Ajaxio Demo
Ajaxio Demo: proof-of-concept to make something Visio-like in ajax: you can add boxes, drag them around, resize them and draw connector lines between them that adjust as you move them around. Pretty much all I use Visio for ;)
The genius of Digg / Atomiq
The genius of Digg / Atomiq: "The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click--about as simple as it gets--and yet it's the central component of the community."
"Flaky Smoochie - CatchFlaky Smoochie - Catch".
HAHAHA. Cartoon violence. It's basically itchy and scratchy, but better done.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 0.4 min, 0.8 MB)
Original post, from Happy Tree Friends:
Be sure to wear protective gear for this baseball game!
(Via Mefeedia)
"Manu Chao en Nueva York": so it seems he'll have a new CD early next year! yey. I went to see the concert in NY and it was fucking fantastic.
Watch movie (Quicktime)
Original post, from gerardo romo z.:
(Via Mefeedia)
PressThink: Introducing NewAssignment.Net
PressThink: Introducing NewAssignment.Net: pretty interesting plan to get journalism funded open-source wise.
Visa Blog : Immigration critic has thin skin; thin logic, too
If you're following the immigration debate, my immigration laywer that I worked with in the past is doing some good blogging
Blogger still no enclosures
Blogger's new beta has rss2.0 feeds, but STILL no enclosures. Come on Google! This is 2006!
What's worse I think, is that they still don't show an RSS button - the RSS is there but many people won't find it. It's as if they don't *want* people to subscribe.
What is it with blogger? These are basics!
Cruxy
Cruxy is a new service that tries to make it easier to buy and sell independent media. They just launched. I know the guys behind it, and apart from being excellent coders, they're also great human beings, and they mean what they say - they really want to make it easier to buy and sell independent media. The site is pretty good, not too much stuff there yet, but check it out, I have a feeling this one will grow big.
VideoJug - Life Explained. On Film.
VideoJug - Life Explained. On Film.. Videojug is a great idea, a videohost for how-to movies. Excellent. The only problem is that I can't seem to find RSS feeds anywhere.
"Noche de Jazz en Harlem NY": we finally found a fun bar in Harlem and they have fantastic Jazz too.. Maria made a movie of it.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 4 min, 8.4 MB)
Original post, from diariodeviaje:
Watch the videoHace un par de semanas estubimos con Melina y Willie en Saint Nick's Pub un lugar maravilloso donde sin las pretenciones innecesarias que normalmente se encuentran en nyc se puede disfrutar de una muy buena musica.
(Via Mefeedia)
"Off The Grid-The Geeks Unplug"; Scoble invited a bunch of people (anyone really) to the middle of nowhere, here's a good overview video.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 3.7 min, 27.5 MB)
Original post, from ryanne on blip.tv (beta):
this is going to be featured on RyanIsHungry.comcheck it out!
(Via Mefeedia)
This is a live webcast about lebanon etc. happening RIGHT NOW: streamtime.sdp (video/quicktime Object). Check it out, new ways of collaborating.
NYCMosaico (this is the new site) has been one of the sites that really tracks and celebrates latino culture in New York. Now, from what I hear, the person doing their website has fallen out with them, taken the old domain name nymosaico.com with him and left the team having to build up a new site, new links and so on.
It's easy to say of course that you should always control your domain name, but in reality the web person often does it, especially if they're not getting paid but are a volunteer.
"Blissful": really, really amazing animation stuff. Short too so enjoy!
Watch movie (Quicktime, 0.6 min, 4.6 MB)
Original post, from No fat clips!!!:
I posted this one on Ticklebooth before, but it well deserves an extra time in the spotlights.Blissful is a short yet amazing blend of animation and motion graphics did by Leftchannel for Fantômas (brainchild of Mike Patton), "a trip through torment and obstacles of supposed demise within the mind of an evil being."Mike Patton (born Michael Allan Patton) is an American musician. He is best known as the lead singer of Faith No More from 1988 to 1998, but has also handled lead vocals for Mr. Bungle, Tomahawk, Fantômas and Peeping Tom.Questo lo postai su Ticklebooth, ma credo che meriti ben donde un'altra razione di fama e gloria.Blissful è un breve ma stupefacente misto di animazione e motion graphics realizzato da Leftchannel per Fantômas (perto della mente di Mike Patton), "un viaggio attraverso la mente di un essere maligno, irta di ostacoli e di tormenti."Mike Patton (nato Michael Allan Patton) è un musicista americano, meglio conosciuto come il leader dei Faith No More dal 1988 al 1998, ma ha anche cantato per Mr. Bungle, Tomahawk, Fantômas e Peeping Tom.via Motionographer and 'boardsDOWNLOAD: Scarica Blissful.[Format: Quicktime - Size: 5 MB - Running Time: 1 min.]WATCH: Guarda Blissful su 'boards.MIRROR: Guarda Blissful su Blip.WATCH: Guarda Blissful su Leftchannel.[Format: Flash]WATCH (ALT.): Guarda Blissful su Blip.[Format: Flash]LINK: Visita Leftchannel Industries Inc.MVDBASE: Pagina di LeftchannelIMDB: Pagina di Mike PattonCODECS: Apple Quicktime - FlashTags: [Short Movie] [Motion Graphics] [Motion Graphics]
(Via Mefeedia)
"There Are So Many Of Us", a prettty cool animation. I wish I could do these :)
Watch movie (Quicktime, 2.7 min, 17 MB)
Original post, from dhuth on blip.tv (beta):
Music by David Michael Stith.
(Via Mefeedia)
Ryan Is Hungry » Josh Wolf: Federal Grand Jury Appearance
A videoblogger is being sued:
Ryan Is Hungry » Josh Wolf: Federal Grand Jury Appearance: "We went to Josh Wolfâs Grand Jury appearance earlier this week. The video is 10 minutes long, but has good information and we wanted to document as much of the event as possible.
As we understand it, the Federal prosecutors want him to turn over a raw video tape he recorded during a protest over a year ago. Josh refuses to hand it over and now, potentially, faces jail time.
Hereâs the original video that got Josh in trouble.
At this hearing last Thursday, July 20th, the judge extended his judgement till August 1st. Go to joshwolf.net for more updates.
Why should any of us care?
For us, itâs important to support journalists or anyone with a camera being harassed by the government to turn over recordings of public events that each of us has every right to record. We donât want the government, local or federal, to make it a habit of asking for anything we happen to record. Then we each might question: âDo I want to record this and be harassed later on?â? This is especially true during controversial political events.
The good news was this-
At Joshâs press conference, there were about 30 people there. Mostly regular people. 40% of the people had some kind of recording device: audio, video, digital photo, and plain old notebook. Its very cool to see that we all realize that we have the power to disseminate information we think is important. Things can be remembered and discussed without permission."
ongoing · Unending War
ongoing · Unending War: "Iâm having a persistent anger-management problem; seeing your former home blown to hell with malice aforethought will do that. So, who am I mad at? Oddly, Iâm not that mad at the foot soldiers on either side, the IDF or the Hez. Itâs depressingly easy to get young men to go out and kill and die for reasons that turn out later to have been really crappy. The IDF gruntsâ leaders tell them that doing this will make the rockets stop and bring peace to Israelâs northern border, and Iâm sure a lot of them are going about their bloody business as conscientiously as they possibly can. The Hez grunts are mostly poor, oppressed, ignorant, and religion-befuddled, and their leaders tell them that doing this will punish violent oppressors and do Godâs will. ¶
Those leaders, though... anyone whoâs read first-hand reportage about the Hez leadership knows theyâre bloodthirsty racist fundamentalist barbarians who would really like to kill all the Jews and revert the world to fourteenth-century ways. Scum.
As for the Israeli political leadership, we have to act on the assumption that they actually kind of understand whatâs going on around them, and that they launched this in full knowledge that they intended to kill hundreds, displace hundreds of thousands, and break a country. And thereâs a sickening suspicion that they knew it wouldnât work, that this is all playing to the domestic political theater; which would be getting into MiloÅ¡eviÄ territory. Scum.
But right at the moment, thereâs another group that Iâm even angrier at. These are the individuals right here in the civilized world who are egging on one side or the other, who show up in blog comments and on talk radio and in some newspaper columns, explaining how itâs OK for one side to lob rockets into cities, or for the other to blow up towns with everyone in them, because the other side deserves what itâs getting; the victims are kind of sub-human, or are paying a fair price for something they did in 2001 or 1987 or 1973 or 1967 or 1949 or a couple of millennia before that.
Their position, basically, is âLetâs you and him fightâ?. Yep, theyâre willing to fight to the last screaming bleeding victim, as long as itâs a couple of continents away from their comfy chair. Some more of them will write me after I publish this. Theyâre not just scum, theyâre cowards."
In Europe, we had 2 world wars ravage the continent, and somehow, people seem to remember. We always feel that the US has never (recently) known a war on its own land, only in other countries. And really, it's true: I am in NY now and this doesn't feel like a country at war. Nobody's dying. No houses are being blown up.
There are a lot of reasons why the US is so happy to go to war in foreign countries and tear them apart (the biggest military in the world needs at least some practice), but the fact that they don't remember what war is like must be one of them, and the feeling many in the world have that terrorism against the US is ok stems at least partly from that. "Let them feel some pain too", basically. Sure, americans are good at theatrics about the "american lives lost", but the average person doesn't feel any pain from being at war with 3 countries in 5 years (I may miscalculate here, is it more or less?).
Attacking and ravaging other countries does not help you, guys, even if you call them terrorists. And supporting countries who do doesn't help you either.
DreamHost Blog » Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster..
DreamHost Blog » Anatomy of a(n ongoing) Disaster..: "As I’m sure most of you already know, we’ve had nothing but troubles, large troubles, for pretty much the last three weeks. A lot of these troubles were our fault, a couple of them were at least ostensibly beyond our control, and they all compounded each other.
Here I’ll try and go into as much detail as possible about what happened, why, and the steps we’re taking to stop this sort of thing from ever happening again. I can’t excuse what happened, just apologize and hopefully elucidate."
The reason I like Dreamhost is that they are the ONLY host I've dealt with in many years that really, really work for you and communicate and are basically just human beings that want the best for you.
Israel is wrong
Scripting News: 8/1/2006: "I know I'm going to catch hell for this, but it's time to say something. Israel is wrong. There aren't two sides to this anymore. I've heard all I want to hear from Israel. It's time to stop the attack on Hezbollah, withdraw back into Israel, stop firing bombs into Lebanon, and shut up for a while and let everyone else sort this out. It's not just Israel's problem. There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake in the Middle East, and this time not only has an Arab country, and that's what Hezbollah is, withstood Israel's attack, but they're also clearly justified in their response to the Israeli attack.
Hezbollah has every right to have defenses against Israel. If I'm not mistaken, Hezbollah didn't start firing rockets into Israel until they were attacked by Israel. Okay, they took two Israeli soldiers hostage. And now Israel has killed hundreds of Lebanese, destroyed large parts of the country and its infrastructure. It's enough already. Even a Jew like myself sees how wrong the Israeli position is."
Sometimes you just have bad luck:
the blip.tv blog » hardware issue: "Looks like the failure is more serious than simply a primary disk array. We lost two disks simultaneously in a big storage server called a RAID 5 array. Our RAID 5 arrays are supposed to be able to lose any two disks and keep running, but you can’t really lose two disks simultaneously. It’s all a bit technical, and I’ll spare you the details. Almost immediately after that happened — you really can’t make this up — the power went out at our secondary datacenter."
Working from home: rythm vs. structure
When you're working for yourself, not just working from home but really working for yourself, you don't have to stick to 9 to 5. 9 to 5 is only used because it's easy to control by companies, anyways. Nobody is productive from 9 to 5. I never heard anyone say: "Jee, I'm really at my best from 9 to 5."
So when you work for yourself, instead of a structure that tells you when to work, you have to find your rythm. The times of the day when you get certain stuff done.
For me, after a coffee in the morning, I have a few hours of very creative, focused attention in which I get a lot done. Rythm has a lot to do with how you eat, by the way. But it's different for everyone. So, finding your rythm. Figuring out when's a good time to do coding, versus when's a good time to go to the bank.
See also: Get your rythm
During Friday Curfew Busy Mansur is Empty 4
"Curfew in Baghdad normally starts at 8 pm most days. This means no cars are allowed on the streets after 8pm, and you shouldn't be wandering outside your house without extremely urgent business.
These days Iraqis tend to be at home by 5 or 6pm.
Before the war, even during the sanctions, Mansur was a hip, lively, exciting area. Think of it as the East Village or Mission District of Baghdad.
Now the curfew begins at 11am on Fridays, and doesn't end until 6am Saturday. This means Iraqis are prevented from travelling the city for almost 24 hours one day a week.
When you include this with the other 60 hours Baghdad residents are under curfew, this means you are under curfew about half of your life in Baghdad."
"Minuteman Fuera de NYC!!!": the "Minutemen" are this self-appointed group of people who want to get immigrants out of the country. What a crazy idea, and racist too. This is a video of a protest against the minutemen.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 3.8 min, 30.1 MB)
Original post, from gerardo romo z.:
Protestas contra el grupo anti-inmigrante Minuteman Click here to view video
(Via Mefeedia)
Get your rythm
I'm up early today, couldn't sleep with the heat. It's 4:00 am. Yeah, that's ridiculous.
So I figured I'd do an experiment. Since I work mostly from home these days, I'm always trying to find the best rythm. I know that usually, I get up and from like 8:00am to noon, I'm very productive. In the afternoon, not so, so I do chores then.
What can I get done this early? Is it a time to code? To wax philosophically? To read up?
What do you do?
"Prodigio peruano en Nueva York". I met Gerardo a few weeks ago. He's videoblogging for El Diario, a Spanish newspaper in New York. His videoblogs are fantastic, a great insight in daily life of Spanish New York.
He's a pioneer. He must be one of the first paid videobloggers in the world.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 1.7 min, 13.7 MB)
Original post, from gerardo romo z.:
(Via Mefeedia)
Rocketboom about comics. Batman, Superman, Spiderman. You names it.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 4.3 min, 24.3 MB)
Original post, from Rocketboom RSS 2.0 Main Index:
story links: rb field correspondent zadi diaz covers comic-con 2006, chuck d., rich koslowski, kyle baker, adam wallenta, steve rude | related: exclusive chuck d interview on jetsetshow.com, zadi covers comic-con 2005
(Via Mefeedia)
"AK - Parking Lot, pt.1" American King - check it out. The true America.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 2.7 min, 15.3 MB)
Original post, from Human Dog Productions:
Garrett explains a new job prospect as part of his plan to get his life back together. Look for more on Friday. Subscribe to Human Dog using the Big Feed Button on the left and get American King and the rest of Human Dog delivered free. Your comments are appreciated. DOWNLOAD Quicktime/iPod VIDEO FILE DOWNLOAD Windows VIDEO FILE
(Via Mefeedia)
"Sometimes I Feel Like This". Short, atmospheric, and making a beautiful point, I like this kind of videoblogging.
Watch movie (Quicktime, 0.7 min, 2.3 MB)
Original post, from Ryanne's Video Blog:
Know what I mean? Jay definately caught me in a mood. That mood seems to have been lasting about 2 weeks. I'm slowly slipping out of it though. Thanks to things like Node101 Weekend which remind me that there is still hope in the world. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
(Via Mefeedia)
iPhoto, Flickr and Photocasting on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
iPhoto, Flickr and Photocasting on Flickr
P.O.V. - The Tailenders . Behind the Lens. Filmmaker Interview | PBS: "The Tailenders" documents Global Recordings Network, which is an organization that has the goal of translating Bible stories into every language in the world. The organization use low-tech hand-wind players to distribute those recordings. And the film follows them going to the Solomon Islands, India and Mexico as they make translations and distribute them."
Just saw this movie, very interesting.
In all the web 2.0 business talk, I never hear anyone say that it's perfectly valid to create a business, run it for a while and then kill it. Why is that?
MySQL AB :: Unicode and Other Funny Characters
MySQL AB :: Unicode and Other Funny Characters: "Sorting strings is a common action to take, but on top of not everyone using the same characters, not everyone even sorts the same characters the same way! A collation is a defined way of sorting strings, and it is often language-dependent. "
Here's an article about something that was a real eye-opener for me a few years ago: it costs more to be poor.
Basically, if you're poor, you pay more for everything. Housing (you rent, you don't own), food, loans, you name it.
Study Documents âGhetto Taxâ Being Paid by the Urban Poor: "The poor are also the main customers for appliances and furniture at ârent to ownâ? stores, where payments are stretched out at very high interest rates; in Wisconsin, a $200 television can end up costing $700."
Keywords » Oligarchy: "During the years that George W. Bush has been in the White House, productivity growth has been stronger than ever. But the real compensation of all but the top 20 percent of income earners has been flat or falling. Gains in wages, salaries and benefits have been increasingly concentrated at the uppermost rungs of the income ladder."
What seems to be happening is that, at least in the US, the rich are getting richer:
peterme.com: Fujita-san
peterme.com: Fujita-san: "A couple days ago she came to me with a print out of this database record. It turns out the subject of that record, Santaro Fujita, lived in our house in 1942 (though we don't know if he rented or owned.)
What will sadly not surprise you, if you connect a Japanese name and the year 1942, is that the record is evidence of his relocation that year to the Central Utah Relocation Center, but not before being housed at the race track in Tanforan (San Bruno, California). As in, horse stalls converted to barracks. (You can download a Powerpoint presentation featuring photos of Tanforan.)
Look again at that record. That such a reductive, factual presentation of data can stir up such sadness is a bit shocking. Fujita-san was no recent emigre. At the time of his relocation, he was nearly 60 years old, having lived in the United States over 40 years. The idea that our government considered him in any way a threat is dismaying to a remarkable degree."
Momentshowing: Amercian King
Momentshowing: Amercian King: "Let me tell you why I like American King:
Daily shows are becoming very popular in the Videoblogging world. I think the TV industry really gets into the idea of short, daily content. I'm personally not so interested because it reminds me of "distraction entertainment". It's the "i'm bored at work. Make me laugh." There is certainly a place for this kind of video. Topical. Breezy. Light. Fun. It's here and then forgotten. Next thing.
Chris has made a name for himself creating the universe of Human Dog. Like an HBO series, the story is told in parts. Each part informs the later videos. A rich, complex world is formed. The stortelling of Amercian King assumes that the viewer will follow along and learn the world. Like an HBO show, the story begins and will eventually end. Complexties and subtleties are the highlights."
Mefeedia development practices
For mefeedia, we're getting better and better at developing practices. I always had a way to print out queries being performed on any page, today I added a way to have an EXPLAIN statement run on those queries and output a warning if something looks funky (using filesort, no index used, ...). That way, I can browse through the site and very easily see if there are potentially bad queries on a specific page, like in the picture below.
In the example below, there's a query that uses a filesort, which is often a bad thing, so I go to PHPMyAdmin to do an explain on that query, and see if I can improve that query by adding an index or something.
Other development practices that are really helping that we use are (clearly) using versioning, a bug database and a fairly clean internal API. For our internal API, we also run PHPDoc to generate automatic documentation, which is really easy when trying to find if there's a function that does what you want and for refactoring stuff.
Another pretty cool thing we got is a script that does simple counts of rows in the database. It's on an external server (a shared host), and just pings the db every hour, gets a list of tables and logs their rowcounts. It's a great way of adding stats, I'm surprised I didn't find an open source solution to do that. We added graphs to make it even nicer. The only regret I have is that I didn't start doing this from day 1.
The only things we feel we are really missing now is a way to do a 1-click go-to-beta and a 1-click go-live of changes. That'll help us roll stuff out more regularly. We're working on that.
OK/Cancel » Archive » Guide to Remote Usability Testing
OK/Cancel » Archive » Guide to Remote Usability Testing: "The ability to intercept someone live as they begin a task, have them quickly share their screen and comments over the phone, and then watch them continue to use their computer the way they were about to anyway, is by far the greatest benefit remote testing offers."
Codec for Sony vegas
Sony Vegas is great, but if you make movies witha small digital camera like the Canon Powershots, the videos are in avi format with a codec that Vegas doesn't have. The result is that, when you add a video to the timeline, only the audio shows up.
A lot of places try to sell you codecs for like 20$.
It took my a while to find, but the first link on this page (morgan-multimedia) is free and works great and fixed the problem:
www.jetdv.com :: View topic - How do I open AVI files create by still cameras?
Conversations with Dina
Conversations with Dina: The Indian governement is (it seems) blocking entire blog domains, like Typepad and Blogger. The block is being enforced by Indian ISP's which means that these entire domains cannot be accessed from within India.
Eyebeam reBlog: The Flowers of War | The Huffington Post
Eyebeam reBlog: The Flowers of War | The Huffington Post: a great post about the imagery of war.
Jon's Radio
Jon's Radio: a great post on licensing aggregated data.
It's a question I've been struggling with for mefeedia. Clearly, all the data like posts and videos is licensed under the license specified by the creators.
But there are also lists, playlists, tags and so on that we and our users create and aggregate.
During a discussion with Jon, I started thinking of it as "the people's data" instead of "mefeedia's data". That helped.
And I am trying to find a very open license to license our aggregation of the people's data out again. It's a struggle all aggregation type services will have to deal with.
The all new Yahoo! homepage, has, for the first time ever, no longer any trace of the directory that made them so famous. The directory was already moved towards the bottom of the page in a tiny box last time, but now it seems like it's totally gone. (I'm not counting the search box directory switch).
Rosenfeld Media - Search Analytics for your Site: Search log potluck
Do you work with search logs? Go leave a sample at Search Analytics for your Site
Wigblog - Things Internet and Otherwise by Richard Wiggins
Wigblog - Things Internet and Otherwise by Richard Wiggins: "Imagine my surprise one day in April 2006 when, while merrily Googling away doing research for the book, I discovered you could already buy it! O'Reilly had assigned the book an ISBN -- 0596101910 -- and submitted it to the Amazons of the world as a soon-to-be-published book!"
OReilly is telling the world that they are publishing Lou Rosenfeld's new publishing house's first upcoming book.
Is OReilly playing dirty? An honest mistake? Whatever the case, it does sound like OReilly could make a bit more of an effort to straighten this out.
Scripting News: 7/15/2006
Scripting News: 7/15/2006: "In the case of Podshow, I know who they are, and have seen how ruthless they can be with other people's work, not just mine, and how their lack of conscience means they'll do things that I don't want to know about, but since it's in my area of creativity, I have to be concerned."
O'Reilly Radar > A Week in the Valley: GData
O'Reilly Radar > A Week in the Valley: GData: "I had a great lunch with Chris DiBona and Mark Lukovsky at Google. There's a huge move within Google away from SOAP and even REST-style ad hoc APIs and towards GData instead. The big point for me was that GData is just Atom/RSS for reading, Atom Publishing for writing, and A9 stored queries for searching. They had to specify a bit of glue around sync and so on, but the whole thing is that simple."
Widespread CCD problems in consumer imaging products
Widespread CCD problems in consumer imaging products: my Canon elph camera that I love suddenly developed this problem.
I am calling Canon and they say that if this is indeed the problem, they will replace it for free.
The problem looks like this:
So if your camera suddenly looks like that, call the manufacturer.
Flickr: The Everyday Information Architecture Pool
Flickr: The Everyday Information Architecture Pool