Today I Learned (TIL) about GeekTool, a Mac OS X preference pane that allows an enduser to float data on the background. Images, the text of files, and most importantly, the output of shell scripts can feed GeekTool.

I stumbled upon GeekTool looking for a desktop clock for my new work MacBook Pro. For some reason, I have a hard time locating the menu bar clock, but I want something a little less transient than the Dashboard widget.

Being a UNIX guy, writing scripts to create ambient information flows is appealing. It’s a bit more complex, and less aesthetic, than iStats Menus, but way more flexible. Flexible like a sawzall.

Hat tip to Judi Smith

Typically, for whatever reason, January is a slow reading month. If I’d actually had even a half decent pace, some of these past years I might have been able to read 40+ — 50 books in a year.

Thanks to my new Kindle, looks like that might change. Of course to baptize the device, I had to read a classic, and what better than William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Per usual with every read, my opinion of Case lessens, but I’m struck by how relevant and timely the vision still is. This time around the Panther Moderns vs SenseNet scene is eerily reminiscent of Gnosis busting Gawker’s chops, the various Anonymous/4Chan hacks, and WikiLeaks. Complete with overboard response by various authorities.

But today I also completed reading Charle’s Stross’ The Fuller Memorandum, third in the Laundry Series. New Year’s vacation made some available time, but on public transit the Kindle is so convenient there are a plethora of reading opportunities. The other nice thing about the Kindle is that, presuming you’ve stocked up, as soon as you finish a book, there’s another one handy to begin.

Despite the promising start, I’m going to put myself on a modest 30 book target for the year. I will say the Kindle definitely agrees with me, although it suffers from the gravitational pull of the iOS touch interface. I often find myself trying to “swipe” on my Kindle. But once you get into a page clicking groove, man does the text get chewed up.

“Scarcity brings clarity,” is a phrase I’m fond of. I try not to use it in writing as it’s a bit shopworn. I keep the sentiment in mind though, when I’m mentally complaining about various constraints at work.

Curious as to who coined it, Google’s Eric Schmidt got my original attribution. Looking a little deeper, Sergey Brin put “scarcity breeds clarity” into the 2008 Google Founders’ Letter to investors. That seems to be the origin, although Marissa Mayer pops up in a Business Week interview with brings and a dateline a few weeks ahead of the Founders’ letter.

Guessing Sergey came up with it, or heard it somewhere else, and popularized it within Google before putting it in the letter.

Just curious.

Speaking of gadgets, after all that angst over what smartphone to get, I finally picked up an iPhone 4 in mid-September 2010 (Correction, late October). Despite dancing with the bleeding edge Android models, I got the JesusPhone (apropos Stross) mainly because I wanted to stay with AT&T.

That’s right, stay with AT&T. I’m not a huge voice user. Coverage in the DC area is pretty solid. And I wanted to fold my plan and my wife’s plan into a family plan. Prying her off off AT&T would have been more trouble than it’s worth. The choice has worked out well. Our combined plan totals about $90 a month, which isn’t a huge cost savings but now I have 2Gb of 3G connectivity a month and 200 text messages.

And the iPhone makes a great ubiquitously available, interstitial computing device. Each one uniquely kitted out with a passel of apps, they create their own pocket universes, the 3G connectivity making wormholes across space and time.

Now if they’d just get around to enabling a mobile hotspot feature, the dang thing would be perfect.

Don’t know what happened, but in 2010 I turned back into a gadget nut.

January 1, 2010 all I had was an iPod Nano, a bottom of the line MacBook, and a crappy old cell phone.

As of January 1, 2011 I have general access to:

• an iPod Touch 3G

• an iPhone 4

• an iPad (Christmas gift to my wife)

• a well provisioned MacBook Pro (work laptop)

• a Kindle 3G

• Updated: a 43” HD Television

Heck, I even broke out my old PSP to play Lumines after the iPhone version pissed me off.

We’ll see how much time I get on the iPad. My wife has taken to it pretty well. But I should have quite a bit to say this year about the iPhone 4 and the Kindle.

Miiine! All mine!

I’M BACK! D’ya miss me?

So’s Mark Farina with lucky 7 in the Mushroom Jazz series. Well almost. He’s taking pre-orders. Of course, like a fanboy, I went for the collector’s edition.

And the limited edition Mushroom Jazz 7 t-shirt.

The atoms are supposed to ship on November 9th. Hope the bits are released a week from tomorrow. Really looking forward to what he comes up with this time around.

On the blogging front, the time off was good. And now I’ve got plenty to talk about.

Victory!! It was an ugly 91 point to 66 point victory, but I’ll take it. Ugly? With a 25 point spread? I had to sweat out the Monday night game against the Green Bay defense and kicker. Yeah, it was a slim probability of defeat, but weirder things have happened.

Tom Brady did a great job as usual and the Titans’ Chris Johnson returned to form. Their combined 51 points were enough to buoy the mediocrity of the rest my team. No other players made it to double digits.

My opponent had a similar day, except only Tony Romo overperformed. Ray Rice made double digits, but underperformed.

Thanks to another underwhelming week, I’m giving up on Calvin “Megatron” Johnson. I was sort of suspicious when I drafted him as my first wide receiver, but thought the Lions might be better this year. Matt Stafford’s nursing another injury, the Lions look bad again, and Johnson has had three bad fantasy performances. See you on the waiver wire buddy.

I learned my lesson last season. Cut bait on name brands quick, before they cost you a game.

I’m a believer in meta is murder for blogging, but I’ll take a brief minute to violate the rule in this space.

My posting streak actually ended!

At first, I thought this past weekend was the death knell. I’m Mr. Mom for a while with my wife out of town on business travel. On Saturday, I lounged around watching college football, then went to an evening affair held by some family friends. My little guy got to run around a bit in the dark and burn off some energy. By the time I got home it was midnight. C’est la vie!

Subsequently I felt a distinct lack of motivation on Sunday. Ergo, I mentally declared the streak officially ovah.

However, now looking back at the Mass Programming Resistance archives, I apparently didn’t post on September 6th. I’d originally intended to end the streak on Memorial Day, but deluded myself into thinking I’d shot past that day.

If my math is correct, I’ll have to really comb the archives to make sure, I put in 191 days straight. Not bad considering holidays, work crush, and the general random intrusions of life. Time to start a new one … maybe after New Years.

Okay, I’ve gotten sucked in to EC2. Signed up for my account. Launched an instance or two. Thought I correctly uploaded my key pair but apparently that failed. So I can’t ssh into the instance.

Having fun though. I’ll get this yet.

Update. Success. Figured out I needed to log in as ec2-user.

Took a little time off in the afternoon and attended Amazon Web Services AWS Cloud for the Federal Government event. Local. Right off the Metro. Free. What’s not to like? I wasn’t exactly the target audience, being a technologist and a long time AWS observer, but I enjoyed the presentations and learned a thing or two.

Werner Vogels is a long time hero of mine. Did a productive stint in academia and then moved to the world’s pre-eminent online retailer. And not just as some high ranking engineer but as a director and then quickly rose to CTO. I’m not sure if he gets his fingers dirty building systems anymore, but the successful direction and management he’s provided AWS is astounding.

His talk at the event was mostly summary and sales pitch for someone like me. I was hoping he’d get a little more into the roadmap for AWS, but he ran out of time. Still enjoyed his presentation. Reminded me yet again that elasticity and utility pricing in computation are two rreally powerful, reinforcing concepts.

The customer presentations and panel were also quite good, especially Tom Soderstrom, the CTO of NASA JPL, and Michael Wood, the Director of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the guys that brought you Recovery.gov.

P.S. You gotta love an Internet CTO who was an early blogging adopter and who’s really into hip-hop.

P.P.S. Obtrivia, James Gosling (or one of his co-authors) has an L. L. Cool J quote in The News Book. One of the earliest computation/hip-hop mashups that I know of.

Link parkin’: Gensim is a Python framework for vector space modeling. This means taking a corpus of text documents, where document means any bag of symbols from a fixed vocabulary, turning the documents into a vector representation and then discovering latent structure within the corpus. Good for unsupervised document analysis.

I’ve been wondering for a long time about the specific implementation of a vector space model algorithm known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation or LDA. The only LDA implementations I’ve seen previously are in C++ and Java and I can’t seem to grok how they translate the LDA math into code. Maybe the Python version in Gensim will be a bit more illuminating.

The above YouTube clip was pretty much my week in a nutshell. Except the Titans even lost on top of it all.

Hopefully this is CJ2K’s worst stat line of the year. And it was truly awful. 34 rush yards? 19 receiving yards? 1 lost fumble? 0 TDs? Brutal. Given that Chris Johnson is a must start, my team basically can’t win if he has awful fantasy output like this.

Tom Brady wasn’t particularly helpful either with 2 picks and a lost fumble. My kicker and defense also were below projections for the week.

On the positive side, thank goodness Brady filled up Wes Welker’s stat line. Also, Calvin “Megatron” Johnson produced this week. But it’s tough to win with only those two.

The only upside is that I was off my optimal lineup by only 2 points. And still would have list by 14.

Update. Apologies for tweaking with the feed.

I’ve long been an admirer of Amazon’s Web Services products, but not a big user. Recently I’ve been thinking of doing some tinkering with EC2, S3, SQS, and the like. Given the current popularity of the platform amongst developers (or maybe my misguided perception of said popularity), I thought there’d be more books on the topic.

Amazon itself is surprisingly thin, with only about three to five titles that I can find which are on topic. The only O’Reilly book, Programming Amazon Web Services is over 2 years old. It’s probably sufficient to get started, but a lot has happened on the platform in that time.

Seems like there’s an interesting opportunity here.

The intersection of blogging and journalism was an emphasis of my last gig. Since I’ve moved on I’ve pretty much avoided thinking or blogging about journalism. Just callin’ it part of the past life.

But recently a few background cycles have gone to the topic and I thought I had a little epiphany.

Blogging has developed into a fundamentally emotional medium. By emotional I mean that to be an effective blogger, not even high profile, you generally have to show passion or have a point of view. The consensus is that the best bloggers bring that to their writing. Even those coming from traditional journalism have to migrate away from the typical objective, inverted pyramid of the print newsroom. TV, most people would agree, has an emotional bias due to its reliance on visual images. Audiences are being conditioned to expect this type of emotional content on the Web.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being emotionally driven, but that makes the medium somewhat in opposition to our stated principles about journalism. Dumping objectivity, non-partisanship, and rational discourse, all intended to help dampen the damaging aspects of the non-rational, leads to radicalism of all sorts. Emotional responses have a somewhat checkered past in the history of mankind.

If true, this is a troubling thesis as the Web becomes more and more interconnected with our social and cultural lives.

Just thinking out loud.

With the migration of Mass Programming Resistance, I finally downloaded the latest MarsEdit 3 release and put it to the test. For me, it’s a very evolutionary step, since I primarily use Markdown for formatting and don’t have heavy media needs. The scheduled media attachments feature is probably the biggest addition for me. Post editing can now function completely offline.

Still, the fit and finish seems like a notch above, and nothing busted. And while it’s probably because I’m using MovableType 5, posting seems much zippier. I’ll give MarsEdit 3 a little credit there.

Oh, and I anted up the $14.95 for the upgrade. Support your friendly indie Mac developer.

Okay, so I think that college football on Friday is blasphemous. (Thursday is only criminal) Make room for the high schoolers why dontcha! And the football usually sucks. I mean how many Conference USA football games are actually worth watching in any given year?

But the beloved Golden Bears are playing Nevada tonight. So I have to watch. At least make it worth my while Shane Vereen.

Addendum. Also, it’s a little odd to see Pac-10 games regularly on ESPN, other than those involving the University of Spoiled Children and/or Nike University.

Update. Well Shane Vereen tried to make it worth my while. Unfortunately, the defense, with an assist from Kevin Riley, didn’t. Cal gets smoked 52-31.

One of the pleasures of finding the living Strictly Rhythm site was discovering the availability of Tony Humphries Strictly Rhythm Mix Vol. 2 for purchase from the Defected Store. This was one of the earlier DJ mix CDs I ever bought and it still sounds great to this day.

I’ve got a lot of mixes of Strictly Rhythm tracks, but this might be the most enduring of them. The key is that it doesn’t overdose on the high profile Strictly Rhythm hits. Humphries’ mix is mainly a lot of solid mid-level tracks that most house DJs would know, but wouldn’t call classic. River Ocean’s Love & Happiness might qualify but after that, you’ve just got good old thumping tracks. I’ve got a particular fond spot for M & M’s So Deep, So Good, the Banji Boys Love Thang, and R. B. M.’s Latin Flavor.

The mix is also illustrative of the peak of Strictly Rhythm’s “Wild Pitch” era, ala D. J. Pierre. Lots of hard beats, not nearly as austere as acid house, but having many of the same synth lines. Trancey but with a lot of danceable energy. Plus a lot of Latin flavor.

Good stuff, and it’s been kickin’ in my iPod Touch recently.

Link parkin’: python-dateutil looks to be fairly mature, but parsedatetime seems to handle a wider variety of date expressions.

VICTORY!!

Doom Patrol rolled this fantasy weekend, racking up a league leading 142.5 points. Chris Johnson, Tom Brady, and Wes Welker were the big performers, each going for over 20 points. Everyone else on my team, including my kicker and defense, went for double digits. Except for Calvin Johnson, who was robbed.

The great thing about this win is that I used the optimal lineup, so there were no points left on the bench.

The scary thing about this win, is that my opponent left Arian Foster and Pierre Thomas on the bench, who scored 42.3 (yes you read that right) and 16.1 points respectively. His optimal lineup would have beat me, so in some sense I benefit big from an opponent’s mistake. Then again, it’s really hard to sit the Falcon’s Michael Turner who was on his roster, so it’s not clear that any reasonable person would have played that optimal lineup.

Onward and upward. This coming week all of my players face tough defenses, so getting a victory will be a bit of a challenge.

It’s been well over 4 years since I officially pulled out of Chicago at the end of my previous gig. That was the last time I used a desktop machine on a regular basis. Oh sure, I’ve still got the Dell box running the latest Ubuntu server edition, but that machine’s stuffed in the basement of the townhouse. I generally ssh into it, and the only time I use the attached monitor is when I’m upgrading the distro.

I don’t quite know what that really says but it seems like a sign of something. I’m not in the nerd top 1% but I’m up there. In college, I built a computer out of wire, chips, and breadboard. I programmed it with switches. The only output it had was blinkenlights.

That was some of the most fun I ever had.

There have been a few times since where I’ve thought, “Wonder what I can get at the low end of the desktop market.” Now I’m not sure I’m even interested, although a Mac Mini is a little tempting. Only because I could probably afford a good laptop in addition to a used Mac Mini or micro-PC. Still, I’m probably much more inclined to get just a 15” MacBook pro, like a lot of the folks on The Setup.

What it really says is that mobility has trumped all. The laptop is the briefcase of our era. Soon that might be the pad.

Reminds me, I need to get around to buying an app phone.

On this inaugural NFL Sunday, I thought I should check in with the results of my office league’s fantasy draft, even though I know you don’t care.

As defending champion, I was expecting to have no luck with my draft position. Just planning on the fantasy gods to screw me. I was pleasantly surprised to see my team’s icon come up in the number one slot. Makes drafting a bit easier. For posterity’s sake here’s the results.

1. (1) Chris Johnson (Ten - RB)

2. (16) Tom Brady (NE - QB)

3. (17) Calvin Johnson (Det - WR)

4. (32) Cedric Benson (Cin - RB)

5. (33) Dallas Clark (Ind - TE)

6. (48) Wes Welker (NE - WR)

7. (49) LeSean McCoy (Phi - RB)

8. (64) Ronnie Brown (Mia - RB)

9. (65) Brett Favre (Min - QB)

10. (80) C.J. Spiller (Buf - RB)

11. (81) Philadelphia (Phi - DEF)

12. (96) Jeff Reed (Pit - K)

We’ve only got an eight team league, so there’s plenty of depth on every team. Number in parens is the overall draft position in our league. There’s some pretty solid free agents available, so I expect we’ll see a lot of matchup plays over the course of the season. Defense and kickers I always deal with week-to-week myself.

I was pretty happy with the results, even though I’ve already dumped a couple of guys before the season started. Tom Brady, Chris Johnson, and Dallas Clark are no-brainers. I feel really strong at running back with Cedric Benson, Ronnie Brown, and C.J. Spiller, plus I dumped LeSean McCoy for Arizona’s Tim Hightower. That basically makes for 4 #1 running backs alongside Chris Johnson.

I’m a little worried about my wide receivers. We’ll see how Wes Welker holds up, and Calvin Johnson is playing for the Lions. I may have to trade a couple of backs to get a really consistent wideout.

I’m feeling pretty good about this year. This draft was definitely way better than last year’s. Doom Patrol has a fighting chance from the get-go.

George Packer, of The New Yorker, perfectly expresses what often keeps me up at night:

Nine years later, the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don’t stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up.

What tools do we have these days to counter Teh Crazy?

Way back when RSS aggregators were the new hotness, Bloglines was one of the earliest large scale, commercial, web based feed readers. This was even before Google Reader.

Of course as a feedophile, I jumped on the platform and greatly enjoyed the service. It had its quirks, but at that point the bar hadn’t really been set.

Then Google Reader came along, and put an end to that relationship.

A combination of Google browser user interface fu and Bloglines just running aground with technical glitches after being purchased by Ask did them in.

Now it looks like Bloglines has pretty much completely dribbled away the significant launch lead it had and sizable chunk of its audience as well. TechCrunch has the exclusive that Ask has finally decided to shut down Bloglines. I won’t be in mourning but this’ll be one more thing I can remind the youth of the ‘Net about in my dotage. Kids, once upon a time there was another aggregator besides Google Reader. And it used frames! Not that newfangled AJAX stuff.

Picked this up from O’Reilly Radar. Steve von Worley’s Data Pointed looks like an interesting take on data science:

The Data Pointed recipe? One part magazine, with original, longer-format articles that document our in-house research endeavors, and two parts blog, chronicling interesting developments from elsewhere within the field of data art and visualization. Combine, add a pinch of comedy and half a thesaurus, pressure cook until tender, and bon appétit! To receive updates fresh-and-hot, please do subscribe to the RSS feed, follow on Twitter, or fan on Facebook.

Consider me subscribed.

So I now have in my hot little hands a copy of William Gibson’s just released book Zero History

Although not the greatest video, here’s a taste of what Zero History is about:

I’ve said before that I’m in the tank for Gibson. Right now he’s the only author I pick up in hardback (modulo Chaykin of course, but that’s a special circumstance). This may be the last hardcover I buy ever. One, while I like the Pattern Recognition series, I don’t like near future style enough to keep purchasing hardbacks. If Gibson keeps up in this vein, I’ll probably start waiting for the paperback editions.

And two, by the time he completes his next book I’ll probably be well into e-books.

Speaking of Pattern Recognition, I haven’t read it in a while. Spook Country came out over three years ago. So I think I’ll read the whole set as a trilogy to get the full thematic impact.

Moved publishing of this weblog over to Movable Type 5. Things look mostly unbroken. Spooged the Atom feed for a few minutes, thanks to a setting buried away in the user profile that the Atom template slurps up. Need to crawl over the archives and see if anything else has busted.

Update. Whoopsie. Forgot to move the actual MT cgi files over. Breakage may still ensue.

Update 2. Think I’ve got it all sorted, but anticipate further bumps.

Harder than I think it should have been, but not as bad as my worst imaginings, I’ve managed to upgrade Mass Programming Resistance to the latest version of Movable Type. Here’s the high level steps to the migration:

• Export the 4.23 content to a basic MovableType xml file.

• Install MovableType 4.34 in a parallel setup. This installation should use MySQL as a database.

• Import the 4.23 content into the 4.34 installation. At this point you have a MySQL db with the 4.007 schema.

• Following Jason Culverhouse’s instructions overwrite all of the MovableType 4.34 CGI files with 5.02 files.

• Use perl ./tools/upgrade --name superuser from the cgi directory to upgrade the db to the 5.0x schema.

At this point, seems like I’m in good shape. There are some configuration settings that need to be tweaked, and I need to port the handful of MT pages over, but otherwise all seems good. Even posting using MarsEdit seems to work. In fact, the new install seems make posting with MarsEdit speedier.

No thanks to the Movable Type documentation, which I found to be pretty much useless on the topic of upgrading.

Still need to do the actual switch over, but should be about a 5 minute job. Apologies if screws up your feed reader.

Well, I was planning on upgrading my blog to MovableType 5, but they dumped support for SQLite, which was one of my favorite features. Now the default only supports MySQL. If I have to go that route, I’ll have to seriously evaluate what blog platform I use. Drag!

Also, this is a test post for MarsEdit 3.

Foo. Doesn’t seem to have fixed long posting times. I suspect it’s not MarsEdit’s fault, but my server side setup.

Took me a little over a week from reception to completion of Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!. Definitely well worth the $$ I laid out for it. 20+ years on while I can see some of the shallowness induced by the form, I can better appreciate the underlying satire. Chaykin’s art held up really well though. It doesn’t look dated in any way shape or form.

Some elements of the series I had forgotten:

• The rather explicit racial politics, the modern update of the final solution, and the kooky Nazi imagery. The A.S.L.C. were a bunch of bad dudes.

• Mananacillin.

• The Plex trying to literally sell out the United States.

• Reuben’s adventures in Brasilia, and the general rise of South America and Africa.

• Luther Ironheart’s boneheadedness.

• C.K. Blitz, C. G. Marakova, Sam Louis Obispo, Titania Weiss, The Witnesses, and Raul the Cat. How could I forget about Raul!

I can’t remember if Chaykin actually had problems delivering issues on schedule, but a number of the early episodes had a lot of recap. As if there were big chronological gaps in when the issues were actually published. Another minor nit is that the hardcover edition doesn’t have any page numbers, especially when it comes in at a big honking 400+ pages.

In any event, issues 1-12 were great. The 13th and 14th ones just remind you how great Chaykin’s illustrations were. Here’s hoping that someday there’s a collected release of the second 12 Chaykin issues which includes Northern Lights, Double Cross; Bullets and Ballots; and Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Over the years, I’ve built a bunch of command line oriented Python scripts. Logging has always been a big tool in the box but I’ve never done as much profiling as I would have liked. So the pyCLI module looks pretty interesting:

The cli package is a framework for making simple, correct command line applications in Python. With cli, you can quickly add standard command line parsing; logging; unit and functional testing; and profiling to your CLI apps. To make it easier to do the right thing, cli wraps all of these tools into a single, consistent application interface.

If it does what it says on the tin, pyCLI can eliminate a lot of boilerplate. I’m also interested in the background of who put the module together and whether it’s been used in a production system. Otherwise, it looks pretty well designed and put together.

After all my whining about Apple’s music player on the iPod Touch, I thought I’d dig around and see if there were any alternatives. I wasn’t holding out much hope, as I thought Apple would have all the iTunes formats and data on lockdown.

Apparently I was wrong. You can write your own custom player for iOS that taps into the users iTunes database. Seems to be a plethora of such apps in the iTunes music store.

So I’m giving the rather garish Amp Music Player a test drive. At the very least, it seems to do a better job of making track metadata visible. But the overly busy interface doesn’t seem quite right coming from the music app. We’ll see how it goes.

After reading Stephen Wolfram’s entry in the setup, I subscribed to the RSS feed. The number of entries went way back. All the way back to Alex Payne, presumably the first entry.

So I decided to read them all.

Don’t know if this is just selection bias, but I noticed there were quite a few Macs in usage, maybe even a significant majority. A lot were laptops with only 4GB of memory. Also enjoyed the gender mix and the eclectic “career” choices.

Some of the more entertaining entries for me included: Amy Hoy, Aaron Swartz, Richard Stallman, Mark Pilgrim, Anne Halsall (reminds me I need to checkout Inkling), and Andrew “bunnie” Huang,

Looks like it’ll be an interesting reading month.

One of the reasons I like reading British sci-fi authors, is that they have enough room in their head for alternative political systems. Witness Iain M. Banks in regards to his Culture series Via MetaFilter:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

Despite not really enjoying Banks’ Consider Phlebas, this might be enough encouragement to check out the forthcoming Surface Detail.

In addition, I’ve got William Gibson’s Zero History on pre-order with Amazon. And I’m now reading China Mieville’s The City & The City. Really working the cream of the crop.

I confess to being one of those beta testers that startups hate. One of those that begs for an early invite, then doesn’t use the system, and doesn’t even provide any feedback. In the case of iCurrent, I’m guilty as charged.

I was seduced by Ramana Rao, who’s research, companies, and blog I’ve been following for a long time. The iCurrent vision was definitely simpatico with some thoughts I’ve long had about personalized news. As soon as Rao announced the product, I immediately asked for an invite.

So what caused me to recently turn off my iCurrent e-mail subscription, with a whole bunch of unread messages? The reasons probably start with this quote from Rao:

We spent the first 6 months building a conceptually complete architecture. Not architecture in the sense of a scalable Internet architecture, but as in a framework with places for the ideas. We implemented enough at coarse 90% levels so that we could assess proceeding. Beyond the airflow simulation, it was wind tunnel tests, and then enough of an airplane to test in real world conditions.

Throughout we interviewed people all over the US (Idaho, Kentucky, Ohio, Florida), a typical qualifier being not knowing what “TechCrunch” was.

That should have disqualified me instantly. In addition, I observed the following:

• I read news in my RSS aggregators: Google Reader and NetNewsWire. I don’t want to add any other “locations” such as another website or e-mail.

• Rating is work. I know iCurrent demands people in the loop, but for me I didn’t want to put in the work.

• The channels that seemed closest to my interests weren’t close enough. For example, the house music channel pulled in too many false positives of articles that include the words “house” and “music” or that were simply event announcements.

• The majority of sources were mainstream media, which I’ve mostly given up on for the news I care about.

• Channels only presented small numbers (< 10) of articles. I’m just wired for much higher rates of information flow.

I wish iCurrent the best of luck. If they can pull off aggregation for the average non-techie it’ll be a big winner. I remember Daylife trying to hoe this row and changing course to become a smart content provider for publishers. If there’s one suggestion I had for iCurrent, it might be to provide an API to allow others to experiment with human in the loop in those places they can’t service, like feed readers.

Flash Update. Turns out iCurrent was purchased by the Washington Post Company back in July. If MediaBeat is right, and the purchase price was in the neighborhood of $5 million, that’s not encouraging for personalized news as a business. iCurrent’s only investor, Crosslink Capital, put in $3 million over about 3 years. That’s probably not an acceptable rate of return for a venture capital firm.

And I don’t have a lot of confidence that WaPo can make something significant out of the acquisition. Besides, iCurrent limited to one source doesn’t seem all that useful.

It’s a little over a week until the start of the National Football League regular season. All across the land, fantasy football league drafts are taking place.

I know you don’t care about my fantasy team. I wanted to alert the audience to the fact that I will be guiding a new edition of Doom Patrol in defense of my office league title. I was getting a little nervous there, but the commish finally pulled the trigger on the league invites. Unfortunately it’s short suspense, as our draft is this Friday evening.

There will be chronicling.

You have been warned.

Despite my disappointment with Douglas Rushkoff’s Life, Inc., and a wariness of books taglined with listicle bait (TEN COMMANDS FOR A DIGITAL AGE), I’m somewhat intrigued by Rushkoff’s new book, Program or be Programmed.

In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping readers come to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age––and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries. This is a friendly little book with a big and actionable message.

I’m generally aligned with the sentiments expressed in his recent blog posts, wary of corporatism and mass culture, and interested to see Rushkoff’s prescription. Presumably he’ll spend less time building the argument and more on actionable measures.

I’m also interested to see how his experiment with indie publishing works out.

15 years ago to the day, a secretive site called Suck, launched its first salvo onto the Web. Within a couple of weeks, if not a few days, I discovered the site and was instantly hooked.

While obviously of its time that first post, Live Through This, still reads pretty caustic and pretty funny. A tirade about Courtney Love conspiracy theories, it marked to my mind the beginning of the modern blogosphere. To that point, what resembled blogging was mostly tech oriented, personality driven, or link blogging. Blogging was still all about the Internet and the Web. Suck transcended the form by using the blog format as a mode of serious media criticism, including critique of The Web (tm). Interestingly the only URL in that post that’s survived link rot is Lollapalooza’s. And of course the permalink for Live Through This.

A couple of alums also managed to survive and thrive a bit as well. Ana Marie Cox went on to fame as a Wonkette. Heather Havrilesky does a lot of work for Salon. If you read anything intelligent, you’ve probably run across Terry Colon’s illustrations. I wonder if Jake Tapper ever regrets contributing as James Bong.

Suck’s been gone for over 9 years. I still pour out some chardonnay for ya homie.

Information informs. Analysis enlightens.

Classic Institute.

According to Wired, Dr. Who might have paid a visit to MIT’s 6.01. As a 6-3 alum, I have to quibble with Annalee Newitz’s “the infamously hard and awesome introduction to computer science class.” Awesome? Yes! Infamously hard? No. Famously well taught, so that many folks from other majors would take it? Definitely.

Update: Better story via MIT itself. The Doctor: 1 / Harvard: 0.

Photo courtesy of Melanie McCue through a Creative Commons by-nc-nd license.

So I hit some pretty important milestones at work and decided to give myself a summer treat. I ordered the hardcover collection Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! from Amazon. A little over a year ago, this edition hit my radar, but I hadn’t gotten around to purchasing a copy. Partially because of the price, which was $50 from the only place I could find it online, at the time.

Well Amazon had it for $37. Since I’m an Amazon Prime member, I got it in two days for no extra charge. What’s not to like?

The book arrived just a little while ago. And boy does Chaykin’s art still look good, even 27 years later. Definitely amped up to revisit Reuben Flagg’s (mis)adventures again.

Firefight! All Night! Live!

Finished off the first book, Conan, in what I’d call the definitive paperback series for Conan the Barbarian. Here’s the contents:

• Introduction (L. Sprague de Camp)

• Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hyborian Age, Part 1 (Robert E. Howard)

• The Thing in the Crypt (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

• The Tower of the Elephant (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hall of the Dead (Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp)

• The God in the Bowl (Robert E. Howard)

• Rogues in the House (Robert E. Howard)

• The Hand of Nergal (Robert E. Howard and Lin Carter)

• The City of Skulls (L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter)

I cheated a little in that I didn’t bother to read the Introduction, Letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller, and The Hyborian Age, Part 1. Sorry if I remember the material wrong, but I wasn’t interested in reading extensive world building and fanboyish claptrap.

In this series of stories, Conan is pretty young, basically a teenager. He wanders away from Cimmeria into the more “civilized” western nations of the area. Most of his initial adventures are as a thief, but by the end of the book he’s become a trained mercenary. Interestingly in the first two-thirds of the book, the stories read with much more of a mystery feel than swords and sorcery.

As one can see, this is again a mix of Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. The straight Howard stuff is pure gold. The Tower of the Elephant, The God in the Bowl, and Rogues in the House are all well paced and written, if occasionally a bit flowery, reflecting the pulp heritage of the era. Special nod to Rogues in the House for inspiring the classic cover art by Frank Frazetta. Carter didn’t do too bad a job finishing up The Hand of Nergal. The other three stories are pretty pedestrian. At the moment, I can’t even remember the plot of The Hall of the Dead.

And just an observation, but I’m pretty sure every story up until The City of Skulls featured some form of the phrase, “Conan, naked but for a loincloth…” C’mon guys, break out a thesaurus once in a while.