels: hope

For a long time I have wanted to purchase a small camera I could have with me all of the time. I used to own a Canon S100, one of the first such cameras. This week, I purchased, for the same price, a Canon SD800 IS -- which is smaller, has a longer zoom, wider wide angle, image stabilization, and 7Mpixels.

It is a beautiful camera with lots of automatic features as well as the ability to control most everything manually.

Canon SD800 IS
Review
Fan Web Site
Amazon

Labels: photography

A couple of interesting articles:

• Powerset: The search engine that would outdo Google
• Hello Natural Language Search, My Old Over-Hyped Search Friend
• Why Search Sucks & You Won't Fix It The Way You Think

It's always fun to try to spot the next winner. This article is an advanced peak at a company claiming to be able to put more language understanding into searching. This of course is a better way of asking and answering questions than any of the viable search engines of today -- but, many people have tried to do this before and failed for a variety of reasons.

If these guys can actually:

• understand questions without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• understand web sites without limiting themselves to a specific domain
• do this quickly

then, they have a winner. Otherwise, it's more of the same hype and failures.

Labels: advtech

Yesterday was a glorious day for the Town of Lexington, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States of America!

As I said the day after the Primary election, and I will say again, it is wonderful this morning to finally be able to feel good about the government officials who were chosen to lead our state and country.

Deval Patrick's victory was indeed, as Sen. Kennedy said, "a shot heard 'round the world" although when Kennedy referred to the "shot heard 'round the world" starting at Concord's Old North Bridge, I could feel a collective discomfort fill the room of Lexingtonians we were watching the returns with...

I have been watching Deval Patrick ever since my son signed on as one of his first paid campaign organizers in early 2005. When he came to Lexington on the day he announced his candidacy he was careful about his answers to questions because he admitted that he hadn't thought through many of the issues. As the campaign went on, he learned more about the issues and applied his values and instincts to coming up with stands on the issues. I believe Deval Patrick represents the good values that we all seek -- honesty, humility, openness and most importantly, a positiveness towards government which he views as people doing good things for each other.

In last night's acceptance speech, I listened attentively to his comments about the Governor acting on behalf of all of the citizens of the Commonwealth -- not just the Democrats and not just the people who voted for him -- all people. His actions during the campaign when he matured his positions on the issues facing the Commonwealth makes me believe him when he says his administration will listen to inputs from all sides, and make decisions based on this information and the set of values he showed us during the campaign.

I thought Kerry Healy's concession speech was excellent. She was gracious, and kind -- a side of her which, if she had shown during the campaign, would have made this a much closer election.

Nation-wide, there was a clear message sent to Washington: Americans are very unhappy with the way our country is being governed. Mid-term elections usually result in a similar erosion of the President's party in Congress. And this year was no exception. We will probably hear from the Bush administration that this normal erosion is a clear victory for their cause. But that is wrong. There was a significant impact of that dissatisfaction yesterday and the results will be a Congress more representative of the people. Congress will no longer be a rubber stamp for the President, and that is good. I believe that the Democrats realize we now need to cause some positive action. I urge you to read and consider the newly written 6 point action plan which reflects long held Democratic Party principles. You can find this at http://www.democrats.org/agenda.html.

Speaking of rubber stamps, many have complained that with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Legislature, there will be no checks and balances in State government. I think there is another way of looking at this: with a responsible Governor such as Deval Patrick in office and an active Legislature which is on the same page as the Governor, rather than having the two branches of Government fighting each other, as we have had in the last 4 years, we are about to have both bodies of Government working towards the same goals.

People who voted against Deval Patrick and feel that it has been a good idea to have this form of antagonistic checks and balances, need to admit that a majority of the Commonwealth disagrees with you.

Looking at the Lexington Results:

( http://tinyurl.com/t9cvv)

an amazing 70% of the registered voters participated in the election. I wonder how much of this was due to interest in the election and how much due to the Get Out The Vote efforts by both parties.

In the Governor's race, twice as many people voted for Patrick as for Healy. But it wasn't four times as many: bi-Partisanship is alive and well in Lexington.

Labels: hope

TravelBrains - Travel adventures that leave you smarter!

We have enjoyed a variety of audio tours you can play in your car as you travel through an area. When we went to Gettsyburg, we purchased one of the best tours that even today our boys refer to fondly -- mostly because of the enthusiastic narrator, Wayne Motts.

Sources for tours of this type are listed above.

Labels: history, travel

Flood Maps:

What will happen if the impact of Global Warming is as dire as some predict. In particular, there are some that say that the impact of global warming will be that the massive Greenland ice shelf will melt. If this were to happen, sea levels around the world would rise -- how much? Perhaps 7 meters, 14 meters, 28 meters: depending on the severity of the impact, these are all numbers being talked about.

When I first hear of this, I wondered what the impact would be on the area where I live (Boston, MA, USA). What better way to display this information than on a map. So, I looked around the web and found this web site, which is an application of GoogleMaps with image overlays. You can select the severity of the flood and then see how the sea level would change for any area in the world. Pretty scary...

Labels: despair, mapping

Printing Dogmas Graf Photography - Digital Imaging articles

Many purists say that you need an image at 300 dpi in order to print photo quality images. This guy shows that this is not necessarily true: he is shown holding a 20x30 inch print of a tiger that was printed from a 3 MPixel jpeg image.

Labels: photography

A Web Site to Call Your Own - New York Times

The Real Animal House By Chris Miller - Books - Review - New York Times

Pictures, With Map and Pushpin Included - New York Times

Widgetbox › Flickr photo map : powered by mapsack.com web widget review

Labels: humor, mapping, photography, web

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The $200 Billion Lunch

This is an excellent example where technologists knew the right solution to a problem that may now get solved because of a crisis: and solved not because of leadership by the US but by the leadership of China. There are many other examples:

• The threat of global warming induced rising water levels
• The ill-conceived process of funding and developing electronic voting machines
• Security on the Internet
• Internet and eMail protocols that allow spoofing
• Homeland security of shipping ports
• Bird flu and other potential global pandemics
  

The usual reason for not solving these problems is that it would cost too much. I believe that may not always be the most significant reason. Frequently these solutions lack a strong advocate with the leadership and power to take us in the right direction. Quite often solutions could occur on an incremental basis incurring much less cost by being part of normal replacement investments.

Of course other times, it does require massive Government investment. But many of the items above are hard problems that aren't as "easy" as building weapon systems and so the collective product of our elected officials punt and spend massive amounts on money on the easy projects.

Labels: despair

Hello,

For quite a number of years I have written entries in various blogs that I have created. The topics of these snippets have included, observations about the Internet as it has developed, neat applications that I have discovered, fine art on the web that has interested me, travelogs, photography, other hobbies and new ideas I have about computers and networks.

Recently, I find that as I read or watch the news, more and more I have comments about the articles I encounter. Other times, I think of non-technical stuff that I would like to write down and get other people's reactions. Perhaps it is my age, perhaps it is the polarization of the political world we are in, perhaps something else -- but in any case, it makes me feel better if I get a chance to write about what I am thinking.

In any case, I have created this blog as a place to capture all of these ideas.

The title of this Blog comes from a segment of Edward R. Murrow's early television show where people would get a chance to present their thoughts. I like the phrase because it captures the sense that in writing down ideas, I acknowledge that in everything I say, there is part of it based not on certainty but belief -- i.e., sometimes you need to proceed based on a belief, not something that is totally provable.

If you would like to comment on what I have written, there is a link on each article for this. You can also subscribe to an email feed of these articles by sending a blank message to thisibelieve@googlegroups.com . You cannot post messages to this group. you will receive notification when I create a new entry in the blog.

I hope you enjoy these writings and give me feedback on them.

Labels: despair, hope

I have just finished a website for author and teacher Jane Katims. I know Jane through her husband, Dan Perlman who I have coffee with weekday mornings at Peets. With this web site, I was able to combine information about Jane's talents with the beautiful paintings of Linda Peterson, whose website I completed about a year ago.

To quote from the web site:

Jane's work includes poetry, fiction, and radio plays and documentaries. She teaches courses at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education and Tufts University, as well as teaching private creative writing workshops. She has earned several awards for her work in literature.

On all pages but the first page, the banners rotate among a group of beautiful abstract oils by Linda Peterson. I really like the colors used in these paintings and Linda was very kind to let me use them for Jane's website.

Labels: mywork, writing