So while my information trapping approach is working well in terms of catching stuff from my various GReader accounts, it falls down on my personal laptop. E-mailing links essentially means sending mail from myself to myself. GMail happily receives such e-mails but doesn’t run filters on them, foiling my carefully crafted instant labeling/filing scheme.

Since GMail supports IMAP, I thought I’d give programming a workaround a shot. Adding my own messages to IMAP folders turned out to be easier than I thought, thanks to Python. Pulling info out of apps through AppleScript/Python appscript is more painful than I anticipated. Still I’ve managed to get notetaking from within Safari down to making a selection and hitting a keystroke. That’s with a little help from Red Sweater’s FastScripts.

I think I’ll be anteing up for FastScripts soon. Scripting the Mac with Python is F-U-N!

And should be a short step to getting something working for NetNewsWire, where I do my heaviest feed reading on the Mac.

Late last year I rejoined my long time browsing love, Firefox. It’s been a good run, but there’s a big issue with Firefox on the Macintosh. Scriptability. Being able to drive applications with AppleScript, and consequently other languages like Python, is a big distinguisher on the Mac. Despite the quirks, scripting works way better than on Windows, and can be a real boon to productivity. I’ve been looking at application scripting as a means to make my information trapping as frictionless as possible.

Looks like the upcoming version of Firefox will still suck at scripting.

So now I’m going to take Safari out for an extended spin. Looking at my Firefox usage, the only significant missing feature was extensions. Only two were important: TabMixPlus (mainly for session saving), and ColorfulTabs. I can live without the latter and it seems like there are Safari extensions to deal with the former.

We’ll see how it goes. There have been a couple of minor muscle memory issues so far, but things look promising.

On second thought, I’m probably better off using IMAP for that synch up of my notes folder and GReader. If you use SMTP, you need a mail relay. I pay Mailhop $20/year for 200 outbound e-mails/day. Still, when developing and debugging it’d probably be easy to screw things up, chew through that quota, and end up looking like a spammer.

Better to come off looking like a busted e-mail client than looking like a spammer.

So previously I documented how my information trapping process had reduced to e-mailing links + text to myself. I’m pretty happy with the setup, but there was one little niggling glitch.

Google Desktop could search my notes, through GMail, but if I was offline I couldn’t actually read the notes. I needed a seamless way to synch my notes folder out of IMAP onto my laptop. You can turn on an option in Thunderbird, my longstanding e-mail client, to synch folders. However, Thunderbird e-mail is not indexable by Google Desktop. At least, not without some hairy kludges.

I had a thought to pulling out the Python swiss army knife and hacking something together.

Enter Apple Mail. Mail can be configured to do the exact same IMAP synching, but it’s mail storage format is compatible with Spotlight, which is what Google Desktop uses under the covers for indexing. Mission accomplished, although I’ve turned a finely polished e-mail program into a simpleton file synch program.

Now all I need to do is get my starred items out of Google Reader and into my notes folder. Yeah, I could just mail the items from GReader instead of starring them (I actually do this fairly often, but what about the old items), but I’m trying to eliminate friction. Starring is as low friction as it gets.

Two challenges here: 1) getting the items out in an automated fashion (sounds like a good job for a cron script), 2) getting them up into GMail, in the right folder, with the right date (not quite sure which of Python’s SMTP or IMAP modules is the right call)

I recently added Nas’ Made You Look to my hip-hop iTunes playlist. For whatever reason, this track gets me really pumped up on when it comes. Nas does a real tour de force of rhyme flow, mixing couplets, cadences, and verbal gymnastics, all the while clearly enunciating and not coming off too serious. The backing beat is rugged and the intermittent gun shots creatively break things up.

Put your hand up that you shoot with, count your loot wit’

Push the pool stick in your new crib, same hand that you hoop with

Swing around like you stu-pid, king’a the town, yeah I been that

You know I click-clack where you and yor men’s at

Do the Smurf, do the Wop, Baseball Bat

Rooftop like we bringing ‘88 back

[Gunfire]

They shootin’! — Aw made you look

You a slave to a page in my rhyme book

In a screed against Apple’s reality distortion field surrounding the iPhone, John C. Abell had a little toss off line that I found particularly compelling:

The stakes are, however, much higher than the smartphone market. The three things that matter in computing are the hand, the screen, and the cloud.

Hand, screen, and cloud seem like a particularly convenient shorthand to think about what and how we interact with computing these days. The notion also has distinct implications for how modern and future applications are constructed.

Picked up J Boogie Live! In the Mix off of the Amazon remainder shelf. I was pleasantly surprised, given that I didn’t like the more recent Soul Vibrations. That’s partially because the latter is a straight ahead album, whereas Live! is a mix cd.

Still, given that I’ve only had one listen, I was really impressed. It was sort of the downtempo hip-hop Yang to Mark Farina’s downtempo house Yin.

Quoting from cdto‘s project page:

Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd’d to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it’s icon) to placed in the finder window’s toolbar.

Looks really handy.

Hat tip to Hivelogic.

Quick logging of books recently completed.

• Daemon, Daniel Suarez. Frustratingly horrible. I know factions of the digerati love this book, but it’s poorly written, weirdly plotted, and comes off as ridiculously fanboyish. There was interesting conceptual potential, but it was butchered by poor execution of the techno-thriller format.

• The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner. I thought I had completed this once before, but my memories didn’t align with the ending. In any event, I know I started it recently and then left the book on an airplane. Anyway, a really good read and dates well despite its underpinnings in mid-70’s Alvin Toffler futurism.

• Brasyl, Ian MacDonald. An entertaining, but not quite brilliant, combination of historical adventure ala Cryptonomicon, near-present techno-cultural study like Spook Country, and near future speculative fiction. All blended into the riotous cultural stew (from these Western eyes), that is Brasilia, wrapped up in a bow of quantum computing.

That makes 10 books for the year. If I have a good June and knock out 5 more, I might be closing on the 35 book target.

Being an MIT VI.3 major (that’s computer science for mere mortals), it is with a tinge of melancholy that I belatedly note the passing of the 6.001 course into the night. I had the good fortune to actually have Gerry Sussman as one of the co-lecturers.

“Starting this year, though, the Course VI department is beginning to migrate incoming freshmen to the new curriculum. And 6.001 doesn’t really have a place in the new curriculum, so this is the last term that it was offered. Several years ago, Sussman said that he wanted to be the last person to teach 6.001, and so he taught it this term, taking it back from (guest blogger) Eric Grimson, the head of the department, who has taught the class for as long as any of my friends can remember.”

Despite not having much of a programming background, fairly common back in the mid-80’s, I actually found 6.001 relatively easy. Closures were just completely natural. The course was challenging, but I never felt overwhelmed like some of my peers.

Sussman blew my mind on the last lecture though. He basically described Conway’s Game of Life. Fair enough. Then he went on to explain how you could build Turing complete computation on top of Life. He elegantly described how to build wires, logic gates, arithmetic units, and registers. From there it’s just a small matter of code.

Remember, this is the absolute intro class to programming for majors. In my case, the last lecture before summer vacation. And Sussman does it all in an hour. Nobody leaves early and we give him a standing ovation.

Aside. The other professor who co-taught with Sussman, was from the Materials Science department. He volunteered to co-teach with Sussman just to learn about computation. That’s reputation.

While I’m deficient on reviewing completed books, I’ve actually been reading quite a bit. Just for my memory, here’s what I’ve completed recently, with some brief commentary:

• Going Postal, Terry Pratchett. Just randomly grabbed it off the rack, without knowing it was a Nebula Award nominee. Great choice, and exceedingly poignant given our recent global financial woes.

• The Jennifer Morgue, Charles Stross. I probably gobbled this too fast and gave myself indigestion. The bonus short story and afterword tasted better.

• The Forever War, Joe Haldeman. Back in print finally. Started out slowly but then exploded into classic status.

• The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m generally sympathetic to Taleb’s philosophy about our inability to deal with randomness. But way too much diatribe larded on to make this an enjoyable read.

That makes 7 completed for the year, and the rate is picking up. It’s going to be tough but I still might hit my 35 book target for the year.

SSH is the greatest tool for logging into remote machines. ssh-agent is a convenient way to use public cryptography with ssh so that you don’t have to repeatedly type in your password. Dave Dribin has a great explanation of the whys and hows of ssh-agent, including how it’s nicely integrated into MacOS X Leopard. Especially how the MocOS keychain is used to securely hold ssh passphrases.

Only thing was, it wasn’t working for me. MacOS X would properly ask me for my keyphrase, and I’d hit the checkbox for “Remember password in my keychain”, but the passphrase would not be stored. After a few hours of fruitless Googling and looking at debug logs for ssh, I finally turned my eye towards the MacOS keychain. Turns out the permissions on one of my keychain files was borked. The Keychain Access utility has options to Verify and Repair your keychains, which revealed the problem and cleaned up the issue.

Now I’m a happy camper. Hopefully, if someone else is having a similar issue, Google will be able to surface this discussion for them.

Discovered IgniteDC just in time for them to close ticket sales for their inaugural event. Oh well!

The Ignite presentation format consists of strictly timed and advanced slide (read PowerPoint) presentations. The concept was born in Japan as Pecha Kucha, adopted by techies and other hipsters in the states, and renamed due to copyright issues.

I’ve known about Pecha Kucha/Ignite events for years, but haven’t had an opportunity to attend one. Hopefully, keeping a closer eye on a local version will eliminate this lack.

Earlier I mentioned a bunch of libraries that I typically add to a new Python installation I create. This can get laborious though, having to install each package individually.

There are a couple of Python “distros”, for lack of a better term, that bundle up a lot of useful modules, especially for scientific computing, with a specific Python interpreter. I’ve long known of the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD), which is a mega-collection of Python libraries. Python(x,y) is a recent (to me) addition which seems to be a little more focused on providing a full-fledged development environment.

While EPD has the advantage of a MacOS X build, Python(x,y) has clearer licensing. I can’t tell if the “free for hobbyist” spirit is still in effect for EPD, but Python(x,y) is clearly GPL.

My Daring Fireball T-Shirt arrived in the mail on Monday. Although I’m not sanguine about American Apparel’s advertising, DF’s provider did produce one of the nicest $30 T-shirts I’ve bought recently (or ever).

Clearly this is the beginning of a slow descent into Macintosh fanboyism. I’m happy to support John Gruber’s work though.

So the Amazon MP3 Store just put one on the board against the iTMS. Here’s what I picked up today from AzMP3:

• House of Pain, Jump Around

• EPMD, You’re A Customer

• Big Daddy Kane, RAW, Ain’t No Half Steppin, Set It Off

• Marley Marl, The Symphony

• MC Shan, The Bridge

• Souls of Mischief, That’s When Ya Lost

The only track the iTMS had was Jump Around, and for $1.29 at that. Everything was $0.99 on AzMP3. Screw variable pricing.

Recently, my installation of Witch had been really sluggish. Being a window switcher, Witch relies on applications to report their open windows. If an individual app is slow then Witch feels slow. Last.fm does not play nice in this regard.

Thanks to the Witch user forums, I discovered this issue and found that you can have Witch ignore certain apps. Skipping Last.fm leads to normal zippy behavior in Witch. I’m posting about the solution mainly so that it can better surface in Google.

The 2009 Major League Baseball season kicks off tonight. I’m not a mega-baseball fan, but being a red-blooded American sports junkie, I definitely at least pretend to follow the races. In many years, I do a pretty good job, but the DC area teams, the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles, are so bad all enthusiasm is drained by the end of May. Since the Rays made the World Series recently, the Pirates and maybe the Royals are the only other organizations on a comparable level of incompetence to the Nats and Os.

So this year, I’m forsaking my boyhood team, the Orioles, and officially adopting the Chicago White Sox. Eight years living in Chicago, marrying a South Sider, and being a Chicago resident for the only World Series in the last century (Sox 2005), should be sufficient ante.

On another baseball note, once upon a time I speculated that Baseball Prospectus wouldn’t be able to sustain a subscription based model. Whoops! Missed on that one.

A unique form,…, a unique form,… of music.

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this blog that my main musical taste is in DJ mixed House music. What is House music? Of course you could go to the Wikipedia entry for House and get a nice encyclopedia style history.

But you wouldn’t get the feeling.

Hat tip though to Unclouded By Ambition for posting about a trailer for an upcoming Untitled Documentary about House Music. If the documentary is true to the trailer, than it looks like this will be heavy on oral recountings from working DJs. This will be a nice update on Chip E’s The UnUsual Suspects: Once Upon a Time in House Music. The UnUsual Suspects was solid but somewhat parochial in that it focused on Chicago and New York and on a short period right at the birth of House. Very useful for understanding a handful of pioneers, especially Larry Levan, but a little uneven. Hopefully this new documentary will cover the global spread of the form, and also have a little higher production values.

I’d buy that for a dollar.

No scratch that.

Oh Please, Oh Please, Oh Please, Let This Movie Be Released and Let It Be Good!!!

Besides I like anything with Mark Farina.

And what is House music? In the trailer, I think Julius Papp, Kerri Chandler, and Derrick Carter (about 1:00 minute in) get the closest to a definitive answer. House grew out of underground, DIY aspirations and inspiration from Disco (the good kind, and yes there was a good kind). But being primarily progression based and dance oriented, the basic elements were easily mutated and recombined with other musical styles. So the core is four on the floor dance rhythms, roughly of a certain BPM. After that all bets are off. All that matters is whether the rhythm moves you or not.

One thing about the new iPod Nano is that to maximize enjoyment, your metadata should be as clean and accurate as possible. I’ve started to wade in and work on my library. Now I’m really appreciating the utility of TuneUp and Discogs.com. The former has done a good job cleaning up 90% of what I’ve thrown at it. Plus it pulls in cover art. The latter is handy for finding cover art which TuneUp doesn’t get right.

So far I think there’s only one playlist which I’ll have to clean up by hand. For whatever reason, DJ John Howard’s San Francisco Sessions v2 is really screwed up in the automated tagging systems. The artist and title information is flipped. But if that’s all I have to grind over, TuneUp will have paid for itself.

I have dorky looking pair of Koss over the ear headphones that I’ve been using for a while now. Dorky looking but with great sound for the type of music I listen to.

In keeping with the sleekness of the new iPod Nano, I thought I’d give these newfangled in-ear headphones a shot. I bought the low end Sennheiser headphones you see there on the right. I gave ‘em a bit of a whirl for most of the day and it’s going to take some getting used to. The sound is actually pretty decent, often equivalent to my Koss set. However, my ears always feel really weird, and the cords often transmit noise when I move vigorously. Plus, I tend to generate a lot of ear wax so the earcaps look a little scungy. Maybe I need to try one of the other size caps that came with the headphones.

In any event, I’ll keep the test drive going, but I may have to retire the in-ears to the office.

I had no realization that the 4th generation iPod Nano was such a new product. It was only announced in September of 2008, and probably only shipped in quantity for the Christmas season.

Mine may be the singularly most elegantly designed and carefully crafted device I have ever owned. The device is amazingly light and thin. Any decently sized set of headphones, including earbuds, seems to have much more mass than the Nano. It screams out to be constantly held. Or left out on your desk to attract envious admirers. The LCD display makes a major difference. If your music has proper images attached, you really do get the experience of having beautifully designed cover art available.

There are also numerous sleek little touches, like reflecting the cover art into the track display area. Also, they fixed one of my major nits with the Mini. The Nano now horizontally scrolls long title, artist, and album names. This crops up quite frequently in the land of DJ mixed music.

CoverFlow is sort of a bust for me though. In continuing news, Apple seems to be well nigh actively hostile to folks that use playlists to any significant extent. Makes the ability to use the Nano’s accelerometer to slip into CoverFlow sort of useless. However, the auto-rotation is really handy for photo viewing.

I haven’t used an iPhone or iPod touch, but if you don’t need you’re media player jammed up with your phone, or you don’t need a bunch of apps, I can highly recommend the Nano as a media device.

Python is my current favorite programming language. I don’t switch favorites often, but I have an appreciation for many other languages. Heck, as an undergraduate I actually wrote code on TI Explorer Lisp machines.

One of the Python community’s mantras is “batteries included.” There’s a belief that any decent programmer should be able to build fairly sophisticated applications with the stock Python interpreter. Translation, a large standard library.

Even so, over the years I’ve found myself installing a bunch of different 3rd party libraries every time I go through a new Python implementation. I’ve had to do a few of these over the last couple of days. A core set of post-“batteries” essentials have coaleseced. Here they are in no particular order:

• Numpy, for array and matrix operations

• Scipy, which includes Numpy, for advanced matrix operations and signal processing

• lxml, for high speed, standards conformant XML processing using the Python-centric ElementTree API

• PIL, the Python Imaging Library, for munging images of all formats

• networkx to conduct various network/graph generation and processing experiments

• The Universal Feed Parser since you never know when you need to slurp down and process an RSS or Atom feed

• virtualenv to easily create customized, isolated versions of a stock Python intepreter

Python logo cribbed from the Python website, copyright the Python Software Foundation.

About four or five years ago, can’t really remember, I burned some credit card points on low end, 6gb iPod Mini. Actually, I think it was about a month before the first iPod Nano’s were announced. I was sort of chapped that I’d just “bought” a discontinued model.

I didn’t really take to the Mini at first, but then started heavily using it in 2006. I found its actual physical heft to be comforting. Some if it was an attempt to get back in the gym, but I also had some long car rides. Then when I got back East and drove from Leesburg to Arlington for about a year and a quarter, it really helped me keep my sanity. When I switched to riding a commuter bus and Metro, the Mini still kept me company. Recently it had fallen out of favor, because I always broke out the laptop on the bus. Might as well just use iTunes there. However, I still pretty much carried it around everywhere, including a trip to Boston. The Mini was still pretty handy for airplane rides.

I was climbing some stairs in MIT’s Stata center. Concrete landings in an open plan, architect’s office style space. Got up to the second level then hear, “clink, PING, ….. POW”. The poor thing had slipped (jumped?) out of my pocket, fallen 3 feet to concrete, bounced, then flew for another story, before almost braining a poor grad student.

I went down and retrieved the Mini, but it was too late. All it does now is display the unhappy folder sign. It was from a generation of iPods with disc based harddrives. I’m guessing there was a head crash.

I found myself with a pile of rewards points yet again and decided to move into the modern era. Cashed ‘em in online, and five days later had to stop by the post office to pick up a package. Now I have a spanking new 4th generation 8Gb iPod Nano. Very sexy. Thinner, richer (more storage), and purdy (“high resolution” color LCD screen). This portable images and video thing might just catch on at some point.

I think it’s a keeper.

My second Finding Ada post highlights a peer of mine, Valerie E. Taylor. She was a couple of years ahead of me in the grad program at UC Berkeley. Valerie and a few other graduate students provided the peer mentoring foundation that helped a fairly significant cohort of African-American students to complete their dissertations in EECS. Many of them are still making major research contributions in EECS. From the mid-80’s to mid-90’s, there was a really vibrant community of African-American students in Berkeley EECS, due in large part to Valerie’s efforts to recruit and retain students.

Here’s a fairly recent bio:

Valerie E. Taylor earned her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University in1985 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. From 1991-2002, Dr. Taylor was a member of the faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University. Dr. Taylor joined the faculty at Texas A&M University as Head of the Dwight Look College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science in January of 2003, and is, also currently a holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship II. Her research interests are in the area of high performance computing, with particular emphasis on the performance of parallel and distributed applications and mesh partitioning for distributed systems. She has authored or co-authored over 90 papers in these areas. Dr. Taylor has received numerous awards for distinguished research and leadership, including the 2002 IEEE Harriet B. Rigas Award for woman with significant contributions in engineering education, the 2002 Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni from the University of California at Berkeley, the 2002 Nico Habermann Award for increasing the diversity in computing, and the 2005 Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing. Dr. Taylor is a member of ACM and Senior Member of IEEE-CS.

We also overlapped as faculty members at Northwestern University. Valerie was part of the reason I went there. She moved up, becoming one of the few female, African-American heads of a major research oriented Computer Science department. Frankly, I’m mostly hedging on that. Odd’s on she’s probably singularly in that category and she’s been making it work for 6 years now. Has it been that long?

I moved on from Northwestern, but if I’d listened to Valerie a little more closely I might have thrived there. Such is life.

As a recovering academic who is also a minority, I thought I’d join in with the Finding Ada crowd today. I have two prominent women in computer science research I was fortunate enough to know on a first name basis. Susan L. Graham and Valerie Taylor. They both deserve their own posts, so I’ll start with Sue.

Susan Graham was on my dissertation committee at UC Berkeley. She and her husband, Michael Harrison my direct advisor, led the Ensemble research project which funded a lot of my time there. Sue was my introduction to the overworked professor’s two word e-mail response. I fondly remember her penchant for correcting itsos in my writing. When I got to Berkeley, I was sort of naive and ignorant. I really had no idea who she was, although she had been publishing for over a decade. Then again I wasn’t really a compiler geek at that point. But when I saw that she was the Graham in Graham-Glanville generator, prominently mentioned in The (Green) Dragon Book, then I knew she was a world-class researcher. If you are a young female academic in computing, Sue helped pave the way for you.

Here’s her bio from the UC Berkeley EECS web site:

She received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. In 2000 she received the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award. She has served on numerous advisory committees; among them, the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005. Recently she co-chaired a National Research Council study on the Future of Supercomputing. She is President of the Harvard Board of Overseers.

She is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the UC Berkeley. Her research spans many aspects of programming language implementation, software tools, software development, environments, and high-performance computing. As a participant in the Berkeley Unix project, she and her students built the Berkeley Pascal system and the widely used program profiling tool gprof. Their paper on that tool was selected for the list of best papers from twenty years of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (1979-1999).

Uh, yeah.

This also doesn’t mention the fact that for a long while, she was the only female faculty member in the UC Berkeley CS Division.

Now that I’ve got all my media players scrobbling to last.fm, I’ve developed a serious case of recently played narcissism. I find myself checking my newly scrobbled tracks page about every 10-15 minutes unless I’m seriously concentrating on something. This constant attention reveals two interesting things.

First, quality digital track metadata makes life in the new music era much improved. I had a bunch of tracks ripped from CDs way back in the 1995-1998 range. Since they were DJ mixed House discs, they were compilations of tracks from various artists. The automated ripping software and catalogs of the time were pretty inconsistent so you might wind up with the ID3 artist being the CD compiler or the original artist. Similarly, the track title might be the original track title, or the title combined with the track artist. And then there was stuff that was just flat out wrong, not to mention confusion about Unicode characters for our favorite foreign artists.

Poor last.fm was having a hard time correctly resolving track names. So I anted up for TuneUp Gold, which I’ll give a provisional endorsement. It actually does ID3 clean-up pretty well, but I’m not a big fan of the user interface, which is a bit sluggish on my machine.

The second thing I learned is that while the world is improving in regards to DJ mixed music in general, and House in particular, things still ain’t perfect. last.fm is pretty good about having entries for most of the major House artists. However, there’s a lot of pseudonyms in the genre along with remixes, edits, “featuring FooBar”, etc. last.fm doesn’t do a great job with this stuff, especially resolving to the right artist. I’ve also seen very limited positive results for auto-correction on these tracks. I’m not sure how good they could do though. I can’t seem to find it anymore, but I remember a page on the last.fm site essentially saying “various artists are hard!” Plus, I’m sure the House listening population is pretty small, so last.fm doesn’t have a lot of useful data.

I’m wondering if there’s room for a niche, self-sustaining, adjunct to last.fm that caters to House fiends. Maybe with a little more people power to compensate for the lack of scale and data on the automation side.

Despite all that, I should say I am quite enjoying last.fm.

The amount of self linking in modern weblogs, especially from high level blogging networks such as Gawker Media and Weblogs Inc. The ratio of inlinks to outlinks feels like 5-10 to 1.

The fact that self linking URL’s I used in New Media Hack, have the domain name wired in. Now my current archives exhibit a lot of linkrot, that’s going to be a pain to fix. Sometimes in The Jungle we smack our own.

The insane amount of flair on many modern weblogs. Back away from the widgets folks.

Blog posts which don’t have authorship and dating at the top of the post. This goes for news articles as well. Clear, early bylines are good information architecture. They help readers evaluate the timeliness and veracity of the following content.

Item titles in MetaFilter’s RSS feed suck. They’re typically not descriptive of the item so you can’t easily scan the spew in a reader like NetNewsWire. It’d be nice if they had a feed that just collapsed all of the posted nuggets into one item.

I love the Arlington County Public Library. Close to work. Nice selection of books. Well designed public space. Rock solid Wi-Fi.

But most of the books I’ve borrowed have had some kind of damage. Not so bad that they were unreadable obviously, but it feels like somebody’s spilled a cup of coffee or a coke on every book in the Science Fiction section.

Still can’t beat the price though.

Don’t know why I picked up Greg Egan’s Diaspora as I strolled through the library, but it turned out to be one of the mind-blowingest pieces of science fiction I’ve ever read. Diaspora puts the hard in hard science fiction, but I found that as I just let the heavy math, astronomy, physics, and compuatation wash over me it turned into an enjoyable read.

Diaspora is a loosely threaded collection of stories set in an extremely posthuman world. The book has an 8 page glossary to explain some of the more advanced concepts, such as a polis, which is a computational infrastructure that hosts populations of posthuman consciousnesses. You can think of them as cities for AIs. Three sorts of humans still exist, fleshers who indulge in gene engineering but forsake the completely virtual existence of polises, gleisners, which are humanoid robots housing human consciousnesses, and then the citizens of the polises where most of the characters are drawn from.

The book is insanely difficult to summarize, although the Wikipedia page for Diaspora actually does a pretty good job. The story literally takes the reader from the birth of an orphan polis citizen, eventually named Yatima, over the course of trillions of years and even trillions of universes, essentially to the end of reality. It’s literally that deep. As an example, the first chapter Orphagenesis attempts to convey how the Yatima intelligence comes to be self-aware.

To push the story along, various unpredicted astronomical events threaten to wipe out all humanity. Yatima, friends, and citizens clone themselves and take a variety of approaches to transmitting themselves across the galaxy, in search of answers to why their understanding of the universe failed and places to safely hide from the catastrophic results of other miscalculations. Ergo the title Diaspora. Egan takes no shorts in illustrating how that understanding and wandering is built out of complex mathematical, physical, and computational concepts.

Eventually the story boils down to Yatima’s search for the mysterious Transmuters, an alien race who have not only mastered our universe, but an infinity of of universes. The end of the journey leaves open more questions than it answers, principally in the areas of the role of intelligent life and what consciousness means when you have immortality and a complete understanding of how the universe works.

Diaspora isn’t for everyone. Even though there aren’t any greek symbols, if math gives you a hard time you’ll be put off. If you actually know much about the math and physics behind the story, I could imagine one getting sucked into deciphering the viability of Egan’s carefully crafted intellectual constructs. One other issue is that the characters get to be so far from human, that it can be hard to build a connection with them. Still, for a scientific lightweight like me, there was just enough plot and characterization to keep me going through the hard patches. Recommended, with reservations.

Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel is arguably the book William Gibson’s Spook Country should have been. MacLeod’s work is a little uneven, and eventually has a complete mindfuck ending, but it’s well worth reading just for the speculative political fiction.

First and foremost, The Execution Channel is a near future spy thriller with some interesting speculative elements, bearing only the slightest bit of science fiction. Set in the UK, the key characters are Roisin Travis and her father James Travis. Roisin, a peace activist, happens to be near an RAF base in Scotland when it gets vaporized in a mysterious mushroom could. This sends things sideways in jolly old England while Roisin and James both go on the lam. Turns out that James is a bit of a mole, selling out the crown. Meanwhile, he trained Roisin in a bit of tradecraft, which she uses to try and make her way to their designated meeting place.

Potential thermonuclear detonation obviously escalates world tensions. MacLeod develops a bevy of ancillary characters to illustrate hidden surges of espionage, counter-espionage, propaganda, and disinformation. One of the more interesting persons is Mark Dark, one of those pajama wearing, basement blogging, conspiracy theorists, who just happens to actually have a line on what’s really going on. Dark stands in for the blogosphere which MacLeod brings to life as a real area of of action for clandestine information operation campaigns. In addition, there’s a passel of spook types filling a spectrum from brutal, ideology driven thugs to elegantly refined pragmatists.

Suffice to say careful attention pays well when reading The Execution Channel.

Where The Execution Channel improves on Spook Country is in the gritty meanness that’s probably a little more accurate to our times. The just plain nastiness of some of the operatives in action and post-disaster human behavior doesn’t get lost in effervescent slickness. Yet the feel of conspiracies within conspiracies is similar. MacLead also does a brilliant job of subtly twisting the milieu into a disconcerting alternative history. I did a couple of double takes when confronted with some of the political shifts deftly woven into the narrative. And while subtly presented, they are at the same time enormous yet insignificant. Hard to explain but definitely on of the more interesting aspects of the book.

MacLeod mainly trips up near the finish line. The concluding events seem rushed and rely on some seemingly manufactured coincidences. The absolute conclusion jarringly comes completely out of left field, although it is consistent with all of MacLeod’s prior foreshadowing. Finally, the eponymous “Execution Channel” is a slim chapter ending device that adds a sense of menace. However, it just up and disappears about 2/3 of the way through the book. Not sure what the intended commentary was but I certainly missed it.

The Execution Channel is far from perfect, but similar to MacLeod’s The Star Fraction, I found it worth reading if for nothing else its political provocations. As I said of that book, MacLead is most interesting not because of his ability to speculate about science, but his political thought hacking, said ability also applying to The Execution Channel. Recommended.

The diggin’ in the cratez iTunes strategy has reunited me with the Jungle Brothers. The JBeez, for short, were an offshoot of the late 80’s/early 90’s Native Tongues hip-hop collective. Not quite reaching the same level of renown as A Tribe Called Quest or De La Soul, looking back they had a pretty productive oeuvre.

Apropos, Elle Driver: “You know I’ve always liked that word… ‘oeuvre’ … so rarely have an opportunity to use it in a sentence.”

Some highlights:

• Jimbrowski, their debut, “the thing’s so big you need a U-haul to haul it”

• Because I Got It Like That, the 12” followup if I remember correctly

• JBeez Coming Through, “5000 boomin watts. Sound system state of the art”

• Black is Black, especially the Gee Street Ultrablack mix

• I’ll House You, A House music anthem to this day, “feel the vibe, feel the vibe, feel the bass, c’mon!”

What’s great about all of these tracks is that the beats, rhymes, and energy still hold up well today. For a 1.5 album group, their sophomore effort Done By The Forces of Nature was a little weak, the JBeez got a lot done.

Since I started listening to more music through iTunes on my Macbook and with my iPod Mini, I decided to reconnect with Audioscrobbler or technically last.fm. I had used the old Audioscrobbler for a short while back in 2005, but they have since been absorbed and redeployed as the last.fm web services API.

Audioscrobbler plugs in to your media player, scrobbles your tracks a.k.a records what you listen to, and then uploads that data to last.fm. From there, last.fm taps you in to a social network of other digital music listeners. This has turned out be surprisingly interesting, as there are connections to playlists from similar users, videos for many songs that I didn’t think had one, and even free music.

Even better, I’ve found that my jury-rigged home MP3 jukebox can be hooked in as well. I’ve put a bunch of MP3s on an old Linux box. I run MPD as a remotely controllable, media player. MPD feeds an Icecast server which I can securely connect to over SSH tunnels. Comes in handy when trying to listen from work.

Just to be a completist, since I do a lot of listening in the office, I wanted tracks played through the above concoction to be scrobbled as well. MPD doesn’t directly support scrobbling, but there are a handful of supporting applications that listen to MPD’s playlist and scrobble the results. At first I gave mpdscribble a shot, thinking a stable C application would be pretty reliable. For whatever reason, mpdscribble often timed out uploading scrobble data. I switched to the Python based lastfmsubmitd and now things work great.

Finally lastfmsubmitd is a nice elegant piece of code that relies on basic UNIX principles to get the job done. It cleanly forks daemon processes for the MPD listener and the last.fm submitter, and uses the filesystem to record its data. Plus it logs nicely and feels very Pythonic. Excellent job!!

I’ll post more later specifically about the last.fm experience.

Previously I harshed on the Amazon MP3 Store because I couldn’t get Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. That criticism still stands, but a crack has appeared in iTMS armor!

None of Big Daddy Kane’s classics like Raw, Ain’t No Half Steppin, and Smooth Operator are in the iTMS. In fact, it doesn’t look like any of the Cold Chillin’ catalog is in the store. Boooooo!

Thankfully, the Amazon MP3 store at least has Marley Marl’s House of Hits. Okay, so you can’t get Smooth Operator, but digital versions of The Symphony, Part 1 and The Bridge more than make up for it. The rest of the collection isn’t that bad either.

Ob Trivia. The Bridge was originally a B side. The supposedly lesser side of a 12” vinyl record for you youngsters out there. Which reminds me to dig up Public Enemy’s B Side Wins Again

I was deceived by the cover of M. M. Buckner’s War Surf into thinking the story was more of the Neuromancer ilk with the action happening in the cyber realm. Despite the bait and switch, and a truly detestable protagonist, I managed to slog my way through the novel. Surprisingly, I was quite satisfied with the ending.

War Surf documents the self-absorbed antics of a small band of post-apocalypse, hyper rich executives. These over-gene-engineered corporate Methuselahs, led by one Nasir Deepra, parachute into restricted areas of labor unrest, broadcast their joy rides for fame and fortune, and occasionally fry the unfortunate prote (protected employee) that gets in their way. A particularly juicy target is the legendary Heaven, an orbiting satellite under complete lockdown and which Deepra seems to know too much about.

Deepra, despite being hundreds of years old, falls head over heels for a young idealistic executive named Sheeba. To the point of seriously annoying this reader, Deepra fawns over Sheeba, gets violently jealous, and launches into rash acts as if he was a teenager. Goaded by Sheeba and one of his crewmates, Deepra leads a war surf of Heaven.

Things go disastrously for the run, and Deepra and Sheeba get captured and trapped with the denizens of Heaven, a fairly pathetic collection of youngsters barely subsisting against the corporation trying to wipe them off the satellite. Here too Deepra is particularly annoying in his running condescension towards the spacebound “protes”, despite their saving his and Sheeba’s life on multiple occasions. Even worse, Sheeba falls for one of the protes which causes Deepra no end of consternation and brings out his most base and treacherous instincts.

Literally being one of the most self-absorded, clueless, and pathetic characters I’ve ever read about I was amazed that Buckner was able to ultimately redeem Deepra. He finally realizes the protes he so looks down upon represent a humanity that existed before the apocalypse. An apocalypse he barely survived somewhat due to chance, with great personal loss, and with exposure to great horrors. Meanwhile, his life has become an empty existence of tempting and cheating death to no good purpose. His final act of sacrifice is all the more bittersweet due to the careful crafting of his odiousness.

War Surf is a bit uneven, and definitely not a great book. For example, getting to Heaven takes quite a while, even though it’s clear the satellite has to be the tale’s final destination. But if you can enjoy a tale of a true anti-hero it can make a quick and stimulating read.

Be advised that people who read and write a lot more science fiction than I do granted War Surf the Philip K. Dick award.

So I bought Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz Six at the end of December and had an interim report in early January. I think there’s been enough listening. Time to render a final judgment.

Mushroom Jazz Six is good, but not great. The mix sustains some of the finest elements of the Mushroom Jazz series. Downtempo beats with echoes of house music combined with hip-hop and R&B vocals. As I said before Six incorporates many more jazz elements.

What deflates Six is the last 4 or 5 tracks. While quite jazzy, they also take all the energy out of the ride. The mix doesn’t generate any toe tappin’ after Mark Farina’s Life and never rises to another peak. Since this is the last quarter of the album the listener leaves the mix with a blah feeling. Contrast this with Mushroom Jazzs Three,Four, and Five, which all had a late peak then a gentle closing glide.

However, there are some stretches of Mushroom Jazz Six that I really do like. First up:

• Jamal: Jamal 141

• Colossus: Dopebeatz

• Brawdcast: Calm Down (Instrumental)

• J-Boogie’s Dubtronic Science, Feat. Crown City Rockers: Alive (Instrumental)

This run is classic Mushroom Jazz. Fat beats. Mellow atmospherics layered on top. A loop snatched from Tha Alkoholiks Likwit pulls it all together. Guaranteed head nodding.

Then a bit later we have:

• Rubberoom: Bodysnatchin’ (On The Isle) (Instrumental)

• Flash (13): Wasn’t Really Worth My Time

• Mark Farina: Life

Here the energy really picks up. The diva vocals of Wasn’t Really Worth My Time are a signature of the Mushroom Jazz mixes. The bass of Life is really thumpin.

After that though, Mushroom Jazz Six is sort of forgettable. For Mushroom Jazz completists like me, Six is definitely a get. Not a must get, but a get. Don’t feel bad if you waited or bought it used. For those new to the series, there are better places to start.

But you might want to check out some, other, more positive, opinions.

Previously I wrote about a new strategy I have for purchasing music through the iTunes Music Store (DRM free natch). With only 35 hip-hop tracks stuffed into a looping, shuffled playlist, it seems to be working out quite well. Highlights include:

• Chemical Brothers (featuring Q-Tip), Galvanize. That Budweiser commercial campaign got me hooked.

• Tribe Called Quest, Award Tour. 1991?! Jeez I’m getting old.

• DMX, What’s My Name. Vile lyrics, but the combined fury of DMX and the beat is an incredible combination. Makes a lightweight like me want to get up and punch someone.

• Black Eyed Peas, Hey, Mama. Part of the TV campaign that took the iPod to a new level of consumer consciousness.

• Souls of Mischief, ‘93 Til Infinity. Classic Bay Area flow.

• Just-Ice, Going Way Back. A gem known only to real hip hop hedz.

• Public Enemy, Fight The Power. PE and Spike Lee. Nothing else need be said.

For the past week or so, this has been the playlist for my long, commuter bus ride. iTunes is impressively good at not repeating things too closely and some of the sequences are pretty interesting. It’s to the point now that I’m thinking about setting up a few more of these singles playlists. There’s a bunch of 70’s disco and soul, plus 80’s pop that I’d be interested in collecting.

I kinda liked Men At Work. Really

New York may bounce back quickly according to Richard Florida, but DC may never take a hit. George Mason University’s Stephen Fuller has a deeper analysis than BusinessWeek but comes to similar conclusions. Hat tip to Danilo Bogdanovic.

As a DC resident (that may have been the first time I’ve used that phrase in over 20 years), I’m not that sanguine. I don’t think it will get really bad here like it is in the state of Florida, but I retain a sense of downward economic pressure. My guess is that there’s still a non-trivial number of real estate properties underwater or bank owned. Even if interest rates go down, single family homes are typically over the line for jumbo loans. Fat chance qualifying for one of those these days. And that plethora of government and contractor jobs just don’t reach the same compensation levels as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, LA, et. al.

Hope I’m wrong though!!

Given that President Obama is addressing Congress and the nation regarding economic concerns, two recent magazine articles were highly relevant. In The Atlantic, Richard Florida examines how the economic catastrophe will reshape america. Florida, a vocal proponent of cities as engines of progress, weighs potential regional survivors and victims in the wake of the financial meltdown.

His overall argument is that certain city cores are better equipped to deal with the downturn as opposed to exurbs and rural areas. Excess talent, creativity, and tendency towards reinvention can prime the pump for clawing out of the trough. Counterintuitively, he argues that New York will turn out all right, despite the collapse of the financier lifestyle. First, the transferrence of financial might happens on a glacial pace. Second, the throngs of creative types from the artistic, literary, entertainment and fashion industries can step up to drive the city. Other urban areas like San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston have much higher concentrations of residents with high levels of education. Finally, a number of Sun Belt cities that have exploited globalization to expand into manufacturing, may outlast the downturn without much damage.

The big losers? Traditional mid-western Rust Belt cities that haven’t been able to retool ala Pittsburgh. Detroit is the poster child, with St. Louis, Buffalo, and Cleveland teed up for similar dire straits. And of course there’s sunny locales of Phoenix and anywhere in Florida, excepting Miami which will continue to serve as an access hub to Latin America.

Florida is where George Packer’s New Yorker article The Ponzi State goes to ground on the mess that is the Florida real estate market, and how so much of Florida’s economy depended on limitless growth. The article is too long for me to summarize, but Packer does a great job at detailing a cross-section of the social strata in Florida, how the crash poignantly affects them, and the very real interconnectedness of this disaster. Paraphrasing one of the resident’s musings (and Pogo), “We has met the enemy, and he is us.”

Obviously the truth of this mess is a complex and many splendored thing, but these two articles provided me context going forward.

Session saving in Firefox through the Tab Mix Plus extension. Saved my bacon on a number of occasions.

iStats menus. The menu bar items are cool, as well as the iStat pro Dashboard widgets. Reminds me that I need to make a donation.

DyDNS.com’s MailHop Outbound SMTP service. Pay $15/year, get 150 outbound messages a day. Beats the heck out of keeping your own SMTP relay up, running, not busted into and not blacklisted. Also supports working around stupid firewalls you see in many travel settings.

Dashboard in Mac OS X. Oddly enough, I decreased the clock size in the menubar and now I use Dashboard more frequently to check the time. This is making me appreciate Dashboard’s utility.

Search templates in LaunchBar, although I need to break the muscle memory of doing a Google search through the Firefox URL field.