This page contains all entries posted to Manufactured Environments in April 2007.

Internet Radio Equality Act , H.R. 2060, action request

Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Donald Manzullo (R-IL) introduced a bill today called “The Internet Radio Equality Act,” to reverse the Copyright Royalty Board’s controversial ruling which sought to increase royalties to eight cents per song per listener retroactively from 2006 to 2010 for internet radio stations. Copyright Royalty Board’s ruling would render many independent internet radio stations economically inviable.

The SaveNetRadio campaign asks that you take a moment to call your Congressperson to ask them to co-sponsor this legislation. As an internet radio broadcaster and listener, I ask that you do that too.

To find the phone number for your Congressional representative, visit http://capwiz.com/saveinternetradio/home/ and enter your zip code.

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Hot Pink Deal (Seagate 6 GB Pocket Drive for $30)

It’s pink and practical!
Seagate Susan G. Komen Special Edition Pink 6GB Pocket Drives for $29.99 at Amazon.com

Last week I purchased two Seagate Susan G. Komen Special Edition Pink 6GB Pocket Drives for $34.99 a pop. A few days later, I noticed the price dropped to $29.99. That is 60% off the list price of $79.99! So I requested that Amazon credit me the difference and ordered another one for a client.

Full Disclosure: While I have only used one of the drives for a few days, it works great. I used a 4GB silver pocket drive at my previous employeer for about a year and loved it. I can’t promise this pink 6GB model is just as reliable, but I hope it is.

Tags: amazon · deals · flash drive · pink · seagate pocket drive · susan g komen

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A List Apart: Doing the survey, crunching the stats

The web design gurus of A List Apart have finally taken it upon themselves to codify and quantify this thing called web design. “Who does it?” they ask. “And why?”

So if you do any web work — in the design or development arenas — feel free to take a stab at their quick-to-fill-out survey. You’ll feel better after you’ve done it, and it will be for the good of the industry.

And prizes! You might win the cover of admission to one of An Event Apart two-day conference gigs in various cities. Or even an iPod. If you’re lucky.

And if you haven’t already gotten around to visiting A List Apart, it’s a happening publication / site. If you want to learn about the practice of standards-compliant web design, then A List Apart is the place to go. It’s all the best from a lot of the web’s best advocates.

Tags: 2007 · a list apart · an event apart · survey · web design

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Hillary Clinton campaigns in Decorah

I snapped this picture with my cell phone.

New York senator and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came to Decorah, Iowa on Sunday. She spoke “town hall” style to a standing room crowd of around 1,500 people about putting the country back on course, universal health care coverage, repairing damage to the environment, gays in the military, and other stuff. She also skillfully dodged questions about bringing the troops home, NFTA, etc…

The back of my red head is in the second row.

Tags: campaign · decorah · democratic · hillary clinton · iowa · presidential candidate

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Freeform Faust’s playlist for April 21, 2007

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Tags: kwlc · playlist · radio · vote 2006

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6502 Assembly Language

Back in those early days — when I was a little kid in the start of the ’80s — we had a computer. It was an Apple ][+. It was a fine computer, if a little expensive, but I cut my computer chops typing in programs from Nibble magazine. I learned AppleSoft BASIC and all that.

Cut to college, second semester of my sophomore year I took computer science 101. It was fun and easy since I had already done my share of programming. I still had the Apple ][+ back home, and that summer I set out to teach myself assembly language programming.

Wow, what a weird and crazy thing to do, but it totally taught me how computers work. Assembly language is the most basic form of programming you can do. It’s coding in the instructions for the microprocessor using the language of the microprocessor itself.

It’s the ultimate in terms of control, but it’s a very slow and tedious process. In C or other high level languages, there are constructs for most activities. But in assembly you have to write everything from scratch — for example, there are no For loops, you have to construct the loop entirely step by step.

That summer — which I think would be the summer of 1992 — I setup about writing my own word processor in 6502 assembly language for my Apple ][+, which was ancient even at that point.

The 6502 microprocessor, which ran at 1 MHz, was the brains of the ][+ (read: two-plus). I had a program called the MicroSPARC Assembler (later called MindCraft). The Assembler was essentially the equivalent of an IDE for assembly language. IDE may be stretching it a bit, but it had a debugger and some other nice features for writing assembly code.

Well, that’s an old story, and it’s a strange one. Assembly code is an alien tongue — but fortunately not as alien as, say, Lisp. But what got me thinking about all this 6502 stuff is a link I saw over on Waxy to 6502asm.com. It’s a 6502 assembler built in JavaScript, and accessible via the web. There are some pre-written programs if you want to just glance at the code to see what it looks like. It’ll even allow you to compile and run the programs as well.

I don’t think I have any source listings of my assembly word processor anymore, but if you’re feeling adventurous you might want to enter the 6502asm.com coding competition.

And if you’re really serious about 6502 assembly, you can purchase(!) a copy of the Assembler from the above link and run it on an Apple emulator. The Assembler originally cost $50 a copy, but they’re selling it off that website for download for $10. That’s a damn shame. Why they’d still want to charge for the software is beyond me. Put it out in the public domain, and a lot more people will tinker with it.

The lesson to be learned here is that if you want to learn computers, you have to speak their language.

Tags: 6502 · 6502asm.com · applesoft basic · assembler · assembly language · computer science · microsparc

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Freeform Faust’s playlist for April 14, 2007

Tune to KWLC on Saturdays from 2:00pm–3:30pm (CST) to hear Freeform Faust.

Tags: freeform faust · kwlc · playlist · radio

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Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84

CNN is reporting this morning about the death, yesterday, of American author Kurt Vonnegut. It must be a little too early in the morning for the on-air CNN folks though because they listed Catch-22 as one of Vonnegut’s books, which is of course by Joseph Heller. Hopefully they’ll correct that for later broadcasts. The NYTimes has an obituary up as well. Wikipedia is also on the case already.

One of my first places here in Iowa City was next to the Vonnegut house near Brown Street. Vonnegut taught here at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Wikipedia has this to say about his Iowa tenure:

On the verge of abandoning writing, Vonnegut was offered a teaching job at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. While he was there, Cat’s Cradle became a best-seller, and he began Slaughterhouse-Five, now considered one of the best American Novels of the 20th century, appearing on the 100 best lists of Time magazine and the Modern Library.

He will be missed.

Tags: author · iowa writers' workshop · kurt vonnegut · novelist

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The Skimmable (Forgettable?) Boing Boing

I don’t know when it happened, but I realized recently that I don’t really read Boing Boing anymore. It’s still there in my feedlist, and certainly they still are posting quite frequently. But somewhere in there I got tired of seeing the same four or five ideas posted in innumerable permutations. It’s so homogeneous, it’s turned bland to my taste buds. I just don’t seem to have the time or the inclination to wade through the latest 40 posts of whatever, and that’s a shame.

For a long time, I enjoyed the Boing Boing perspective on things and read it closely. These days it merits a skim or even sometimes a “mark all as read” click. And believe me, I want Boing Boing to be good. I’ve suggested a variety of interesting links with snappy write-ups to them, but I suppose they weren’t as interesting as multiple posts on locked elk antlers.

I’ve become partial to MetaFilter, among others, for shear quantity of interesting links. There’s some noise, but there’s lots of interesting stuff that I see turn up there and nowhere else. It’s been a long time it seems since I linked to anything on Boing Boing. But I guess that’s all more a reflection of me — I’ve changed and grown and moved on. Boing Boing is still the place to go for the thing they do, but increasingly I find that the thing they do is not what I want.

Tags: boing boing · metafilter

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Miranda July has a new book of stories due out

So here’s my little Miranda July story. A couple of years ago, I had gone to the Kill Rock Stars website. KRS is an independent record label on the left coast. They had a sampling of MP3 files from their artists. I downloaded what I could. Okay, fast forward a few months. For some reason, when I was driving, a song would keep coming up on my iPod, which was plugged into the car stereo. It was called The Arky Girl. It stuck with me. It kept playing back in my head. The Arky Girl. The Arky Girl. Okay, that was the first piece of the puzzle.

And then, last year, my girlfriend mentioned this movie she had seen called Me and You and Everyone We Know. So we rented it (she didn’t mind seeing it again), and there was the voice from the Arky Girl song in the form of one Miranda July, who wrote and starred in this fine independent film.

Anyway, my interest was/is piqued by this haunting voice that came from the depths of my iPod. And once I saw the movie, I could put a name and a face with the voice. Um…so Miranda July has come at me in parts. But she’s an interesting girl and performance artist, and I recently saw a link on Waxy.org to Miranda’s website for her new book. It’s called No one belongs here more than you. The website is like a PowerPoint for the DIY crowd. Nicely done!

Okay, so here’s the book at Amazon. It’s apparently due out next month. No word on which (of 2) colored cover Amazon is shipping.

Tags: book · diy · miranda july · no one belongs here more than you · performance art

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Where have you been all my life, Scribus?

I was looking at this entry over on Vichar’s Linux blog and was amazed. It’s basically a list of a lot of open source alternatives to proprietary software. It’s a very excellent list, and the software listed there is top notch. What totally caught my eye is an alternative listed to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress called Scribus. I’ve been back in the Linux world for a year and a half, and I’ve heard no one mention a desktop publishing solution for Linux. But there it is: Scribus, where have you been all my life?

I was delighted to find that Scribus is included in the openSUSE distribution that I use — but it can also be used on Ubuntu, etc. There are even versions for Windows and Mac OS X. Amazing! I had assumed that I was stuck with InDesign. I like InDesign, but I didn’t like having to boot over to Windows to use it. Scribus has all the features that I want — page layout with excellent typographic controls including ligatures and other high-end features.

Another important feature that I’ve been looking for is native PDF export. And Scribus talks the PDF game like a champ. I haven’t publicly announced it yet, but I started a PDFcast, a PDF podcast, recently at another location. But I was waiting until I had some content to highlight. With having to boot into Windows to get into InDesign to do my layouts, well, I just wasn’t going through the trouble. But now with Scribus, I can do my typographically enhanced layouts and export them in quality PDF. In Linux! PDFcasting here we come!

I was so damn excited about this that I had to share it with the world. I had looked into TeX, but using a text-based system just seemed so 1970s. So I am pleased as punch to find out there’s an open source desktop publishing solution for Linux. Yow!

Check out this Wikipedia entry for more information and links to various resources.

Tags: desktop publishing · linux · open source · opensuse · pdfcast · scribus · suse

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Movable Type template for an Atom 1.0 feed

I’m always tinkering with the back-end of Manufactured Environments — trying out new ideas and learning. One recent change is that we switched from an RSS 2.0 feed for the main blog to Atom 1.0. I figured it was time to go with this more comprehensive and rational solution for syndication. One advantage of the Atom feed is that it offers both summaries and full-text posts of the blog.

I see that the Atom 1.0 specification has room for a tag analogous to RSS 2.0’s enclosure tag, which is used a lot for podcasting. I’m using Brandon Fuller’s MT-Enclosures plug-in with Movable Type, which produces enclosure tags for RSS 2.0 feeds but not Atom feeds. Also, Feedburner uses RSS 2.0 for feeds with podcasting enabled. So for the moment, I won’t worry about podcasting feeds via Atom, although it appears relatively easy to setup.

The Atom 1.0 specification was my guide for developing the Movable Type Atom 1.0 template that I created. I used the default template as a starting point and simply enhanced it. It takes into account more of the features available in Atom. If you have suggestions or tweaks, let me know.

Without further ado, here is my Movable Type Atom 1.0 template for Manufactured Environments. Download file.

<$MTHTTPContentType type="application/atom+xml"$><?xml version="1.0" encoding="<$MTPublishCharset$>"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">
<title type="text"><$MTBlogName remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>" />
<link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="<$MTBlogURL$>atomFB.xml" />
<id>tag:<$MTBlogHost exclude_port="1" encode_xml="1"$>,<$MTDate format="%Y"$>:<$MTBlogRelativeURL encode_xml="1"$>/<$MTBlogID$></id>
<updated><MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></MTEntries></updated>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTBlogDescription"><subtitle><$MTBlogDescription remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></subtitle></MTIfNonEmpty>
<generator uri="http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/" version="<$MTVersion$>"><$MTProductName version="1"$></generator>
<icon>http://manufacturedenvironments.com/media/atomicon.jpg</icon>
<logo>http://manufacturedenvironments.com/media/atomlogo.jpg</logo>
<rights type="html">Copyright &amp;copy; 2007 Daniel R Stout</rights>
<geo:lat>44.261944</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-88.415278</geo:long>

<MTEntries lastn="15">
<entry>
<title type="html"><$MTEntryTitle encode_xml="1"$></title>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="<$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$>" />
<id><$MTEntryAtomID$></id>

<published><$MTEntryDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></published>
<updated><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></updated>

<summary type="html">
<$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$>
</summary>
<author>
<name><$MTEntryAuthorDisplayName encode_xml="1"$></name>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryAuthorURL"><uri><$MTEntryAuthorURL encode_xml="1"$></uri></MTIfNonEmpty>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="MTEntryAuthorEmail"><email><$MTEntryAuthorEmail encode_xml="1"$></email></MTIfNonEmpty>
</author>
<MTEntryCategories><category term="<$MTCategoryLabel encode_xml="1"$>" /></MTEntryCategories>
<MTEntryIfTagged><MTEntryTags><category term="<$MTTagID encode_xml="1"$>" label="<$MTTagName encode_xml="1"$>" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" /></MTEntryTags></MTEntryIfTagged>
<content type="html" xml:lang="<$MTBlogLanguage ietf="1"$>" xml:base="<$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$>">
<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$>
<$MTEntryMore encode_xml="1"$>
<MTEntryIfTagged><![CDATA[<p class="technorati">Tags: <MTEntryTags glue=" "><a href="http://manufacturedenvironments.com/tag/<$MTTagName encode_url="1"$>" rel="tag"><$MTTagName$></a></MTEntryTags></p>]]></MTEntryIfTagged>
</content>
</entry>
</MTEntries>
</feed>

Tags: atom · feeds · movable type · rss · template

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Don’t go back to Rockville

With a pending move, I’ve had a chance to look back over the past decade that I’ve spent here in Iowa City. Long, strange trips, indeed. I never could have imagined what was in store for me when I showed up on Linn Street in May 1996. My first place was downtown, and that was a great introduction to the pulse of the city. The places that we live in shape us in perceptible ways. One undoubtedly adopts the tone and texture of one’s city.

I did grad school here and have held a variety of interesting jobs — most having something to do with the web. In college, I chose a philosophy major (with a heavy underpinning of computer science), I think mostly because the small private college I went to only had one journalism-oriented course in the English dept. I knew that an English major wasn’t quite the thing I wanted, but it was hard in those early days to really express what it was.

Philosophy though was an excellent choice, looking back at it now. It was my declared major when I went to Luther, and it is also what I ended up with. Philosophy has given me a foundation of thought to build upon. It taught me how to think and sharpened my analytical skills. But even more than that, I turn back to philosophy as the basis for a thoughtful, good life.

My hope is that a new location will spur new and interesting thoughts. I will meet people with different values — even though the Midwest gets lumped together, there are perceptible differences between the cultures of where I am now and where I will be.

As I have grown a little older, I see the value in change. It is good to try on new things. It is good to visit far off places. It is good … to experience people we’re not used to. But I think that’s just life. That’s about staying curious, and learning from what the world has to offer.

I’m an optimist at heart, and I see hope in change. I see a bright and vibrant future ahead for all of us. If you engage life, it will engage you back.

So tonight, I have a bit of quiet before I have to start packing. Tomorrow I meet with the movers to plan out the logistics of my move. And then soon enough I’ll be off.

Memories of this place will remain. Memories of the people and the places, the events and the happenings. I will remember the many, many hours spent in coffee shops talking, reading, and enjoying the college town lifestyle. And a special, deeply felt bow to “Mad Dog” John, PhD, and to Jane, PhD, who is now in the UK. You’ve been the greatest of friends.

Tags: appleton · iowa · iowa city · moving · philosophy · wisconsin

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Leaving.

I had some news I wanted to share with you about big moves. In a couple of weeks, I will be leaving the pastoral splendor that is Iowa for the northern beauty of Wisconsin. I’ve accepted a position within my company in their Appleton, Wis. office. I will officially be working for the Wisconsin group — a collection of ten newspapers throughout the state. Appleton, which is not far from Green Bay, has a metro area population of about 350,000 and is a growing, progressive city.

I’m in the process of selling my place here in Iowa City. Take a look. Oops, sorry, that’s Steve Alford’s place. I was glad to see that real estate is considerably more affordable in the Appleton area compared to this college town.

So I’ll be rejoining the home country. If you’re a blogger in Appleton reading this, feel free to drop me a line via the contact page.

Well, now the cat’s out of the bag. I wish all of my Iowa comrades well. My best wishes to you. And of course, this website is not moving — so keep reading! We’re soon to have more cheese, beer and brats than you can shake a deep-fried Twinkie at.

Tags: appleton · iowa · moving · wisconsin

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It’s not about the blogs, anymore.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the quarter just ended, and we’re due for another State of the Blogosphere report. My money is on a big decline. Well, at least with blogs. And that’s where the story is, according to Dave Sifry. Today, he posted a State of Technorati post. It doesn’t come out and say that blogs have gone to the dogs, but instead he looks toward where the growth is: social media. So now, instead of just feeding up searches of blog posts and Flickr photos, Technorati includes

blog posts, photos, videos, podcasts, music, people, and events that share a common tag to give our visitors a view into who’s saying what - who’s doing what - across the Live Web, all in real time.

Sifry says that Technorati’s monthly visitors have gone up 141% in the past quarter. More people than ever are searching for all of the crap people are putting up online.

Check here later in the week for the actual State of the Blogosphere report. It’s not a question of has blogging declined? but rather by how much? We’ll do our critical analysis of the analysis once the report hits the net.

We like tags here at Manufactured Environments, but my little wish is that it could be automated. Or rather, I wish there was a standard taxonomy available for tagging. But mostly it’s up to the whim of the content creator. In a sense, we have all become librarians, applying metadata to our media, and thereby helping others to find it.

Tags: blogging · blogosphere · dave sifry · live web · metadata

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