Category: food

an iTunes playlist waiting to happen

normblog: Bob Dylan’s best-loved songs:

What else can I say? Listening again to this music – so as to make my own picks, or to remind myself of songs some of you had chosen and which I didn’t remember well – I found the wealth and inventiveness of it just staggering. A compilation set of what’s here wouldn’t be bad.

There has been some grumbling that this is the oldsters version since it omits anything newer than 1976, save one track.

I’d buy either or both of these proposed collections: ain’t the Remix Culture grand?

be careful what you eat

TheStar.com – Corn sweetener linked to obesity:

Researchers say they’ve found more evidence of a link between a rapid rise in obesity and a corn product used to sweeten soft drinks and food since the 1970s.

The researchers examined consumption records from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for 1967-2000 and combined that with previous research and their own analyses.

The data showed an increase in the use of high-fructose corn sweeteners in the late 1970s and 1980s “coincidental with the epidemic of obesity,” said one of the researchers, Dr. George Bray, a longtime obesity scientist with Louisiana State University System’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center. He noted the research didn’t prove a definitive link.

I suspected as much. The health of a generation, sold out to the corn lobby . . . .

I think it’s more about packaged/processed foods (breakfast bars versus the piece of fruit they resemble, etc.) than one ingredient or another.

online dispute resolution

SquareTrade | Building Trust in Transactions

I bought something from an eBay seller (a large liquidator) and have been having some trouble getting the goods delivered. After a couple of fruitless attempts to get any information from them, I decided to enlist a mediator. eBay offers free mediation (I suspect all they do is forward on your complaint to the other party under their name) as well as a low-cost option. A $1.00 item (transaction total: $6.24) doesn’t warrant spending $20 on a mediator: my hope is the more formal reminder of their obligation gets this taken care of.

help rebuild Iraq: you can help

STILL TIME TO SHIP TECH BOOKS TO IRAQ

This is your last chance to release your no-longer-needed computer books to Iraq! They must arrive by next Friday!

BookCrossing and the Freedom Technology Center of Mountain View, California are teaming up to help jump-start Iraq’s infrastructure recovery with computer software and hardware book donations.

Volunteers will meet at Mountain View’s Freedom Technology Center all day Friday, March 26 to pack and ship badly-needed computer books to Iraq. Today in Baghdad, up-to-date PC hardware and software are readily available, but computer books are not. Iraq’s new techies need books to learn.

How can you help? By shipping computer tech books to their California office so they arrive within the next 2 weeks! So go ahead, look on your shelves – anything related to computers will help. Register and then release them to:

Freedom Technology Center
278 Hope St. Suite E
Mountain View, California 94041-1308
USA

Let’s show them the generosity and responsiveness of the BookCrossing community, and have some fun tracking the progress of the books in Iraq along the way!

Read the official press release:
http://www.bookcrossing.com/pr/freedom-tech-iraq-2004.html

You don’t need that old copy of Learning Perl or UNIX in a Nutshell, do you?

hey, little government worker, would you like some candy?

Army to Gates: Halt the free software | CNET News.com:

Since the launch of Office 2003 last year, Microsoft has given out tens of thousands of free copies of its flagship software, which retails for about $500, to workers at its biggest customers. The giveaway was expanded to government workers this year, but ethics offices at the Department of the Interior and Department of Defense have said the offers constitute unauthorized gifts and must be returned.

The Department of the Army went a step further, calling on Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates to stop sending the software to Army personnel.

[ . . . ]

A Microsoft representative said giving away the software is a way to let some customers experience new features. “The goal of the program was to give customers a taste of the software and allow them to learn how it might be of use to their organizations in a positive way,” Microsoft spokesman Keith Hodson said.

Although Office has captured more than 90 percent of the market for productivity software, convincing customers to upgrade to the latest versions of Office has become a growing challenge for the company. And upgrades are essential to Microsoft: Office and Windows produce substantially all the company’s profits.

And I’m sure that when government employee Andrew uses the new version to open a document and then sends it to his colleague Betty, she can open it with her older version, right? And then when she uses her “free upgrade” and modifies the file, Claude finds he has to install it, as well, or the project he owes to his boss, Danielle, won’t be finished . . . .

I’ve used the phrase Trojan Horse today, already, haven’t I?

owning your own data/information

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: be careful what you ask for:
John comments:

Microsoft seems to have realized that we keep building database features into applications and layering them on top of the OS. I am no Redmond booster, but a light came on in my head when I saw what could be done by building the database into the OS in the first place.

They have also realized that by letting people keep all their information as files on a disk, the switching cost of moving to another platform is dangerously low. So moving all client data into a proprietary datastore, in the guise of a fast indexed “file system,” could be a trojan horse. This won’t be a file system as we know it, but a database without a backing store (where Zoe is a database/index built on top of the mbox files, WinFS sounds like a database without the underlying files). Creating a new file will mean you’re creating a new database record, and editing an existing one will be updating one.

So all the icons you see in your Windows explorer will be abstractions: where a “file” is actually a record in your filesystem’s allocation table and the inodes that hold the data, you could end up with a a disk that, when removed from a machine, might contain just one “file.” It will be the raw disk space managed by the database/filesystem layer, and otherwise unusable.

Add to this the notion that access to the data will be managed through the .NET architecture — you run a .NET server at your enterprise or pay a fee to MSFT to use one of theirs(!!) — and I think it’s pretty risky.

Contrast this with all the talk about storing all Office application documents in XML — light, open, and human-readable — and I have to wonder which is the real strategy. These are likely being built by different groups — WinFS would be owned by the OS group — which might explain the differing positions.

And of course, we have seen what happened when the broswer got built into the OS: it became moribund and stale. Market forces are a powerful thing, and sometimes the only leverage you have.

Reading the full article might make these points more clear. There may be updates as well: I should take a look myself.

is this a fair way to fight?

Tim Bray, newly-minted Sun employee, alludes to a variation of the Valerie Plame affair, perpetrated by MSFT.

ongoing · Sunny Boy:

Personal disclosure: In 1997, as a result of signing a consulting contract with Netscape, I was subject to a vicious, deeply personal extended attack by Microsoft in which they tried to destroy my career and took lethal action against a small struggling company because my wife worked there. It was a sideshow of a sideshow of the great campaign to bury Netscape and I’m sure the executives have forgotten; but I haven’t. I should tell that story here sometime so that should my readers discern an attitude problem regarding Redmond, it ain’t because I work at Sun. Also, it has a funny ending.

He also mentions that he knows some smart, honest and ethical folks at MSFT: while I don’t doubt there are some, I would love for someone/some entity to poach as many of them as they could and set up shop with all that talent and none of the baggage.

a project

So I have been wondering how to do something useful with the 623 logfiles I have archived. Sure, I run nightly stats, but they’re pretty basic and they’re not queryable. If I want to analyze something over time, how do I do that?

Well, if I had taken note of this article — Linux Magazine | October 2002 | LAMP POST | Getting a Handle on Traffic — when it came out, I wouldn’t be asking these questions now.

But this is a great article on this topic and points to the installation, care, and feeding of mod_log_sql which — wait for it — is an Apache module that lets you log web server traffic directly into your MySQL database. The mod_log_sql docs are very good and will get you going in no time.

But how to handle the ever-increasing backlog of old logfiles? Not so difficult after all. In Jeremy’s article, he lays out the schema for the database, so you can simply crib that and write something in the language of your choice to turn log data into SQL INSERT statements.
Continue reading “a project”

a great essay on what works . . . . and why

Nicest of the Damned: Running a business on OS X and Linux:

I’m not saying that Macs and Linux boxes are no work, but the work, it seems to me, is focused on the solution at hand, rather than the problem of the moment. It looks like I’m continuing to marginalize the Windows boxes — our CEO wants an iMac when we move into our new space next week.

Frank has written up his experience of the past few years in different environments on building and supporting information technology solutions that work, day in and day out.

Repeatedly, he finds that Windows is the weak link and the less he relies on it, the more reliable the whole system becomes.

There’s also some good stuff about loosely-typed, flexible scripting languages versus more tightly constrained development tools: short answer, Python et al rock, proprietary toolkits don’t. Our time at CNN.com coincided (we were cube neighbors for a while) and where our day to day responsibilities differed, our experiences seem to have been much the same. I supported some Windows-based services that were uniformly unreliable and flaky, and in at least one case, the CTO of one outfit decided to rewrite their whole app from scratch, based on it’s performance in our environment.

Worth reading: I think the idea deserves a more detailed exploration.

[Posted with ecto]