from Suzanne Vega’s Celebrity Playlist commentary, in this week’s New Music Tuesday email …
Yet another playlist I’d love to buy.
Month: February 2004
why not free Webmonkey’s content?
Wired News: Webmonkey, RIP: 1996 — 2004
The demise of Webmonkey and the belated praise for its success makes me wonder: what would be the downside to Terra Lycos just letting it all go with their blessing?
Obviously, as a labor of love for its creators and a clear traffic draw, it was an unqualified success in its day. Why not let it go its own way?
(Of course, I have wished the same thing for the Newton OS and HyperCard . . . )
MovableType Plugin Manager: useful, even if you don’t use many of them
This is proving to be quite useful.
Like working with CPAN modules or FreeBSD’s ports system, all that’s stored locally is a skeleton outline of what’s available: you request something, and down it comes, fetched, unpacked, and installed. Uninstalling is just as painless.
I have more plugins installed than I realized, and I had to walk through the manual registration process (you match each file in your plugins directory against a registered plugin) to start things off properly. The only one that is unclaimed is the Zeitgeist module, but that will be taken care of soon, I’m assured.
Almost all those plugins are in use: the ArchiveYear one I have yet to work with and the Outliner is giving me some problems. The author and I have been in contact: it’s supposed to take the OPML data from NetNewsWire or your RSS reader of choice and generate a reading list/blogroll based on what you’re actually subscribed to.
The only gotcha I have found is in getting the MTW3CValidate and MTTextile to play nicely. MTTextile needs to load first, ideally as the first item in the template, followed by MTW3CValidate.
<$MTTextileOptions smarty_mode="2" trim_spaces="1"$>
[ . . . ] the rest of your page [ . . . ]
If you think this would help (and you’re a MovableType user) check it out.
the monoculture meme
CNN.com – Expert: Microsoft dominance poses security threat – Feb. 16, 2004:
Geer and others believe Microsoft’s software is so dangerously pervasive that a virus capable of exploiting even a single flaw in its operating systems could wreak havoc.
[ . . . ]
“Once you start down the road with that analogy, you get stuck in it,” said Scott Charney, chief security strategist for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.
Charney says monoculture theory doesn’t suggest any reasonable solutions; more use of the Linux open-source operating system, a rival to Microsoft Windows, might create a “duoculture,” but that would hardly deter sophisticated hackers.
If you factor in evolution and the various ways organisms come up with to defend themselves, there’s more to this analogy. Those that can adapt to changing conditions might survive: no guarantees for those that are not able — or unwilling — to adapt.
Pursuing this line of thought in bio-medical terms leads one to ideas like quarantines for known disease carriers, inoculations, and euthanization if a great die-off doesn’t come first.
<update: Feb 19, 2004> Of course, I completely missed the reference to “sophisticated hackers.” When did that become the problem? What we’ve seen so far with the vast majority of these Windows exploits are crimes of opportunity, or schoolboy pranks writ large.
We’re not seeing home computers being used to clean out bank accounts or anything like that: all we’re seeing is immature vandals wreaking their small-minded version of havoc on the commons, soaking up network bandwidth, overloading mail servers and inboxes. A preventable annoyance . . .
another day, another button
MrG finds it interesting that the RIAA is OK with file-sharing _as long as the artist agrees to it._
He suggests that artists embrace the idea by asking listeners to share their music, and asked for some button ideas. Here’s mine: 
This seems like it could be an interesting wedge to use against DRM schemes. If an artist explicitly releases their work under a Creative Content license and as a consequence insists that any distribution scheme (iTunes, WalTunes, et al) remove any DRM from their content, would that break their paradigm? Do the DRM systems support graded licensing?
how low can you get?
Center for American Progress – The Progress Report – Page:
*Daily Outrage*
bq. Conservative allies of the White House have resorted to attacking the military service of former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a triple-amputee war hero decorated for his service in Vietnam.
This is just outrageous. I don’t know what makes me more angry, the fact that someone would be allowed to broadcast this kind of slander, knowing it will be peddled as fact by “rip and read” conservative news organs, or that no one will repudiate these comments before they become woven into the fabric of the debate.
Despicable. A soldier covers a grenade to save his brother soldiers, 4 days after winning the Silver Star for gallantry, and the best a grateful nation can do is allow worthless pundits to disparage him.
quote of the day
To me, open source isn’t about free-loading, it’s about innovation, short feedback loops, higher quality, and the development of a community.
greatest hits
I dug out the 25 most-requested URLs since the epoch (April 2002) and am listing them in the sidebar. Needs some work still (the Archive pages don’t make sense there). But an interesting look at what Google thinks of the stuff here (that’s how most people get here).
“[I]t’s time to move on, and find something else, something that can’t move offshore.”
Many New Causes for Old Problem of Jobs Lost Abroad
Interesting and pretty balanced piece on outsourcing and who’s affected.
Some structural change is inevitable, and has always been part of the reality of the workplace. It’s partly the pace of change that makes the difference and partly the types of jobs that have become portable.
Am I the only one who sees any irony in the resistance to telecommuting (that might allow companies to lower costs by moving parts of their workforce into less expensive domestic real estate) at the same time as jobs move offshore?
manage things, lead people
Ton’s Interdependent Thoughts: Covey on Management:
“In this interview he declared management of people superfluous. One manages money, stocks, portfolios, and the like, not people. Give people purpose and a course, and then stop interfering with them.
The interview ended with this quote (emphasis mine):
In most organisations there is a lack of trust, and most employees are powerless. In this era of knowledge-workers we still use the industrial model of control, in which we treat people like objects. It is as if we are still practising bloodletting, although we know all about bacteria and how they work.”