November 2006 Archives

The end of the blog revolution has been blogged, but will it be televised? Lord knows everything else about blogging gets televised.

Had Mister Stout known about the Warning Label Generator, he could have added this spiffy graphic to his post.

The Warning Label Generator isn't all that great. One could make far better warning labels with a desktop program. But, it was fun for a few minutes and let me create this:

You heard it here first, folks. The blog revolution is officially over!

The insane growth of the blogging space is finally done, and Jacky-come-lately's are leaving blogging in droves. There's been a clear descent of blogging over the past six months. Blogging really started to pick up around 2004. A lot of people got into the game at that point. And 2005 was even higher. People who don't even like words or writing started blogging.

The peak was to come. And in the second half of 2006 the peak has come and gone. And now we're on the backside of blogging. Oh, there will be a lot of people who still blog, don't get me wrong. And we here at Manufactured Environments will continue to bring you quality product for an "almost free" price.

I used to keep track of over 100 blogs via my Bloglines account. That number is hovering around a much lower number now, and more of the feeds are not even blogs but news feeds or aggregators of some sort.

But what remains after all of this are most of the strongest voices. My own subscribing habits have changed. I used to subscribe to lots of different feeds--Tom, Dick, and Sally--but now my blog reading is more concentrated on fewer but stronger voices--people like Seth Godin or Jeff Jarvis. Even Zeldman doesn't seem as much into the blogging game as he used to be (although I think he always eschewed that terminology).

So here's a memoriam to all those bloggers who have come and gone, the people we used to know through the blog. We know you're still online — just other places.

Billy Idol's Happy Holidays is easly the worst new release of the season.

Tune to KWLC on Sunday from 2:00pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Notes

It looks like the entire Switched on Santa by Sy Mann album is available for download from Jeffco Productions.

The link for Andy Cirzan's compilations is down. His new compilation will be available at http://www.soundopinions.com/christmas/ the week before Christmas.

The first modern ball-point pen, the Bic Biro, went on sale this week 60 years ago in the UK. BBC story here:

In 1938, Hungarian newspaper journalist Laszlo Biro noticed the ink used on the printing presses dried quickly and so tried using it in a fountain pen to avoid the problem of leaks, blots and smudges.

But the ink was too thick to flow into the nib. So Biro, with the help of his brother, a chemist, devised a pen tipped with a metal ball bearing that used capillary action to draw ink through the rotating ball.

The patent to the pen was later licensed in 1950 to Marcel Bich of France who used a shortened version of his last name to market the pen: Bic. The world of writing was never the same again.

Q: How did Bush know there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

A: He still has the receipts.

Okay, we're off to Decorah. Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

Okay, you've been reading this blog. God is peering down, watching you reading this blog. God is peering down, watching me writing this blog. And I have to say that amazing things happen late at night when your guard is down, and the music just floods over you. Floods over me. The music is flooding, and there's not a chance that we're going to swamp this place out.

Okay, what I was trying to say is that the companies will lock up your music into weird little formats that put a box around the joy -- joyous -- rapture that is your music. Not MY music. OUR music. It's all in the stream.

Okay, so these little angles and geometries of formats of devices and deceits, I hate thee so. I want to play my music. I want to hear this NOW goddamn it.

I happy am to announce that my lock box has burst free into the open stream.

Okay, you may be saying, What this? What of? What for? I can only say it in plain terms. Amarok 1.4, the music player of choice for Linux, now plays MPEG-4 AAC files, that is, the Apple iTunes format. My billion songs locked into a windows/mac format no more. My billion songs in AAC my billion songs playing to be free my billion songs wanting life ... and finding it.

Okay, so Amarok is cool. Okay, so Amarok 1.4 is the best version yet.

And you wonder, little toad, why I haven't been using Windows? Oh, little toadlet? You wonder and surmise that the music is not in control of the companies. (We did buy one CD with DRM and such we never listen to, poor BRMC.)

Okay, dear reader. Spread the love. Linux is free, and Linux will jam the freak out of your iPod.

We're hosted with (mt) Media Temple, and have had various web sites on their servers for the past year (or nearly so). We've been really pleased with (mt)'s service and rock solid stability. We had a (ss) Shared-Server account them, which provided very high reliability and speed. Recently we found out that Media Temple has a new, next generation service meant to replace the Shared-Server system. It's called (gs) Grid-Server, and it's based on some fundamentally different principles than the traditional web hosting account.

Typically with shared hosting, the web host will put x number of web sites on a particular server. If certain web sites outgrow the needs of that box, they get moved to a less crowded box. But you're tied one-to-one with a particular server.

With (mt) Media Temple's new Grid-Server, a "grid" of servers will serve up your website. All of the servers in the grid have access to your website and can serve it up. As demand comes for certain sites, more resources are doled out to meet the demand. There is an ebb and flow.

It's an interesting idea, and one that has been already tested in high end clusters, which spread processing over a multitude of servers rather than one particular server. This makes a lot of sense in my computer science-trained brain, and I'm sure good things will come of this implementation of (gs) Grid-Server.

Media Temple has spent a year and implemented their own scheme for this. Perhaps because of this there were a few initial glitches with the system -- especially with MySQL connectivity and Urchin webstats not working -- but Media Temple seems to have resolved the remaining issues, and we've seen nothing but glorious amounts of uptime here at Manufactured Environments.

We're pleased with the speed of the new service -- pages are served up quickly, and we're glad that we opted-in early for this new service. Apparently (mt) is phasing out the old (ss) Shared-Server system completely.

Now that Media Temple is in their new Class 4 data center, we're happy to enter a new era with (mt) Media Temple as our web host of choice, and we can highly recommend them to others.

Tune to KWLC on select Saturdays from 2:30pm–4:00pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Factory Records was the pinnacle of British music in the '80s. Hailing from Manchester, the record label published the works of such seminal bands as Joy Division, New Order, Durutti Column, The Happy Mondays, Red Byrd, and many more.

The Factory story was told in a movie from 2002 called 24 Hour Party People. Great movie, and a great soundtrack of course too.

One aspect of the Factory legacy begging to be anthologized is the incredible album and single covers and posters from the label. Factory had some of the top graphic artists in the business designing album covers for them. This body of graphic design is now available for all to see in a shortly-to-be-released book entitled Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album.

It looks to be a completely fabulous, hardbound, 224 pages of masterworks. [via CH]

This post by Ira Mitchell of Eagan, Minn., entitled Eyeglasses Stores are for Suckers is generating a storm of controversy. The author talks about how his $300 pair of glasses never fit and broke. His solution? He went online and found glasses for much, much cheaper.

As someone who has worn glasses since the third grade, I've purchased many a pair of glasses over the years. And they definitely have gotten pretty expensive in recent years. Fortunately I've had insurance to offset some of that cost, but with my coke-bottle prescriptions, I end up paying a lot for the lenses.

If you scroll down to comment #18 on that post, you'll see that Stephanie, an optometrist, wrote in. The author refutes her point by point here.

Mr. Mitchell links to a couple of online stores where he purchased eyeglasses for a fraction of the price, and he claims to be overall pleased with the quality of the lenses and frames.

Slashdot found the end of the internet. At some point last night, some joker posted the 16,777,216th comment on Slashdot and things ground to a halt. You'll note that 16,777,216 is 2 to the 24th power, which significantly happens to be the size of an unsigned medium integer in MySQL. Five years ago, CmdrTaco and his crew of Slashdotians set the keys on their comments database to 32 bit, allowing for 4.1 billion entries. They forgot to upgrade one of the keys, and it was left at 24 bit precision. Well, that limit was reached.

To rectify the situation, they took the database down for three hours or so to run an ALTER TABLE statement, which had to iterate over the 16 million rows of the table. Sounds like everything turned out okay, and Slashdot is back in action. Way to save the day, CmdrTaco!

Iowa's Democratic governor Tom Vilsack announced his bid for the U.S. presidency yesterday. He's the first Democrat to throw his hat into the ring. Vilsack did not run for re-election this time out, and the speculation was that he was going for national office. Luckily, we got another Democrat for governor, Chet Culver, who starts in January.

Vilsack already has his campaign website up and running. He's got a video blog, an RSS feed, and he's linked in to a lot of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. He even has his own blog at Daily Kos.

Vilsack feels he's ready for the big time, and we wish him well. The next two years will be very interesting now that the Democrats have taken the House and the Senate in DC. Two years seems like a lot of time to commit to running for an office, but running for the presidency is a big deal and takes a lot of preparation.

Let's see...Tom & Hillary in '08! Woohoo!

On election night, I was following the results. The U.S. House race in my district was especially close. 30-year Republican incumbent Jim Leach was tied at 50% to newcomer Democrat Dave Loebsack's 50%. Loebsack was ahead by only a few hundred votes. 99% of the votes had been counted. Where was that last bit to come from? Absentee ballots here in Johnson County. The auditor's office was having a problem with counting the absentee ballots, which delayed the results of the very close House race here.

Rachel Gallegos, reporting in this morning's Iowa City Press-Citizen, says it was human error that caused the problem. That's according to JC auditor Tom Slockett. Article here. With all the high technology being brought into elections, does this simply introduce more problems and cost than benefits? Voting is a pretty simple thing. The companies that stand to profit from introducing complicating, expensive voting systems are the only ones who benefit, in my opinion.

My personal efforts to simplify voting have led me to the absentee ballot. Mailing in your mail is an easy and effective way to vote. Plus I like having the ballot in front of me, so I can do additional research on candidates, if I'm unfamiliar with the candidates for one of the lesser positions. I've heard that Oregon has gone entirely to mailed ballots, and I wonder how well their system is working. No system is perfect, but mailing ballots seems like a very good solution (regardless of the "human error" this time around).

Recently, Apple refreshed it's Intel-line MacBook Pro laptops with the second generation Core 2 Duo chips. That meant that refreshed MacBooks (a less expensive line than the Pro models) couldn't be far behind. I was surprised when a little over a week ago, Aprille said she had ordered a MacBook — with the first generation Core Duo chip.

With little fanfare or surprise, Apple announced yesterday the MacBook line had been refreshed with the Core 2 Duo processors, and they also doubled the amount of RAM.

Hey, Aprille, is it too late to return the MacBook and get a newer one? Just wondering.

Oh, ladies & gents, 'tis a blissful thing. This bliss is named MC Solaar. On Prose Combat, French rapper MC Solaar hits the perfect pitch. The beats ride smooth, and the delivery in French is a wide swath of silk draped around your body.

This album was released in 1994 and is still state-of-the-art. Pure beauty in the lyrics, the production, the sound. Solaar samples notably from Serge Gainbourg's "Bonnie & Clyde" on "Nouveau Western" (video at YouTube). And that is just one of many strokes of genius to be found on this record.

Apparently, Prose Combat has gone out of print in the US, but you can find reasonably priced used copies either at Amazon or Half.eBay.com.

And just 'cause I'm feeling like it, here are a couple of MP3 files from the album:

• Samples from MC Solaar - Prose Combat
• Track #2: Obsolète (MP3) [removed]
• Track #12: A dix de mes disciples (MP3) [removed]

Um...how to download? Right-click (for Linux or Windows) or Control-click (for Macs) on MP3 and Save Link As... Really, people, I don't know how you survive without me. Just let Dan guide the way and all will be good.

Mike McWilliams at the Iowa City Press-Citizen is reporting that Dave Loebsack defeated long-time Republican incumbent Jim Leach for Iowa's 2nd congressional district.

The final numbers, unofficially, are 107,097 votes or 51% for Loebsack and 101,386 votes or 49% for Leach.

I'm glad that the political ad season is now officially over. Loebsack and Leach ran a very clean race though. The L.A. Times ran a great article about this race, entitled Iowa candidates accentuate positive, eliminate negative.

Okay, so most of the vote tallies are in, in my state of Iowa. Well, except for the local US House race in Iowa District 2. That includes left-leaning Johnson County where I live. The incumbent is Jim Leach (R) who has held the post for 30 years against newcomer and political science professor Dave Loebsack (D).

KCRG is reporting right now that 99% of the vote is counted, and it's neck and neck at 50% each. Dave Loebsack is slightly ahead with 96,661 votes, and Republican incumbent Jim Leach trails with 96,049.

What's holding up the final tally? The Johnson County auditor is having trouble processing the absentee ballots. They ended up having to do a recount of all the absentee ballots in Johnson County because of process and procedural errors — that includes my absentee ballot vote which I mailed on Friday. In Johnson County, 40% of the people voted early with absentee ballots. My thought is that a lot of Dems voted that way, and the House seat is definitely going to go to Loebsack.

That's my prediction ("Loebsack wins!") at 12:22 a.m., and I'm sticking to it. The auditor has said the recount should be done by 1 a.m. The race is not over yet!

If you haven't voted already, today's the day. It's the first Tuesday in November, which means it's time for an election. It's been a long, heated battle as the candidates have rolled out many an attack ad. I'm glad when it will be done.

I know that journalists are hoping for a Democratic sweep. That's because then the Dems could launch investigations and inquiries into the Bush administration giving much grist for the mill.

I should also note that if you haven't switched to voting by mail, it's the way to go! In most states that means voting by absentee ballot. I mailed my ballot last week, and now I can watch the results roll in today. Oregon has this thing nailed. Everybody in Oregon votes by mail. That's the way to go in this day and age.

The Center for Citizen Media has a handy guide for the 50 states on what activities you can conduct at a polling place (e.g. photography) here.

For my Iowa lads and gals, here's what it says about Iowa:

I did a partial redesign recently and wasn't happy with the results. Today I decided to do things a little differently as you may well have already noticed. The photography area is still on a transitional design, but the rest of the site is updated to the new style. I hope you like it.

Before this recent spate of redesigning, Manufactured Environments had been on the same style for the longest period since I've been writing here at ManuEnvi. It feels good to break it up and take a new look at things.

One nice thing about CSS and tableless designs is that it doesn't take that long to do a redesign. I can design it in a few hours and take it live shortly thereafter. I remember when it used to take me a couple of days to do a redesign. My take on it is that the blog is better for it. I've focused more on the blog content than on the design. But the previous design was as spartan as we've ever gotten here. This one's got a little more spark, which we hope will keep you coming back.

In other news, I spent the morning at the stationery store pouring over the selection of holiday cards. Christmas cards are a big deal in this household. Last year was spartan, letterpress printed cards. This year needed a little pizazz, so I went with a card from W. Turnowsky Ltd. of Tel Aviv. Despite coming from Israel, the cards say Merry Christmas on the front.

You'll note on this entry in the comments that Faust signed his name as Faust W.H.B. Gertz. Look at those initials: FWHBG.

From Matt Haughey's blog this morning, we learned about FCKGW. FCKGW, which is strangely similar to FWHBG, is the beginning of an apparently well known warez key for Windows XP. It is so well known that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

The stolen key was distributed by a group called devils0wn – which has a weird parallel to the name Faust. So is FWHBG some kind of code for unlocking Windows XP?

Now of course we're just trying to connect the dots. But we're left to ponder this some more.

I learned recently about another Firefox extension that's useful for web developers. It's called FireBug and was developed by Joe Hewitt. Here's the blurb:

FireBug lets you explore the far corners of the DOM by keyboard or mouse. All of the tools you need to poke, prod, and monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax are brought together into one seamless experience, including a debugger, error console, command line, and a variety of fun inspectors.

It's a pretty useful little widget that sits harmlessly in the lower corner of the browser indicating potential errors on the page. If you click it, it expands to a full-blown editing window with capabilities to drill-down into the JavaScript and other parts of a web page to see where errors exist.

I've been finding it a handy plug-in, and if you develop for the web, you might too. You can download it from Joe Hewitt's page here or from the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons page here. Version 0.4.1 was released last month, which added Firefox 2.0 compatibility, for all you start-of-the-art folks out there.

If you're interested in FireBug, you might also be interested in my review of Web Developer, an awesome toolbar of web development tools for Firefox.

This morning we're reveling in the latest blast of Cure re-issues. We're especially eager to hear The Top, remastered, but today's pick is Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. I remember picking up this album originally in the summer of '87. A double album of post-Standing on a Beach/Staring at the Sea glory, Kiss Me pointed to a new direction for the Cure. Expansive it definitely was.

If the Cure had done to Head on the Door what they did to Kiss Me, it could have been their best album. By that I mean that the songs on Head should have been allowed to breathe. On Head, each song seems to abruptly fade-out at the three-minute mark when most of them were just getting going. Given a six-minute treatment each like on Kiss Me, Head could have excelled. But I digress.

There were several songs that caught my attention right away. "A Thousand Hours" was reminiscent of earlier work (e.g. "One Hundred Years" off of Pornography), although similar more thematically than sonically. The song that really grabbed onto me and threw me about the room was "Why Can't I Be You?" That's still my favorite off of Kiss Me. And of the course the way the album starts with "The Kiss" and ends with "Fight" is very arresting.

From "The Kiss":
Get it out get it out get it out
Get your fucking voice
Out of my head...
I never wanted this
I never wanted any of this
I wish you were dead

From "Fight":
Sometimes there's nothing to feel
Sometimes there's nothing to hold
Fight fight fight!
Just push it away
Fight fight fight!
Just push it until it breaks

For some reason people really liked "Just Like Heaven." In my opinion, it's one of the more forgettable songs on the album. It's a little pop confection. Dinosaur Jr's cover version was always preferable. If you haven't heard Dinosaur Jr's take on Just Like Heaven, it's well worth digging up.

One notable difference of this album from other Cure albums is the format of the songs. Most Cure songs start like other pop music with a bit of an intro and then going pretty quickly into a stanza with vocals. With a lot of songs on Kiss Me, it seems like the band plays for three or four minutes and then the vocals come in the last couple minutes of the song. Maybe it's just really on The Kiss, but that's my impression of the entire album.

You'll also note that this new remastered CD has the complete 18-track album. When I purchased this album in the '80s on vinyl, it came with 18-tracks. The CD version though until now only had 17 tracks because CDs at that time only held 74-minutes. Now with 80-minute CDs the complete album is whole once more. (The original CD was missing "Torture" — the third track.)

Oh, yeah, there's a second disc in this remastered set of demos and other stuff not meant for public consumption. Worthless.