Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

Anyone expecting me to reference that book (Ghost in the Machine) in a productive way should move along now.

Stinky Trackpads

First, I'm going to complain that my new MacBook's [yes, MacBook. Don't buy one. They're evil] trackpad is no longer capable of clicking and dragging. If I turn off "tap to click", it doesn't click at all. Nor does right clicking work. I now carry around a $10 Office Max mouse with me wherever I go with my MacBook. That's awesome. Um, not.

Machine Ghosts

So I was pausing iTunes today with F8 on my fancy broken MacBook today. The Crowes stopped, but all of a sudden I heard a young girl laughing from my headphones. It was a poltergeist moment that scared the crud out of me for a second. Then a motherly voice says something like, "You've broken it." Had this been going on the whole time I listened to the Crowes? Is there a YouTube page open somewhere? Is my machine infected? Is my mother mad at me and my MacBook is channeling the thought? What the heck? (Not that I'm paranoid)

Well, turns out VLC likes to listen to F8 as much as iTunes does, so as I paused one, I started another. Still, a freakish coincidence for [show whose name I won't divulge] to be cued up where it was.

Enhanced Ebooks

My only other news is that this Enchanced Ebook stuff looks really cool. The NYT bestselling (though I'm not sure exactly what that entails, honestly) writer who lives in my old hometown (!) goes into some detail about why Kindle, Fictionwise, etc can't carry her new book, released today, for several months. I'm still not exactly sure why one can't market the eBook at a hardcover price, but this is all the info I've seen.

From what I’ve been told, the delayed release of the Black Magic Sanction e-book is affecting Kindles, Fictionwise, Nooks, Soney e-readers, along with a handful of others. (April 6th Go ahead, groan. Amazon priced them as a mass market, so that’s where they are sliding.)

Personally, I think it makes some sense. Your real fans will be shelling out top dollar for a hardback (something I've regretting doing with Anne Rice for Lasher and Taltos, but she still got my money). You can't offer the eBook for a price that undercuts the hardback, as that will cannibalize sales at a time where books are really bagging money. In fact, I could even see a publisher, for whatever reason, making the most money on a hardback after the Amazon Kindle cut, even if Amazon was selling at the price of a hardback.

But the workaround her publisher is using is awfully cool by me, since I already own an iPod touch, as it's to release the book as an Enchanced Ebook. This thing apparently has the full text of the book (so it has a traditional eBook) and the full audio, which floored me since the concurrently released audiobook on iTunes is currently selling for $30.95 compared to the enhanced ebook's $14.99. (It appears not all en. ebooks have the audio track.)

Not only that, but the enhanced ebook apparently, at least in this case, also follows the text along when it's "reading aloud". So you could read a few pages, take your iPod into the car and listen on the way into work, and have your place marked in the text for when you stop. That's neat.

More on the enchanced ebook jive from the programmers here. Apparently it has other stuff, like videos with the author and other DVD bonus feature kinds of jive. An interesting step up from the cassette version of Dune Messiah I'm finishing up in the car now. ;^)

Labels: ebooks, macbook

Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges - NYTimes.com:

Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007.

Why would folks think this? Hrm. Because the belief is on the money?

The knee-jerk reaction is that a college acting like a business is a wrongheaded move. To the degree that this mentality produces a college is simply vocational, I'd agree that the move is ill-conceived. To the degree that engineering colleges are business-like, these being fields which are trying to produce citizens whose research is specifically blending scholarship into business, well, the lines aren't quite so clearly cut.

One place where acting like a business is despicable is in the humanities. Nothing concerns me more than the way humanities departments are scrambling for cash via corporate sponsorship and/or partnership. I've heard very well-respected scholars argue that we are entering an age of the digital humanities, where our now increasingly technology-driven fields benefit from adopting the business-friendly model from engineering and hard sciences. Without their money, how can we perform the broad-based, collaborative research the new influences in our fields require?

These rationalizations lose the stereotypical tweed jacketed and elbow padded professor who is in the academy precisely because it provides them safe haven from -- no, simply an alternative to -- those parts of our nation driven directly through corporate capitalism or any other institutional mindset. The academy is supposed to be, well, perhaps "supposed to be" is too strong. The academy was once an institution that was largely separate from the state, the church, and industry. It chose to live in a privileged position from which intelligent citizens would give up their earning power to better society in specific, critical ways. The protection from chasing dollars is precisely what made the college powerful. That's why people set up endowments for goodness sake. Colleges are meant to be money losing propositions. We, as a society, passively or no, long ago said that such commentary was worth the "loss".

Do we blame the land grant college, the Moo U's, for compromising this romanticized goal of cultural critique for critique's sake? Do we blame the rise of collegiate sports and the way the common alumnus/a is just or more likely to give to the football booster program as their old department? Have universities and colleges simply worn too many hats under the same roofs, and this cultural osmosis was too difficult to resist?

I don't know. I just know, from taking a look inside, that faculty bends over backwards to figure out clever ways to make the humanities a money-making enterprise through service courses and science-like research. I've seen too many take jobs in the academy not because they understand the world and wish to make it better through personal sacrifice, but take the jobs only because they offer to them the most lucrative career and cultural respect that their abilities can support. I've seen the new academy take the critical lens of scholarship from its once protected position, and eviscerate its traditional ability to critique power and offer needed alternatives. Without the least feeling of being melodramatic, I feel comfortable saying that the nation, even the world, is worse off for the compromise.

Labels: acad, hats of money

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
I'm painfully behind the Bing learning curve From The Cheapskate at CNET News on how to get $100 off some phones and netbooks at Wirefly. To see all the options, head to Bing, sign into your account (or create one if you haven't already), search for Wirefly, then click the Wirefly.com listing that shows the Bing cashback symbol. I've been thinking that people should make "affiliate" links in pages green instead of the normal blue to show that, when you follow a link to a book at Amazon from a blog, for instance, that the blog author is going to take a cut. There's something underhanded about not including that information when the only way you'd know it's happening is to tease it out of the querystring of a URL in your status bar as you mouseover the link (a statusbar which Safari, for example, doesn't even display by default). Looks like Bing has taken this sort of covert monetizing public. I'm familiar with A9 or whatever Amazon's search was and how using it could bag you a discount, but am completely in the dark about Bing. Labels: amazon, hats of money, microsoft, search posted by ruffin at 2/24/2010 12:33:00 PM

Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Ghosts in the Machine, eNhanced eBooks, and a crappy trackpad Anyone expecting me to reference that book (Ghost in the Machine) in a productive way should move along now. Stinky Trackpads First, I'm going to complain that my new MacBook's [yes, MacBook. Don't buy one. They're evil] trackpad is no longer capable of clicking and dragging. If I turn off "tap to click", it doesn't click at all. Nor does right clicking work. I now carry around a $10 Office Max mouse with me wherever I go with my MacBook. That's awesome. Um, not. Machine Ghosts So I was pausing iTunes today with F8 on my fancy broken MacBook today. The Crowes stopped, but all of a sudden I heard a young girl laughing from my headphones. It was a poltergeist moment that scared the crud out of me for a second. Then a motherly voice says something like, "You've broken it." Had this been going on the whole time I listened to the Crowes? Is there a YouTube page open somewhere? Is my machine infected? Is my mother mad at me and my MacBook is channeling the thought? What the heck? (Not that I'm paranoid) Well, turns out VLC likes to listen to F8 as much as iTunes does, so as I paused one, I started another. Still, a freakish coincidence for [show whose name I won't divulge] to be cued up where it was. Enhanced Ebooks My only other news is that this Enchanced Ebook stuff looks really cool. The NYT bestselling (though I'm not sure exactly what that entails, honestly) writer who lives in my old hometown (!) goes into some detail about why Kindle, Fictionwise, etc can't carry her new book, released today, for several months. I'm still not exactly sure why one can't market the eBook at a hardcover price, but this is all the info I've seen. From what I’ve been told, the delayed release of the Black Magic Sanction e-book is affecting Kindles, Fictionwise, Nooks, Soney e-readers, along with a handful of others. (April 6th Go ahead, groan. Amazon priced them as a mass market, so that’s where they are sliding.) Personally, I think it makes some sense. Your real fans will be shelling out top dollar for a hardback (something I've regretting doing with Anne Rice for Lasher and Taltos, but she still got my money). You can't offer the eBook for a price that undercuts the hardback, as that will cannibalize sales at a time where books are really bagging money. In fact, I could even see a publisher, for whatever reason, making the most money on a hardback after the Amazon Kindle cut, even if Amazon was selling at the price of a hardback. But the workaround her publisher is using is awfully cool by me, since I already own an iPod touch, as it's to release the book as an Enchanced Ebook. This thing apparently has the full text of the book (so it has a traditional eBook) and the full audio, which floored me since the concurrently released audiobook on iTunes is currently selling for $30.95 compared to the enhanced ebook's $14.99. (It appears not all en. ebooks have the audio track.) Not only that, but the enhanced ebook apparently, at least in this case, also follows the text along when it's "reading aloud". So you could read a few pages, take your iPod into the car and listen on the way into work, and have your place marked in the text for when you stop. That's neat. More on the enchanced ebook jive from the programmers here. Apparently it has other stuff, like videos with the author and other DVD bonus feature kinds of jive. An interesting step up from the cassette version of Dune Messiah I'm finishing up in the car now. ;^) Labels: ebooks, macbook posted by ruffin at 2/23/2010 09:50:00 AM

Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Food for Thought: Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges - NYTimes.com Study Finds Public Discontent With Colleges - NYTimes.com: Most Americans believe that colleges today operate like businesses, concerned more with their bottom line than with the educational experience of students, according to a new study. And the proportion of people who hold that view has increased to 60 percent, from 52 percent in 2007. Why would folks think this? Hrm. Because the belief is on the money? The knee-jerk reaction is that a college acting like a business is a wrongheaded move. To the degree that this mentality produces a college is simply vocational, I'd agree that the move is ill-conceived. To the degree that engineering colleges are business-like, these being fields which are trying to produce citizens whose research is specifically blending scholarship into business, well, the lines aren't quite so clearly cut. One place where acting like a business is despicable is in the humanities. Nothing concerns me more than the way humanities departments are scrambling for cash via corporate sponsorship and/or partnership. I've heard very well-respected scholars argue that we are entering an age of the digital humanities, where our now increasingly technology-driven fields benefit from adopting the business-friendly model from engineering and hard sciences. Without their money, how can we perform the broad-based, collaborative research the new influences in our fields require? These rationalizations lose the stereotypical tweed jacketed and elbow padded professor who is in the academy precisely because it provides them safe haven from -- no, simply an alternative to -- those parts of our nation driven directly through corporate capitalism or any other institutional mindset. The academy is supposed to be, well, perhaps "supposed to be" is too strong. The academy was once an institution that was largely separate from the state, the church, and industry. It chose to live in a privileged position from which intelligent citizens would give up their earning power to better society in specific, critical ways. The protection from chasing dollars is precisely what made the college powerful. That's why people set up endowments for goodness sake. Colleges are meant to be money losing propositions. We, as a society, passively or no, long ago said that such commentary was worth the "loss". Do we blame the land grant college, the Moo U's, for compromising this romanticized goal of cultural critique for critique's sake? Do we blame the rise of collegiate sports and the way the common alumnus/a is just or more likely to give to the football booster program as their old department? Have universities and colleges simply worn too many hats under the same roofs, and this cultural osmosis was too difficult to resist? I don't know. I just know, from taking a look inside, that faculty bends over backwards to figure out clever ways to make the humanities a money-making enterprise through service courses and science-like research. I've seen too many take jobs in the academy not because they understand the world and wish to make it better through personal sacrifice, but take the jobs only because they offer to them the most lucrative career and cultural respect that their abilities can support. I've seen the new academy take the critical lens of scholarship from its once protected position, and eviscerate its traditional ability to critique power and offer needed alternatives. Without the least feeling of being melodramatic, I feel comfortable saying that the nation, even the world, is worse off for the compromise. Labels: acad, hats of money posted by ruffin at 2/17/2010 07:59:00 AM

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Washington Post Reporters Now Writing Specifically for Computer Readers This from Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post's Ombudsman, titled "Why you're seeing more copy-editing errors in The Post": Why the increased errors [in the Washington Post]? Clearly, reduced staffing plays some role. A decade ago, at its peak, The Post's newsroom had more than 900 FTES (full-time equivalent employees)... Today, the now-integrated print and online staffs total about 650 FTEs... The answer may be less about staffing levels and more about the changing duties of copy editors. Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day's newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where "search-engine optimization" is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties. Separate online headlines must be written in a way that attracts attention on the Web. ... Some relief may be coming for beleaguered copy editors. This week, The Post will begin search-engine optimization training for the entire newsroom. Front-end help from reporters and other staff should ease the burden on copy editors. [emboldened emphasis mine] I don't know about you, but I'm not happy to hear that journalists are writing for the computers to the exclusion of their human readers. I realize there has always been a pressure on writing to the technology. I've done a review of newspapers from the 18th century, and realize the way that length was constrained by the sheets you could afford to print and sell, or how headline lengths are influenced by column and font size, and how inserting pictures are exceptionally difficult. I've seen papers run out of a font and start printing in, eg, italics to finish up a page to save time. I know that content is influenced by technology directly. Still, what the Washington Post is doing marks a significant change for the press. Now, people are writing content for, say, Google News rather than to point out the most newsworthy events of the day. Like a gamer figuring out the secrets of the algorithm for Mike Tyson's Punch Out ("When he makes the noise, dodge right, and then upppercut"), newspaper reporters, the front line folk, are being asked to learn, anticipate, and integrate the algorithms of the news search engines ("When we're talking about someone in the movies, try to tie Angelina Jolie in there somehow" or "Make sure 'failed Obamacare' is in the title of three of today's stories somehow"). I've noticed the WaPo's declining editorial attention. To redefine what "editing" meanings is to take the lazy fellow's way out. What's happening isn't that you're doing a more complicated job. It's that you're no longer doing your old job. We're more worried about hits than grammar. And what bothers me the most is the degree to which an American institution is pushing onto the front ranks of the free press the onus for making our news match whatever Google's programmers feel is newsworthy. In the briefest terms, then, I'm exceptionally disappointed that Google's programmers have become the editors of the Washington Post. Labels: acad, business, cheating, control, digital, ethics, evil, Google, market, politics, pseudo-academic posted by ruffin at 2/16/2010 09:50:00 AM

Monday, February 15, 2010
iPad in AT&T stores can only end badly AT&T to Carry 3G-Capable iPad in Stores? - Mac Rumors: According to the report, AT&T will be dedicating substantial display space to the forthcoming device. Okay, well, it could sell like gangbusters, but I'm more worried about the iPad being over sold. The report MacRumors quotes says, "We're told that the general plan is to convert one or two existing netbook display sections in each corporate AT&T location into a pretty substantial iPad display area," and later talks about putting the iPad in Best Buy as well. Though the iPad in AT&T's and Best Buy's stores is A Good Thing for Apple, the report makes it sound like they're getting a decent amount of real estate. If the displays full of iPads are too conspicuous, the iPad stands to become conspicuous in its relative absence later on if the stores scale their presence back due to slow initial sales. I'm not sure the iPad is going to have iPod-like success, and almost certainly not the same speed. I think I'd opt for the long haul when I decide how much pimpige space to give it. Now that said, I'm endlessly impressed with the number of nooks that Apple's managing to cram with stores for virtual goods. I haven't done a ton of wireless shopping with my iPod touch in the three months or so that I've had it, perhaps only one quick track. Like Tetris on my cell phone, iPod shopping is more of a time killer than something I set out to do. I've purchased one game for my Wii in the virtual console, but that was more out of novelty than desire. But I have purchased several books from Fictionwise that I read primarily on the iPod, and I know I'd rather buy full-fledged Wii games online than to run down to the GameStop (or whatever they're calling it these days). The iPad is probably large and fast enough that shopping there is going to be a much more pleasant experience. Compared to something like the Peek or even Blackberry, the iPad has great [hardware] stats and monthly fees for 3G. Its ability to slap a store next to your easy chair is a big reason why those prices might seem like bargains from Apple's point of view. Providing that Apple doesn't start by letting brick and mortars oversell the iPad out of the box, that is. Labels: apple, hats of money, iPad posted by ruffin at 2/15/2010 06:22:00 PM

Note to self: Need Collations Help Please - Dev Shed Need Collations Help Please - Dev Shed: Use utf8_bin if you want it to be case sensitive, otherwise use utf8_general. Labels: problem solved posted by ruffin at 2/15/2010 12:15:00 PM

Sunday, February 14, 2010
Note to Self: WeTap WeTap: WeTap is a participatory sensing campaign geared towards identifying, describing and mapping public drinking fountains. posted by ruffin at 2/14/2010 08:30:00 AM

Thursday, February 11, 2010
HTML 5 Video: Apple's Next USB AppleInsider \| Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor: 'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and all of Hulu’s videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch 'But that could change by the time the iPad launches in March. One rumor I’ve heard from an industry insider is that Hulu is working on an iPad-friendly version of its site that should be ready by the time the iPad hits the market,' continues TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech. Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now. Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5? The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal. Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them. HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu\|YouTube] Labels: aol, apple, control, F/free, hats of money, id, iPad, licensing, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM

Saturday, February 06, 2010
Gridlock in DC: Tell the Times it's by Design Op-Ed Columnist - No Holds Barred - NYTimes.com: People, can't we have a citizen revolt over this? It's all about the filibuster rule. The Obama administration is hamstrung because the Senate now requires 60 votes to get anything done, from health care reform to the confirmation of the woman who’s going to oversee building maintenance. No, no revolt necessary nor even advisable. You can only fine-turn a representative government so far. If you are given two choices of government -- 1.) one that was able to make snap decisions on important matters but, at times, make important decisions too quickly or 2.) one that protected itself from snap decisions but also, at times, can't figure out how to tie its own shoe -- I hope you select the second. If the invasion of Iraq shows us anything, it's that we are likely a few checks and balances away from fully implementing the second form of forced deliberative government. If anything, what the 59-40/41 split is telling us is that the current "Obama" healthcare plan isn't the overwhelmingly obvious will of the people. Want to pass your agenda? Stop whining about the rules. Go out and convince more people. Labels: politics posted by ruffin at 2/06/2010 02:36:00 PM

Thursday, February 04, 2010
Amazon chases the obvious How can Amazon be this far behind? (from AppleInsider) The New York Times reports that Amazon has acquired New York-based Touchco, a small start-up specializing in touchscreen technology. It's not like gestures are new; they're at least as old as the iPhone and iPod touch. Why is it that they wouldn't pull the trigger on something like this years ago? They're chasing technology, reminiscent of Microsoft and Zune or Linux and the desktop, copying paradigms that are old news instead of trying to help shape them as they form. I'm not going to say adding better gestures to Kindle (are there any now?) is a bad idea, but it is already a tired idea. Labels: amazon, apple, iPad, kindle posted by ruffin at 2/04/2010 07:31:00 AM

Wednesday, February 03, 2010
GPL code in a copyrighted book? If you print GPL'd code as part of a copyrighted book, does the universe end? Apparently not, but I would like to know how one gets away with that. Labels: copyright, gpl posted by ruffin at 2/03/2010 10:05:00 AM

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