The image capture to the right is the result of my building the Python Imaging Library such that it can be imported within NodeBox. Basically I’m showing that the module can be imported, used to load an image, and that image can be turned into a Numpy array. Remember, this was going to be a little personal achievement.

Well, just like last time, I learned that NodeBox already has the capability I was looking for. NodeBox has not one, but two, image processing extension libraries. The first is PhotoBot, which is essentially PIL 1.1.4 for NodeBox, and deprecated. So while I was ignorant at least it was ignorance of dusty old code that would have need some revival effort.

The second library, Core Image, is a direct poke in the eye. A MacOS only extension, it uses the os’s built-in image processing facilities. Core Image provides an object model similar to PhotoShop’s where an image is built out of layers that can be individually processed and collectively composited. Since the image processing code is a part of the os, and presumably heavily used, it’s been highly optimized AND should take advantage of any GPU speed boosts.

Basically, Core Image looks like what I was looking for if I had only looked a little more carefully.

No worries though. This is all about spare time hacking and learning.

This review of Greg Egan’s Oceanic, appearing on the New Scientist website, makes the book sound very tempting. Then again, I’m still recovering from the head explosion induced by the last Egan book I read, Diaspora.

Oceanic is also a short story collection, which I’m disinclined to read. But I’m parking the link here as a note for future consideration.

The review appeared in a special issue of New Scientist, the fiction of now which has a cute little piece of flash fiction from Ken MacLeod, amongst a lot other good nibbles.

Retconned for typos.

You still don’t care about my fantasy football teams and I’m still writing about them.

In this week’s update, I went 3 and 1. My two Yahoo teams are undefeated. My ESPN team put together a solid win. The NFL.com team got whacked, but I left about 40 points on the bench, attempting to play a few matchups. That team also is overloaded on Cowboys, so I need to add some diversity.

A little bit more detail after the break

For Doom Patrol, I thought I was gonna run away with it, after Drew Brees went off and the New Orleans defense actually provided some punch. But my opponent closed a bit and I had to sweat out the Sunday night game. Brandon Jacobs was playing in opposition and he could have had a big night. Luckily he was basically shut down.

Doom Patrol, B-League benefited from explosive performances from San Francisco’s Frank Gore (200+ yards and 2 TDs) and San Diego’s Vincent Jackson (141 yards and 1 TD). Not to mention workmanlike efforts from Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers and Minnesota’s Percy Harvin. Plus I left 18 points on the bench with Indy’s Dallas Clark.

However, I did play Dallas Clark to good effect in my ESPN league. Andre Johnson exploded as well, unfortunately contributing to the poor score of my Titans DST. I actually got some mileage out of Brett Favre and Darren McFadden.

I got blown out in my NFL.com league. I just played the wrong guys. Plus Tom Brady stank agains the jets. But I’ve actually got some talent on this team.

My biggest worries are my QBs in the ESPN league, Anquan Boldin in a couple of leagues (he needs to get healthy and in the end zone), and running back Jamal Lewis is starting to look bad.

So far so good though.

I was probably one of the earliest fans of Paul Graham’s writings, even predicting the essay collection Hackers and Painters. Before that I actually bought copies of Ansi Common Lisp (2!) and On Lisp. All three copies (I never did buy Hackers and Painters) are proudly gathering dust in storage, along with my Lisp hacking skillz. I should point out that both titles are actually quite good and well written.

For some reason, I found his recent essay The List of N Things to be exceptionally amusing. Part of the charm is a bit of winking inconsistency that actually leads to solid consistency. Or vice-versa? Waitaminnit

Add in the fact that his popular Hacker News site occasionally seems to be overrun with listicles and there’s even more fun for the whole family.

Sometimes I am quite easily amused.

Somehow Cal made a two touchdown win against the Minnesota Golden Gophers feel like a narrow escape. The Bears burst out to a 14-0 lead, then let Minnesota hang around well into the fourth quarter. The special teams was sort of weak and the defense could never deliver the knockout blow. But a win is a win.

Did I mention the offense? More specifically Jahvid Best? He was pretty good. Five touchdowns good. No TD vultures this week. And back in the Heisman picture.

Meanwhile, in other news, the University of Spoiled Children spit the bit against the Washington Huskies, in a major road upset. This muddles both the national championship picture and the Pac-10 race as well. Odds on, USC won’t be able to play for the national title, which actually makes it harder for Cal to make the Rose Bowl.

Then again, if Cal takes care of business the next two weeks, this issue might be moot, and the Bears might be in the national championship chase.

So I made a comment about plastering together some Python modules to get “NodeBox plus a high end image processing substrate.” Turns out NodeBox already has Numpy baked in as of version 1.9.3. Should have done a little background research.

Looks like there’s some wheels I won’t have to reinvent. Would be nice if NodeBox had the Python Imaging Library included. This would make loading a wide variety of image formats into Numpy arrays quite easy. But incorporating that module into NodeBox will make a nice little personal project.

It’ll be good to build on a solid foundation with an active user community. The only limitation of NodeBox for me, relative to processing, is a handful of bitblt operations.

Okay so I’ve sort of made my peace with the wonkiness of MetaFilter’s RSS feed. Now I just blast through the feed really quickly in NetNewsWire, not even bothering with the item titles. I’d say I have about a 10% hit rate on MeFi posts that actually interest me.

One of the better recent ones was today’s post highlighting the work of Mark Skillz. Skillz seems to be a not quite professional historian of hip-hop. But he does have good connections and goes way back into time on his Hip Hop 101A site. Since the birth and rise of hip-hop was square in my formative years, I’ll have to dig into Skillz knowledge.

And the playlist on the MeFi post is to die for. I could immediately recall about 2/3 of those tracks on the instant of reading the title, plus other cuts where they were sampled. That’s right ya’ll I was (am) a bit of a disco freak.

Ha, ha. Only serious

P.S. Criminal though, leaving Let No Man Put Asunder out of that mix

P.P.S. Except it’s pretty hard for a 1983 release to exist in 1979ish. My bad

P.P.P.S. But Let No Man Put Asunder did appear on 1977’s Delusions album. However, the Shep Pettibone mix was the definitive one and it’s unclear to me when that version actually went into circulation. Salsoul just made an official public release in 1983 but it was probably kicking around on acetates and bootlegs long before. Like I said, disco freak. Here endeth the pedantry.

I haven’t been using Posterous as much as I would like, but I’m keeping an eye on what they’re up to. Today Posterous added theming, allowing users to more creatively style the look and feel of their Posterous sites.

I don’t know how well it actually works, but from reading the description Posterous was smart in the theming mechanisms it made available. First, you can just pick from a canned set of Posterous provided themes. Second, their engine is compatible with themes for Tumblr. This taps into a vibrant, pre-existing market or power users can write their own themes.

They’re quietly flying under the radar, but I get the sense that the Posterous team is putting together a good product.

Yes that David Byrne. The one from the Talking Heads. It’s not really a perfect city, but a list of qualities that would exist in his perfect city.

Obviously as a world class musician, he’s gotten to visit quite a few places in his time. I’m sure every other urban dweller who reads the article is measuring their city against the criterion, but I have to say I think Chicago (N.b. where I used to live) stacks up nicely:

• Size, second largest city in the US

• Density great urban core with a westward sprawl of tightly packed neighborhoods

• Sensibility and attitude good old big-shouldered Midwestern values, with a wry wink at all that “Second City” crap

• Security maybe the weakest point, waxes and wanes but overall not too bad

• Chaos and danger still plenty of room in Chicago for urban homesteading and Bohemian exploration amongst a few unruly parts of town, although Daley is probably trying to stamp them out even as we speak

• Human scale there’s quite a variety of interesting residential neighborhoods nestled within and around the skyscrapers of the Loop

• Parking not cheap by a long shot, but typically available and public transportation is quite serviceable including the classic El

• Boulevards Burnham’s radial avenues, Clark, Lincoln, et. al. should qualify

• Mixed use while the Loop empties around 6 PM, the rest of the city keeps on going until 4AM

• Public spaces, Helllloooo Lakefront, Grant Park, Midway, Belmont Harbor. I could go on ad nauseum.

One of the great things about Chicago is that from Memorial Day to Labor Day there are just tons of public festivals and gatherings at all scales. Bluesfest, Jazzfest, Gospelfest, Taste of Chicago, Air and Water Show, Dancing in the Park, Lallapalooza, Sox and Cubs, neighborhood festivals, block parties galore. Hundreds to hundreds of thousands of people get gather amiably, pleasantly milling about.

Not to mention Chicago has a great performing arts (music, theater, comedy, etc.) scene.

And we’ll keep quiet about the weather from October to May.

I know you still don’t care about my fantasy football team, but it’s still my blog. So I’ll write about my team if I want to. Actually, now it’s TEAMS, plural.

I’ll spare the front page though. The short story is I went 2 out of 3. And I’ve got a fourth team in a league I forgot about. The draft was today! More details on how my fledgling fantasy empire is faring after the break.

So the original Doom Patrol is my entry in an office league that’s been going for the three seasons I’ve been with my company. The scoring rules essentially haven’t changed over that period of time.

Feeling my fantasy oats, I was interested in checking out different sized leagues and different scoring regimes. Enter the public fantasy football leagues on Yahoo!, ESPN, and NFL.com.

I probably went a little overboard, adding three new teams to draft for and manage, but I learned a couple of things. There are a LOT of leagues out there, and that’s only the ones I could see. Not sure there’s a lot of owners, since folks can and do sign up for multiple leagues, but there’s a sizable market here. I like the ESPN draft interface and game tracker the best. The Yahoo! drag and drop roster management is pretty cool. I’m not sure NFL.com really has much to recommend it.

As to the results. The ur-Doom Patrol won handily and had the third highest score out of 14 teams. Having Drew Brees and Randy Moss will do that for you. Next up is a “critical” early season contest. I face the highest scoring team from this past week. The winner could have a pretty good leg up on securing a playoff spot. Plus they get to talk a lot of office smack.

Doom Patrol Beta, my Yahoo! public league team, rallied late to win comfortably. Similarly, this team had the league’s third highest score. My opponent had a bunch of Steelers who played Thursday and played well. Meanwhile, a number of my players played Sunday and Monday night.

Let’s not talk about Justice Society, my ESPN league team. For that team I wound up with the 6th out of 10 picks in the draft, arguably the worst draft spot of all. And it showed. I got smoked by 50 points. This team has a lot of second tier stars. Two of my best bets, Jay Cutler and Houston’s Andre Johnson, completely failed me. There’s hope for this team, but it’s going to be a struggle all season.

The New Mutants drafted 9th out of 12. Not great, but not horrible. I managed to pick Tom Brady, Marion Barber, and a bunch of #2 receivers. Plus a bunch of owners were on auto draft, which means I got another steal or two.

All in all, I’m glad I added a couple of extra leagues, although I may have overdone it a little bit. So far my draft acumen has probably demonstrated a marginal positive effect. The real fun begins when I try to pick up a few waiver wire steals to make up for some obvious holes on the various teams.

Found a new data driven, football site: Advanced NFL Stats

I’ve briefly examined the state of open football stats in the past and found them wanting. Now it looks like things are picking up with Pro-Football-Reference.Com. However, it looks like they’ve gone to buying their data from ESPN, which means no further distribution.

So much for open data.

Via: This Number Crunching Life

Looks like Apple is giving K’Naan some prominent play in their iPod Nano 5G and iTunes advertising. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they have the right song cued up.

I’ve said before I love my Nano 4G, but the new features of the iPod Nano 5G are tempting. The bigger screen and the FM receiver are the key attractors for me. The video recording and new colors I could do without. Wouldn’t a combination of iPod and XM/Sirius receiver be cool? It would beat the heck out of those crappy radios Sirius sells.

However, there are two other things higher on my technolust list. First, the Verizon MiFi is #1 on deck. I just find myself with too many short time windows where I could take advantage of my laptop and a little connectivity. And getting free of the need for a Starbucks or the library would be especially nice.

Second, I’d really like to checkout the iPhone App Store. Now I don’t actually want an iPhone, but I can get the App Store experience using an iPod Touch. I was pretty much set even before the most recent Touch announcements. The price point I was targeting now gets you 32 GB, plus the new features. At that storage level, I can get almost all of my iTunes library onto the iPod.

So as much as I like the new Nano, it’ll have to wait. Frankly, it would be gluttony, so I don’t think one is in my near future.

Cal unloaded on another weak team this weekend, letting Eastern Washington hang around for a quarter then blowing their doors off. What’s with the TD vulture Vereen messing up Jahvid Best’s Heisman highlight reel? Next week the Bears are on the road at Minnesota which will definitely be a step up from Maryland and Eastern Washington. At home the Terps barely escaped James Madison University, an FCS (nee 1AA) school.

Have to say the Michigan - Notre Dame tilt was pretty good, especially given who the loser was. Time to dig into some Golden Domer angst on the Web, although I’m sure they’re convinced that they’re just one step away.

And is it me, or does the Big 12 look really suspect this season?

Today, September 11th, was rather somber and gray here in Washington, DC. The day started off quite rainy and never completely cleared up.

In the past, I’ve watched United 93 or MSNBC’s replay of the day’s events in 2001. I could find neither for my evening viewing. Instead, I got Bud Fox, Gordon Gekko, and the World Trade Center in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, its themes and sermons still quite appropriate 22 years later.

So why did I put so much effort into getting Pygame, Numpy, and Pycairo into the same Python interpreter? I’m interested in creating demoscene like visualizations. luis2048’s processing final project is an example of the type of generative art I want to experiment with.

Clearly this could be done with processing but I feel like that tool’s image processing capabilities are limited. By that I mean there isn’t much domain specific language or library in processing related to bit level image manipulation. I’m curious as to what might go into a good language for writing these visualizations. Numpy should provide a solid foundation for image processing abstracting much of the array processing hair.

Also, I’d rather use Python than Java. I think Python has some built-in data structures and modules that might be particularly useful.

So that’s what I’m puttering and nattering on about.

Google Desktop on Snow Leopard is dead according to this discussion thread. I didn’t use GDesktop a lot, but I have (had) a handy LaunchBar plug-in that made it easy to use. Google Quick Search Box is intended as the replacement. As of this writing, QSB’s interface is confusing the heck out of me. Apparently QSB is not much more than an application launcher wrappred around Spotlight and souped up with access to information in your Google account(s).

I’ll give QSB a cursory trial but I’ll probably wind up sticking with LaunchBar and Spotlight.

Apropos of nothing, I’d also like to take this opportunity to curse the MacPorts migration process for mucking up my ImageMagick installation. I use ImageMagick to process the images for this site from the command line. The tools were well integrated into my workflow. Yet another strike against MacPorts.

Hoping to be completely unbusted on Snow Leopard by the end of the week.

So what are days off for? If you’re a geek like me, dorking around with build configurations, many libraries, package managers and multiple installs. All in the name of Rube Golderg!

So here was my goal: a Mac OS X Snow Leopard version of Python with the following modules:

1. Pygame, for doing some interactive bit level graphics and animation
2. Numpy, a high performance array package to enable complex bit level manipulations that can feed Pygame
3. Pycairo, which is supposed to support 2D vector graphics on Numpy arrays

That’s not too much to ask is it? In theory, if it all comes together, I’m on my way to a processing style system with Python and more sophisticated bit level manipulations. Sort of like NodeBox plus a high end image processing substrate.

Of course Snow Leopard had to go and muck things up:

The trigger was Pygame. The current stable release isn’t ready for Apple’s new 64-bit world, including the system built-in Python.

No problem. I’ll just grab one of the pre-built Python’s from ActiveState or Python.org. They’re good old 32 bit, and in fact happily imported Pygame and ran various test scripts.

But since neither Python has Numpy or Pycairo built-in, I have to install them myself. virtualenv + pip? Strike one. easy_install? Strike two. Build from source? Strike three.

The first hurdle is that most of these guys need the old gcc-4.0 and the MacOS 10.4 Developer’s SDK. This takes a bit of beating your head against the default gcc on Mac OS: gcc-4.2. The trick is to set the following environment variables:

export CC=gcc-4.0 CXX=gcc-4.0 LD=gcc-4.0 ARCHFLAGS='-arch i386'

The first three environment variables downgrade to the old compiler while the latter ensures a build that’s compatible with the non-64-bit Python interpreters. That’s another really nasty issue, since Mac OS libraries can have all, some, or none of support for i386, powerpc, and x86_64 builds. If you mess up here you get cryptic linker errors, or even better bomb outs at module load time due to dynamic link errors.

After that, Numpy wasn’t too bad. I have to call out Pycairo as being a real bitch, though. The module depends on a bunch of libraries that are somewhat indiscriminately and inconsistently strewn amongst Apple’s old and new SDKs. Plus I had an install of MacPorts which made things even worse. Finally, Pycairo insists on using pkg-config to figure out where the libraries are, even if pkg-config is completely wrong. It was basically impossible to get a correct combination of library builds matched up to the right executable.

Bottom line, I wound up compiling a handful of essential libraries (pixman-1, cairo) for Pycairo by hand (with the above environment variables set) and sticking them in /usr/local/. That way I knew exactly how they were built and how to convince Pycairo where they were. This latter part involves

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

So now my three modules are all in one place. Yet to be determined is whether they actually work correctly.

So my installation of Snow Leopard is much less busted. Saft now works once again, although I’m a bit chuffed. I had to fork over another $8 when I only bought my Leopard license 2 months ago. Oh well. I also installed the dev tools, so I should be able to build various programs and libraries from source.

I say should because Snow Leopard has introduced a couple of points of confusion. First, is the whole 64 bit transition, which is causing some heartburn in terms of old codebases and old libraries. The second is that the new dev compiler is gcc-4.2, but the old gcc-4.0 compiler is not installed by default. Once it is installed, then you’ve got two compilers available, which is one too many. In general, commercially developed apps seem to be doing fine though.

Apple’s gone and busted up my Python however. I had a 2.6.2 Framework build with a bunch of extensions. Now I can’t build any new modules for it. I also use virtualenv a lot, but you can’t turn off 64 bitness for python binaries in such environments. Plus, all of the 2D graphics libraries (wxPython, pygame, PyQT) seem to be in a touch of disarray due to libraries that use APIs eliminated in Snow Leopard. I was planning on doing my 100 hours project based on some of these modules. Now that’s all in doubt.

Grumble.

Well now. Cal paid Maryland back for that drubbing in College Park last year. In spades. I don’t know how good or bad the Terps are, but Cal seems to be living up to their ranking.

Looking ahead to the rest of Cal’s schedule, clearly the big hump in the season is Oregon on September 26th and USC on October 3rd. The rest of the Pac-10 isn’t chopped liver, but if they manage to win those two games, there’s a real shot at a Rose Bowl in my lifetime.

Big IF though. Beating the University of Spoiled Children is always a tough get for the Bears. At least the Trojans are coming to Berkeley.

Expanding Expose’ to the Dock and Application Switcher feels like it should be a really welcome edition. But just recently I’ve started getting the Option-Tab key combo into my muscle memory. Expose’ is clearly the sexier of the two, but Witch’s basic functionality (pick from list of windows) may be more effective.

I think the key differentiator is that Witch has hysteresis across all open windows. The ones you’ve used most recently are near the top of the list. Expose only has the most recent applications in Least Recently Used order. If you’re going across windows in multiple apps a lot, there’s a little speed penalty. You need two navigations, first to the app and then within the app. For this task, minor speed deficits add up quick.

I think I’ll stick with Witch on this one.

So Snow Leopard wasn’t supposed to break things, although of course a few items would get jostled along the way.

BUT, I had the developer’s tools installed under Leopard.

After I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I didn’t have the developer’s tools installed. I’d pretty much say that’s avoidable major breakage. One minute you can easily install source code packages from the ‘Net, the next you can’t. And this one seems easily avoidable, although I’m not an Apple engineer so there’s probably a good reason for not doing the detection and the tool install automatically.

I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’.

As a DJ mixed set junky, looks like I’m square in Mugasha’s target demographic. What it’ll boil down to is either the stylistic selections (house, downtempo for me) of the unknown DJs or appearances of top names that I like (Mark Farina, Heather, Kerri Chandler, Masters at Work, Sneak, etc.). Here’s the quote from their About page:

Simply put, Mugasha makes it really easy to listen to Electronic Music podcasts and long sets from world famous DJs. Think of us as Hulu.com for some of the most popular dance music sets in the world. We “chop up” the sets to enable users to easily skip and browse through the songs in each set.

I especially like the “chop up” aspect. I hate those DJ mix podcasts where you basically get big wads of audio and not much more. Plus it looks like they’ll have purchase links to the iTMS and Amazon MP3.

One downside of Mugasha is that you can’t download the mix sets. Streaming only. Great for the desktop but a lose for your mobile media device. Still, I give them props for the venture which looks like it’s being run by folks embedded in DJ culture.

I’ll have to give it a whirl and report back.

Ask and ye shall receive. jwz cobbled together an up and running, Snow Leopard, version of XScreensaver. Meanwhile, iSlayer fixed up iStat Menus. Both dropped today.

I need to shoot iSlayer a few shekels.

Stuff I use that Snow Leopard busted:

• XScreensaver

• iStats Menu

• Saft

• Plus Safari seems to crash a might bit easier

Other than Safari, these are all small things, but they’re still irritating.

I know you don’t care about my fantasy football team. But it’s my blog, so I’ll write about it occasionally if I want to.

This season my team is named Doom Patrol, following in the heritage of West Coast Avengers and Green Lantern Corps. The league I’m in is mostly office folks. A live draft was scheduled for 3 PM this afternoon, which made it a bit tricky, since many people actually still had work commitments. Most of the selections actually wound being autopicked.

Meanwhile, yours truly tried to sneak out for a beverage and hand picked selections. Problem is, I forgot the power cord for my personal laptop, said lack being discovered 5 minutes before the draft started. This led to a frantic dash to the local library and the expedient usage of a public workstation.

To make matters even worse, I got the 13th pick out of 14 teams. Luckily it was a snake (order reversed every other round), so I had a fighting chance. Unfortunately, I missed my first two picks and completely blew my strategy of picking up a couple of second tier lead running backs. Instead I wound up with Drew Brees and Randy Moss.

It could be worse.

Herewith are the initial members of Doom Patrol, by round, overall rank in parens:

1. (13) Drew Brees, NO QB
2. (16) Randy Moss, NE WR
3. (41) Darren McFadden, OAK RB
4. (44) Marshawn Lynch, BUF RB
5. (69) Eddie Royal, DEN WR
6. (72) Matt Hasselbeck, SEA QB
7. (97) Jamal Lewis, CLE RB
8. (100) Visanthe Shiancoe, MIN TE
9. (125) Ahmad Bradshaw, NYG RB
10. (128) Donald Driver, GB WR
11. (153) Hakeem Nicks, NYG WR
12. (156) Washington, DEF

Yeah, I know Marshawn Lynch is suspended for three games. I’m hoping Jamal Lewis can stay healthy and productive for that period of time. And I’ll dump one of the WRs for a kicker on Saturday.

I’m looking forward to the start of Fantasy season as much as real college football and the start of the NFL.

This post comes to you live, from the updated version of Mac OS X known as Snow Leopard.

My copy of Snow Leopard arrived yesterday. I took a couple of hours this evening to backup my drive and then set about to upgrading. Took all of 1 unattended hour. Everything seems kosher.

I used the backup time to read John Siracusa’s Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard. Talk about in depth! 23 web pages covering every micro-detail of Apple’s operating system, update, upgrade, service pack, whatever you want to call it.

+1 for the integration of the Dock and Expose. Makes minimized windows more useful.

-1 for 64 bit Safari, with no plug-in capability. The supremely useful Saft is now in limbo.

Shoot. Only posted on 26 of 31 days in August. Consistency dropped off from July’s effort, but still averaged a post a day. I like the mix of topics in August but posting on my WiFi issues might have been a bit cheesy.

Onwards to September!!

A bumper crop of reading this month.

• Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan. Talked about this previously, but I love the book as a great mix of William Gibson and Raymond Chandler.

• Neuromancer, William Gibson. Also discussed previously. One of my all time favorites. Still holds up well despite being 25 years removed. I’d forgotten how much of a low-life sleaze bag Case was.

• A Batman Canon, Various. I piled up four Batman graphic novels into one big reading session. After finishing Batman: Year One, Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: The Killing Joke, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, I felt like I’d read three or four books. Still think The Dark Knight Returns is the penultimate Batman tale no matter what anyone else says. The Dark Knight‘s Cold War sensibility is a jolt though. Somewhat disappointed in The Long Halloween. The Godfatherish aspects could have been a little more subtle.

• Count Zero, William Gibson. The sequel to Neuromancer, I actually enjoy this book more than it’s predecessor. I recognize the greatness of Neurmancer, but connect with the Count Zero characters, and the tri-arc story, more. There’s something spellbinding about the creation of the Cornell Boxes. Other than a lapse into an extended dialog as an expository device, Count Zero would be Neuromaner‘s equal.

• The Stone Canal, Ken MacLeod. A little bit more frenetic than the other two books of The Fall Revolution I’ve read, The Star Fraction and The Cassini Division, but I still liked it. An interesting mix of Singularity and politics. MacLeod doesn’t really go on political rants but varying political systems play prominently in his tales.

That’s 23 completed for the year. Still slightly behind pace for my goal of 35, but now that I’m in the flow that total is quite attainable.

And just another point on The Dark Knight. A good argument can be made that you can divide US comic book history into before The Dark Knight, and after The Dark Knight. And I’m including Watchmen in that division. Other than some of the first issues of the titanic characters (Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Captain America) I think you’re hard pressed to find any other inflection points like that.

Once upon I time, I swore off ESPN.com because they had a way too gaudy home page. Tons of multimedia crap that autoplayed. I switched to CBSSports.com nee CBSSportsline.com. Much cleaner.

Times have changed. ESPN has eased up on the multimedia and are way more in line with dense information presentation consistent with other big media sites. CBSSports isn’t too bad, but a recent spate of overly aggressive interstitial ads has turned me off. I’m going to give “The World Wide Leader in Sports” a spin for my sports info for a while.

By the way, that CHW vs NYY score you see in my little screen capture is iconic of the White Sox’s season swirling down the drain.

Learn something new every day. In MacOS X, if you click on the little AirPort menubar item while holding down the Option key, you get a ton more information about the network you’re connected to. That’s my home wireless basestation to the left over there. Hover over unconnected networks, wait a few seconds, and you’ll get more info as a tooltip.

I picked this tip up from Glenn Fleishman over at TidBITS, where he was discussing other little tweaks to the AirPort menu item that appear in Snow Leopard.

Previously I was thinking that mobility might be a fly in the ointment of PubSubHubbub and other Pushbutton Web approaches. There is applicable prior art though. Basically you need an intermediate, reliable server that the mobile client talks with. Then there are two approaches that could be used.

First, good old SMTP e-mail’s store and forward model could work well.

Second, the sync models of webfeed aggregators like NetNewsWire on the iPhone might be a better fit.

Of course, now the issue is how to push through the intermediate server when the client is connected, so you maintain the “real-time” illusion.

So Apple released an upgrade to their desktop operating system and boy is there an avalanche of reviews. I was going to point out a few good ones, but Gina Trapani already has the Snow Leopard review roundup. Oddly though, she left out the Engadget review, which I thought was cool because it had a bunch of videos.

I preordered Snow Leopard, so I should have a copy soon to install. Overall the verdict seems to be “lots of good stuff, but not a must have“. One improvement that’s intriguing is the upgrade to Services. I never quite understood how the feature was meant to work, but it looks like it’s been cleaned up a bit.

But boy, were there a lot of Snow Leopard reviews. And Ars Technica hasn’t even posted their typical hyperdetailed accounting.

I don’t really use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), but I’ve been a quite interested observer since, … well the day it was born. To wit, from the New Media Hack post for Aug 24, 2006:

I didn’t realize it at the time, and many in the blogosphere are having the same incorrect interpretation, but EC2 isn’t supposed to knock out private virtual and dedicated server solutions. EC2 is really for folks who need to build a cluster of machines but don’t have the sysadmin staff, rackspace, and funds for hardware, available. For a mom and pop LAMP server running a lightly used Web site, EC2 is probably overkill. For a small Web startup short on cash and people, EC2 might be an attractive alternative to building your own data center.

Put it all together and you’ve got cheap, powerful computational units (VMs), reliable distributed messaging (SQS), and inexpensive massive storage (S3), all from one vendor, with reasonable (not easy, but reasonable) programmatic APIs. Interesting times.

In celebrating EC2’s third anniversary, Werner Voegels had a good, detailed post about Amazon’s view of cloud computing and how it differs from “private clouds”. The post also served to announce Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPC), which allows for seamless connection of the Amazon cloud with private networks. This will presumably make corporate folks a little less leery of using EC2 since data and process leakage should be abated.

I’m amazed that EC2 is only three years old. Seems like it’s been around forever. The amount of innovation that’s been internally and externally generated by the platform has been incredible.

You need to know a few things to interpret the presence of the following screen capture, from a Reddit discussion, on this blog.

1. _why, the lucky stiff, was a popular Internet persona from the community of programmers that use the Ruby programming language. He had a very theatrical and artistic style that could be inspiring, confusing, or off putting. Recently he disappeared, wiping out all of his online work. Subsequently he was the subject of a number of eulogies, a few of which appeared on on the social news site Reddit. Many people objected.

2. I am a bit of a nut for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

3. I have a hacker’s sense of humor

Ha, ha. Only serious

Even though I read it earlier this year, I never got around to reviewing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. I don’t know who to attribute the reference to, but I ran across a critique of the book by David Aldous. This paragraph best sums up my reading of the book as well:

A “Black Swan” is defined as an event characterized [p. xviii] by rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability, and Taleb’s thesis is that such events have much greater effect, in financial markets and the broader world of human affairs, than we usually suppose. The book is challenging to review because it requires considerable effort to separate the content from the style. The style is rambling and pugnacious — well described by one reviewer as “with few exceptions, the writers and professionals Taleb describes are knaves or fools, mostly fools. His writing is full of irrelevances, asides and colloquialisms, reading like the conversation of a raconteur rather than a tightly argued thesis.” And clearly this is perfectly deliberate. My own overall reaction is that Taleb is sensible (going on prescient) in his discussion of financial markets and in some of his general philosophical thought, but tends toward irrelevance or ridiculous exaggeration otherwise. Let me run through some discussion topics, first 6 where I broadly agree with Taleb, then 6 where I broadly disagree, then 4 final thoughts.

Aldous’ entire critique is worth reading. He also links to a couple of other reviews from hardcore statisticians picking apart various technical aspects of The Black Swan.

I find Anil Dash’s concept of “The Pushbutton Web” a nice condensing of an intriguing emergent phenomenon on the web. The general concept is that clients establish Web native callbacks or subscriptions where “realtime” notifications can be sent. Then various services, e.g. standing search, can “push” information to the clients without the client having to continuously poll for new information.

There seems to be a strong effort in Google to push this along with their PubSubHubbub protocol and toolkit. They’ve even enabled a number of their services to provide pushbutton notifications through PubSubHubbub. Similarly, the rssCloud folks are doing some interesting tinkering.

This stuff isn’t exactly new or groundbreaking, I remember Bob Wyman’s PubSub trying to make a viable business out of “realtime search”. However, given the growth of Twitter, Facebook, and the general use of Ajax for in-page realtime updates, the right time may have arrived for a loosely coupled, collaborative buildout to support this capability. Interestingly I had a prescient thought about this topic, NMH: Daily Me is Here, on New Media Hack, back in 2004.

One fly in the ointment might be integrating the humongous population of mobile devices out there, which will probably never have continuous connectivity. The pushbutton protocols I’ve seen so far assume a reliably upstanding Web server. Otherwise the “pushing” services typically drop the subscription, often relatively quickly. If you use some kind of proxy, how long does the proxy keep old notifications? Do you even need to keep old notifications? Or is this something that the client should determine? I wonder how Research in Motion deals with this for the BlackBerry.

So what to do in the face of disconnected clients? I think that’s going to be a major challenge for The Pushbutton Web.

Don’t know if it was the luck of the draw, or just my turn in the queue, but I got an invite code for Brizzly.

Brizzly mainly appears to be an alternative web interface for Twitter. At least for my tweet stream, there seems to be minimal difference from the Twitter view. In Brizzly, Twitpic images are expanded inline. Similarly for shortened URLs. Other than that I’m not seeing a whole lot.

The Brizzly help page does have some more feature info though. I should give it an extended test drive.

Don’t know why, but the Brizzly mascot makes me a bit uncomfortable. Maybe bears shouldn’t wear spandex that tightly. And you know it’s spandex of course!

Brizzly, brought to you by thing labs has a blog and there’s more info from UsefulTools.

After reading Dan Frakes review of the Docks application, the concept of easy switching between multiple dock configurations sounds really appealing. And the price, $10, seems right.

I adore Quentin Tarantino’s movies. Pulp Fiction is a personal top fiver. Reservoir Dogs is excellent and Jackie Brown is severely underappreciated. The Kill Bills and Death Proof are somewhat entertaining but fatally flawed. I’ll probably see Inglourious Basterds, although I don’t have particularly high hopes.

Tarantino’s films are amazingly quotable and that’s because his characters are always talking. I’ve known for a long time that his approach to dialog is what fascinated me, but Matt Zoller Seitz and Keith Uhlich of The L Magazine have put together a short text essay on dialog from Tarantino movies and an accompanying video essay as support. Said video is embedded below. The combination neatly sums up what I’d tell people I love about these movies.

There are some other Tarantino dialogs, probably not Socratic enough to fit Seitz’s bill, that tickle my fancy:

• Reservoir Dogs: Mr. White explaining to Mr. Orange various brutal crowd control techniques for a robbery and then ending matter of factly with, “I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco.”

• Pulp Fiction: Fabienne trying to convince Butch pot bellies are sexy, “Shut up, Fatso! I don’t have a pot! I have a bit of a tummy, like Madonna when she did ‘Lucky Star,’ it’s not the same thing.”

• Jackie Brown: Ordell explaining to Lewis why he hangs with Melanie even though she’s a bit of a flake, “You can’t trust Melanie but you can trust Melanie to be Melanie.”

P.S. Two video embeds in a row. Whoohoo! I’m a modern blogger.

Okay, MTV finally got me. I was channel surfing during a slow part (by definition since it’s preseason) of last night’s NFL snoozer between the Giants and Panthers. The video below was playing.

It was K’naan’s “T.I.A (This is Africa)”, from the Troubadour album (They still make those things?). HOT!!… Enough for me to do an impulse purchase from the Amazon MP3 store. Not approved for children though.

K’NAAN “T.I.A” music video directed by: NABIL from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.