This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in May 2004.

Memorial Day—National WWII Memorial

Grandfather and Grandmother (and my mother) were in Washington DC this weekend for the dedication of the National World War II Memorial. Apparently the weather was mild and they had 20th row seats in a sea of two hundred thousand people.

My grandfather served in Italy during the war in the 10th Mountain Division. A book published last year details the exploits of this elite unit. It’s called The Last Ridge: The Epic Story of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division and the Assault on Hitler’s Europe by McKay Jenkins. Grandpa highly recommends the book and says it is very accurate. I plan on reading it this summer.

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CSS all the way

In February of 2003, I relaunched my website with a CSS-only design. No tables. Last fall, I redesigned to the current design and started using a single main table again. Well, I’m proud to announce that I’ve gone to a CSS design again—maintaining the current design but eliminating the table and added CSS instead.

What does this mean? Essentially that this website is using some of the latest methods available. For one thing, it makes future redesigns even easier—just change the CSS file and the whole design can change.

Special thanks to Faust for his cogent CSS ideas.

I’ve also changed the background image for the time being but that may change again as well. It’s an actual scan I made of graph paper and reduced to one infinitely repeating cell.

In other news, I’m nearly done reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. I’ve been a big Gibson fan ever since I first read Neuromancer during college in 1992. I’ve read all of his books. I remember Neuromancer as being spot on at the time—as if Gibson had written it last week instead of 1984. You’ll remember (or maybe not) that in 1992 the big computer news was Virtual Reality. That was what was going to take over the whole world. Well, it wasn’t to be—obviously it has applications but it’s nothing like what they were hyping back in the early 90’s. Of course Fall 1992 was when I first started using email (e.g. the Internet). I was living abroad and it was my only contact with my college back home since phone calls were so expensive. And fast forward to 1994 when the World Wide Web broke, and everything changed.

At any rate, I’ve tested this new CSS design in IE6.0 and Firefox 0.8. Let me know if you encounter any display glitches in your browser of choice.

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RIAA sues more people. Crazy!

As always, I bring you the news of more RIAA lawsuits via Edupage, a publication of Educause:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) this week announced another 493 lawsuits against individuals for trading copyrighted files, bringing the total number of such suits to nearly 3,000. The RIAA continues to file so-called “John Doe” lawsuits against individuals whose identities it can then obtain from Internet service providers. The RIAA has settled more than 400 lawsuits with individuals, but the group also announced that it has filed 24 suits against people whose identities it has discovered through John Doe suits. According to the RIAA, the 24 who were sued by name declined to settle out of court.
Reuters, 24 May 2004

In other news, there’s this interesting game called the Anti-Bush Online Videogame. Enjoy! (Instructions: click Play, and then click through a bunch of screens. Oh, caveat, it’s dirty.) [via mefi]

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Blogging article

NYTimes.com article today on blogging. Of passing interest.

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Graduation time

Last weekend was graduation time here. The undergrads got their BAs and BSes. The master’s students got their MAs and MSes and MFAs. And the doctoral candidates received their Ph.Ds. A happy time for all involved. Tomorrow morning my alma mater is holding their graduation ceremonies. I kind of wish I was there to hear the commencement address. Instead, I’ll just read it in the almuni magazine in a few months of course. But if you’re looking to get your commencement speech fix for the year, I suggest Jon Stewart’s (‘84) humorous address to the students and parents of the College of William and Mary.

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Movable Type 3.0

There’s been a lot of discussion online recently about Six Apart’s new pricing and licensing structure for the new version of Movable Type 3.0. Movable Type is the software that runs behind the scenes on this website and thousands of others. Previously it had been a free product with optional good-will donations. I’ve donated $40 to Six Apart for the use of this great piece of software. But times are changing.

Some people are talking about switching to WordPress, which is an open source (free, as in beer) that a lot of people like. I’m in the process of reshaping someone’s WordPress blog (people pay me to do these things for some reason) so I’m getting a chance to see it up close and personal.

I really don’t want to switch to something else. I like MT a lot, and as I indicated I’m willing to cough up a few $ to pay for a really great product. And thankfully, my previous donations, as Six Apart had indicated at the time, will apply towards the purchase price of MT 3.0, which at the introductory level is $70 and will be going up to $100 at some point.

What I don’t like about the new licensing of Movable Type is the restrictions. Previously, you could maintain unlimited numbers of blogs with one installation. That’s all changing. I use MT on a couple of websites, and I’ve got a couple of non-public blogs that I use on this website in addition to the public one you’re now reading. So maybe my modest use of MT would fall under the $70 level, but not being able to expand without forking over additional $ is a problem.

Dive Into Mark for example has already switched to WordPress. To my mind, people who are willing to quit MT at the drop of a hat are not loyal customers anyway. Let them go. It’s not like MT 2.661 has suddenly gone away. Obviously the software is installed on people’s local servers and they can continue to use it. Six Apart has already shown signs of being responsive to people’s needs. There was a backlash to the pricing, but let’s face it there’s a lot of people who don’t want to pay for software. They can have Blogger. That’s fine.

I’m in wait-and-see mode. Like I said, MT 2.661 works great for my needs, and at this point there’s not a compelling reason to upgrade—MT 3.0 isn’t a “feature” release anyway. It’s a structural overhaul, and most of the new features seem to be in the commenting system. In some sense Six Apart are trying to upgrade their product in the perceptual space. They’ve dropped the “personal” from “personal publishing system.” Maybe they don’t want to compete with the Blogger.com’s and the Radio Userland’s of the world, but that has been their core market to this point: the bloggers.

The pricing seems about right in the world of paid software, but are bloggers cheap? Perhaps. Full-featured RSS newsreaders cost about $30 (NewsGator, FeedDemon, etc.) but I’m still using SharpReader, a free one, because I like it. Movable Type has a lot more functionality and power than a newsreader so maybe it makes sense to charge $70, $100 and more. But it’s not just the price that people are balking at. It’s those restrictive terms of use that they’ve implemented. (Read about it here).

Oh, look, they are responding. The basic level ($70) has been expanded from one author to five authors with five weblogs. Okay, that answers it for me. Movable Type is still the way to go.

P.S. It’s really an issue of semantics. Movable Type has long been at the domain MovableType.org. Dot ORG is for non-profits, or at least it used to be. So by being at .org they’ve made the perception that their free software would continue to be. It’s time for them to give up that moniker and switch over to dot COM.

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Elephant

“Elephant” by the White Stripes is on, or at least it was. It’s an okay album. But if you want to check out the White Stripes, you should definitely check out De Stijl. That’s still my favorite album by them overall.

Dori over at Saranwarp is holding a little broadcasting experiment. Go over to her website and check it out. She’s got not such a bad taste in music, but the broadcast stream isn’t too reliable. Maybe she’ll get the kinks worked out of it yet.

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Rootsy

I’ve got After The Gold Rush by Neil Young on the stereo tonight, and it’s got me feeling all rootsy. What do I mean by rootsy? It’s an earthiness, a feeling of simplicity. I’m not a big Neil Young fan, but it’s hitting the spot tonight.

I guess it’s a question of moods. This afternoon we were driving around town—it was sunny and 72 degrees. A great day. We were listening to Felix da Housecat in the car. That was great. But tonight something got a hold of me, and I’m just thinking about lifestyles and simplicity. Actually it was a book I was reading tonight that my friend Faust sent me. It’s just the thought that our modern lifestyles are sometimes too unnecessarily complex.

Last night, I went to a couple of parties, and the thought that I was left with is the need for harmonious relations. We are by nature social creatures, and our health depends on that. I think for me, as a bachelor, that sometimes I get caught up in the material world. I don’t have little mouths to feed, so I think that I can buy that expensive espresso machine, and I do. I like that scene early on in the movie About A Boy where Hugh Grant’s character is explaining the life of the modern bachelor—he juxtaposes a quote that no man is an island by saying that in our world now, every man is an island—it’s an island age, he says.

Okay, Neil Young is done. Time to put something else on. Any suggestions?

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On the Stereo

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Eternal Spotlight on the Sunshine Mind

We went to a matinee of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind this afternoon. I’ve read some people’s comments about the ending—how it’s a powerful statement of love. I guess so. More captivating to me were those moments when Jim Carrey’s character is trying so desperately to hang onto his memories as they’re being erased. It was this—and not necessarily the ending—which was the true statement of love. I liked the scene in the book store where he’s talking to Kate Winslet’s character and the books are turning blank and evaporating. Obviously his decision to erase his memories was misguided and hinted of revenge because she had done the same. Looking back at the movie, my only wish is that instead of spending most of the movie in the erasure and having him reunite so soon with Winslet, I’d have liked to see a longer aftermath of the procedure—time spent in the current moment where they’re grappling with shadows of half-memories and figments from the past.

It was a good movie. I highly recommend it. I’m just glad the movie was still playing here because I’ve wanted to see it.

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Out of town

I’ve been out of town for a while so posting has been light…more to come…

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Malta joins the EU

As many of you know, I once lived on the island of Malta for a year. The place is near and dear to my heart. The latest news from Malta of course is that they’ve joined the European Union on May 1st along with nine other countries. Maltese is now another language officially recognized within the EU. So if you’re fluent in Maltese, the EU wants you to work as a translator! Well, being a country of only 400,000 people, Maltese is known to a select few. The language has its roots in ancient Arabic with a smattering of influences from the Romance languages. It’s written with the Roman alphabet with a few special characters thrown in for good measure. Here’s a good place to start on the Maltese language. Ciao!

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More File Sharing Lawsuits from RIAA

Here’s the latest scoop, via Edupage, an electronic publication of Educause:

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed another 477 lawsuits against individuals charged with violating copyright. The RIAA has filed lawsuits every month of 2004 against file traders it says are guilty of digital piracy, and the latest round of lawsuits is the second to identify colleges and universities where the piracy is alleged to have taken place. Of those named in the current round of lawsuits, 69 illegally traded copyrighted material over campus networks, according to the RIAA. Fourteen institutions were identified in the lawsuits, including Michigan State University. Peter K. Wu, director of the program in intellectual property and communications law at Michigan State University, said he sees the lawsuits as a temporary measure to limit copyright violations. “The companies have been able to intimidate some file-sharers,” he said, “but among some of the more egregious offenders, there’s actually been a backlash.”
Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 April 2004

This brings the total to nearly 2,500 people sued in the past eight months, according to CNET. Well, at least the lawyers have something to do now.

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