Blog posts

Sent this morning to All Things Considered and the NPR Ombudsman. Dear Sir/Madam, As a regular listener to NPR’s many news programs I appreciate the depth with which you approach news stories, and the lack of partisan bias or corporate affiliation which distinguishes your coverage from many of your colleagues. I was, however, deeply disappointed by the coverage yesterday evening of President Bush’s speech, both as part of your regular coverage and during the regular news announcements. ...

Until late yesterday afternoon there was a problem if you viewed this blog using Firefox and tried to go to an individual entry page. I’d stripped the ugly ‘.html’ from the end of links, but not completed the tweaking of the server settings to make that work as it should. That’s now resolved, and just in time to celebrate the release of Firefox 1.5. While Microsoft fool around trying to make sure turn-of-the-decade technologies finally work in the 2006 release of their web browser, the Firefox developers have once again raised the bar for web browsers. The new version not only provides a smoother browsing experience, it also offers up a number of new features that give the web developers amongst us plentiful opportunities to experiment. ...

After much procrastinating, Kari and I recently invested in iPods. I got one of the new video iPods and, much to her delight, we found a reconditioned pink ipod mini for Kari. And naturally we wanted to be able to listen to them in the car. Having discovered that Griffin’s original iTrip doesn’t work with the 5th generation (video) iPods (despite the “works with all iPods” sticker still on display) we decided to try out the Monster iCarKit, a combined charger and radio hookup which boasts the ability to plug in a mobile phone charger and iPod simultaneously. ...

It has come to my attention (thanks to Kari and Harv) that some people subscribed to the atom feed from this site aren’t seeing updates come up in their newsreaders. When I changed the blog’s templates I also upgraded the atom feed to the (now standard) Atom 1.0 format, the latest and greatest syndication format. Some older newsreaders have trouble with the format so if you somehow ended up here but didn’t see an update in your newsreader you may want to check for an update, and/or request that the writers of your software catch up with the standards.

Fred Clark over at Slacktivist is one of the more astute bloggers out there, and this piece about the term ’ Cyber Monday’ was yet another laugh/cry triumph. A demonstration of why the mainstream press desparately needs a reality check, and how far down the road to corporate control of perceptions of the ’net we’ve already gone.

Watching Good Night, and Good Luck a couple of weeks ago was something of a cathartic experience. George Clooney’s writing and directorial skills came as a pleasant surprise, but the film’s main draw for this viewer was the way it tapped into an ongoing frustration with the self-censorship of much of the mainstream media, particularly in the USA. While direct links between the McCarthyism that is the film’s conflict and modern times should only be drawn cautiously, that period offers a historical lesson that has been forgotten all too quickly. ...

Through Google Maps Mania I came across The Starbucks Challenge. It’s an effort to use the web to hold Starbucks to their promise of providing fair trade coffee at the customers’ request. The idea is that you request a cup of fair trade coffee, and blog about the response you get, posting an appropriately tagged link on del.icio.us. They pull all those postings together, plot them on a map and communicate the results to Starbucks management. ...

The Pragmatic Programmer is one of those books that has rapidly slipped into the subconscious of much of the programming community. So much so that I have delayed reading it for quite some time simply because I suspected its content to have been duplicated in the many, many articles on development techniques that have passed through my newsreader. But recently, feeling the need to spend a bit more time reflecting on my coding habits I decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did. ...

Grand Rapids, Michigan, the city in which I live, has recently been conducting trials of citywide WiFi technologies. Mayor George Heartwell and the City Commission have an impressive vision of the potential offered by municipal wifi, not just for helping the general community leverage online tools, but also to connect together public services and make service providers more efficient. Unfortunately that vision isn’t shared by some of the current infrastructure providers, or all State Congresspeople, and their are moves to introduce legislation at state and federal levels to block such plans. ...

Andrew Bird’s " …and the mysterious production of eggs" has justifiably become one of the year’s most acclaimed albums (it only has one competitor as my favourite) and his recent set at UICA came close to measuring up to its high standard. The album draws much of its strength from its eclecticism, balancing on the edge of the freak-folk movement but with a welcome injection of jazz and swing influences, and it was quite a surprise to see only two people on stage. Through judicious use of sampling and a versatile keyboard, Bird and collaborator Martin Dosh built a rich sound based around Bird’s violin (plucked and bowed), keyboard, guitar and percussion. While relatively stationary on stage—when singing and playing multiple instruments, there’s not much opportunity for movement—Bird’s an expressive performer, reinforcing and exposing the songs with his facial expressions. ...