Month: February 2004

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: a peek at Apple’s video device strategy?:

“Unless some other kind of content in factored into this (something that isn’t affected by screen size like a movie would be and that doesn’t require a 90 minute investment), I’m not sure what’s a-brewing. A TiVo player you carry around, perhaps? Sync it up with your PVR and take your programming to go, along with your music . . . . .

There’s the obvious tease there, between what he says about their labs and the widely-discussed job posting for a video engineer with experience in consumer electronics . . . something’s up at Infinite Loop.”

(the height of egotism to quote yourself, but I wanted to refresh my memory: what did I say about that again?)

The more I think about this and in the wake of the single most widely TiVo’ed event ever, I think there’s some kind of portable video player that works with some kind of outboard display (for all I know, it could “broadcast” with a very weak signal. With the airport extreme running at 56 Mbits, WiFi is an option as well.

Trouble is, I don’t watch TV. I watch movies and the like, some baseball, but no mainstream network stuff or even cable. (Irony: when we had our @Home cable service connected in 2000, they inadvertently connected up cable TV as well, but we never knew it. AT&T didn’t catch it, but Comcast did. We never knew.) So the potential for this is obvious but I don’t feel a visceral demand for it.

Meanwhile, Frank continues to monitor progress toward his iServe (and he’s better qualified to address this new device’s requirements, anyway), and this mystery device is coming together just off-stage. What’s next?

[Posted with ecto]

Eat Your Vegetables: Hello Janet!:

“And to think i wasn’t going to watch the halftime show! But how often do you get to see Justin Timberlake expose Janet Jackson’s breast? The answer is over and over again if you have ReplayTV. Click on the image to see the video.”

Well, I didn’t see it (and I’m so glad I was retrieving my kids from next door where they were watching, unbeknownst to me) as it happened, but Lane has a link of the, um, offending video from the above-referenced article.

And a large still (where the pasty/nipple guard ornamental jewelry – ouch! – is clearly visible) is available here.

And it occurs at the end of the performance: how coincidental . . . .

[Posted with ecto]

This just in . . .

“William Gibson is giving a reading/talk at Kane hall this tuesday evening at 7 pm. Tickets are available at the university bookstore free of charge.”

[Posted with ecto]

“Our approach has been to seek out the best and brightest talent,” said Lisa Gurry, a lead product manager at MSN. “Beyond that, I can’t add anything.””

I know one bright fellow they have already recruited: it should get interesting.

[Posted with ecto]

T & G Blog: :

“It’s a question of ethical choices,” says Riverdale’s Nelson. “In a school, it’s public money. How should it be spent? Is it ethical to buy software instead of hiring an art teacher? Me, I want an art teacher–not the Microsoft help assistant dancing on every student’s desktop.”

I’ve said for years that what people (educators among them) call “teaching computers” is just teaching applications that will be a dim memory by the time the students reach the workforce. Teach them to think, to learn, whatever tools are at hand, and the rest will take care of itself.

Others understand this.

A provincial German town drops Microsoft for Linux – 03/24/03

Spanish Extremadura chooses linux over Windows: access to open source cited :: Global Learning Outreach :: open source knowledge for an open source planet:

“The Spanish province of Extremadura has made linux its official operating system going so far as to create its own regional distribution. Citing linux’s open source, Vazquez de Miguel, the province’s the minister of education, science and technology, said: “We are the future. If Microsoft doesn’t become more open and generous with its code, people will stop using it and it will disappear.”

[Posted with ecto]

CBS apologizes for breast-baring end to halftime show:

“We were extremely disappointed by elements of the MTV-produced halftime show,” Joe Browne, NFL executive vice president, said. “They were totally inconsistent with assurances our office was given about the content of the show.”

Admittedly, the “costume malfunction” wasn’t part of the planned performance, but let me see . . . the announced performers were P. Diddy, Kid Rock, Nelly . . . and the bright sparks at the NFL expected “Up with People?”

On that note, set the wayback machine for 1985 . . .
Quotes and Jems ( 4-Dec-1995):

“Sen. Danforth: “There is nothing on the face of the album which would notify you if the record has pornographics material or material glorifying violence?”
Tipper Gore: “No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me.”
Frank Zappa: “I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy’s legs on the album cover is good indication that it’s not for little Johnny.”
— The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985

<UPDATE> Does CBS think we’re that stupid? | A Whole Lotta Nothing:

“It’s funny, when you collect the evidence, I wonder if CBS really thinks the public is stupid enough to believe it:”

read on for some observations that make you wonder if the NFL and CBS were gamed . . . sadly, the link to the article about how it was all planned no longer works.

<UPDATE 2> from a press release, issued Jan 28:

“I don’t think the Super Bowl has ever seen a performance like this,” Duldulao added. “The dancing is great. She’s more stylized, she’s more feminine, she’s more a woman as she dances this time around. There are some shocking moments in there too. It’s a lot of pressure, there’s so many creative people and creative artists, you want to make sure everything is different, and I think she’s going to do that. She’s doing her job well.”

[Posted with ecto]

In keeping with the general cleanup, I also decided to stop logging image transfers, only logging html, css, rdf/xml content.

I use custom logging that dates back to my efforts to keep NIMDA-infected trash out of my logs.

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI "\.(gif|jpg|png|jpeg)" dontlog

I added this line to my httpd.conf and that seems to do it. Later, I may remove css, js, and rss feed files as well.

If I need to find out images are missing or causing errors, the error log will tell me that.

Of course, this make the bandwidth reporting in webalizer useless, since we’re filtering all that out, but mrtg is picking that up.

I also changed my text-encoding to work around some issues ecto was having with some content. For some reason, some pages were hard-coded to iso-8559-1, so I had to first swap that out for <$MTPublishCharset$>. Then add to mt.cfg:
PublishCharset UTF-8
NoHTMLEntities 1

[Posted with ecto]