Caineville to Goblin Valley, UT

Caineville to Goblin Valley, UT
Originally uploaded by ghaff

In between Microsoft MIX08 (in Las Vegas) and Novell Brainshare (in Salt Lake City), I took a week off to do some hiking/photography in southern Utah and some skiing up at Alta. All my Utah pics are in this set. (Some are from a previous trip to the Moab area.)

Links for 03-25-2008

It's been a while. Lots of travel!

• Battle Over: CBS gave 'Jericho' a fighting chance - From Inside the Box - Zap2it - A remarkably sane post about TV show cancellations.


• New York Photography » POD Photo Books, Bottom Line - In-depth look at the various print-on-demand photo books. Personally I've used Blurb and been happy with them.


• Q&A with Clay Shirky, author of <i>Here Comes Everybody</i> - Nerve.com Screening Room - Interview with NYU professor Clay Shirky about his new book.


• Most Controversial Campaign Ads: No. 10 - AOL Video Blog - Pretty good collection of ads.


• ClearContext Corporate Weblog - I looked at this a while back. It may be time to take a peek again.


• Disks have become tapes - O'Reilly Radar - "In short (as observed by Doug Cutting at OSCON last year), MapReduce hits the sweet spot by operating at the transfer rate of disks (growing at 20%/year) rather than seek rate (growing at 5%/year) as relational databases do."


• Marginal Revolution: All you can eat? - The specifics will probably be messy and hard to predict. But I think it fair to observe that different ways of paying for/consuming music could change the market.


• Coding Horror: The Dark Side of Extensions - It's worth remembering that customizability and extensions aren't really an answer for the vast majority of users.


• InsideTrip - Intelligent travel choices - A new air travel site.

Links for 03-03-2008

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Confession: I love to fuck with car salesmen - Another good one.


• Megan McArdle (February 28, 2008) - The cult of the CEO - "CEOs are too often empire builders, squandering retained earnings and diluting share values in order to make dubious corporate acquisitions."


• Megan McArdle (February 28, 2008) - Odd conundrum for the day - For some reason I found this post about clothing sizes rather fascinating.


• Steve Wozniak's frustrations with iPhone, Apple TV and MacBook Air | APC Magazine - "The AppleTV has problems... the 24 hour limit once I start watching, I have to finish in 24 hours. My life is way too mobile and unpredictable for that." This is a developing quasi-"standard" that needs nipping in the bud.


• InFlightHQ » Rent someone else’s parking spot using ParkingHunter - Interesting idea although the listings look pretty skimpy for Boston at any rate.


• James Duncan Davidson > Free is not a Constant State - " Free in one market doesn’t mean free in all markets. And, by definition, if some uses shouldn’t be free, then you’ve just found some markets you can sell into even if you give your photographs away for free in others."


• Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia | The Register - Sorry, but we all need our own brand of gossip stories now and then.


• tecosystems » Utter Crap?: Matt Asay and The Linux Desktop Q&A (and Video) - Agree with many points, mildly disagree with others. That said, I have trouble believing that Linux will ever become a widely-used fat client OS in the Windows/OS X mold.


• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: New York Times Movies Graphic - Good visualization of film box office receipts over time. Click through to the NYT to scroll back through time.


• Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong? « HighContrast - Intersting in a mostly academic kind of way. Maybe we simply shouldn't refer to more generic "network effects" as Metcalfe's Law.


• Photo industry braces for another revolution | Underexposed - CNET News.com - Good overview of digital photography trends (3D photographs, depth of field control in software, etc.)

Links fro 03-03-2008

• What's in a Font? - Virginia Postrel interviews the director of Helvetica. (Watch it BYW even if you're not a type geek. If you get Netflix, it's on Watch Instantly.


• http://www.daheshmuseum.org/ - The museum in the IBM building in NY has closed but their collection is still online. Some nice 18th and 19th century European realist art.


• Lofty Ambitions - "Today’s lofts are mere reproductions of the originals—and nothing offends architecture critics more than inauthenticity."


• The Next Slum? - Interesting article although I think its conclusions are overbroad in both intensity and geographic location.


• NYTE - I ran across this at MoMA earlier in the week. Some very cool visualizations.

Links for 02-28-2008

• Dartlog: Jeffrey Hart on the First Time he Saw Buckley


• PlagiarismToday - » 10 Basics About Copyright Everyone Needs to Know - Good, concise rundown on some copyright basics.


• The Semantic Web’s biggest problem - - mathewingram.com/work - Also, at least some talk about the Semantic Web posits lots of labor intensive metadata creation up-front for (hopeful) value down the road. That's not how the Web has evolved to date.

Links for 02-27-2008

• An Online Collection of Visualized Networks - ReadWriteWeb - I'm seeing a lot of interest in visualization these days. There's a lot of complex data to process.


• Amazon Web Services Blog: Orglex: Using AWS to Build Semantic Web Ontologies - These "ontologies" (essentially mapping relationships) are focused on several specific professional domains (which is where this sort of formal mechanism makes most sense).


• The Despair Inc. Blog » Your Own Printed DIY Demotivator Posters - Print your own demotivators!


• Beware of Freeconomics - ReadWriteWeb - A counterpoint worth reading. A related thought is that various cross-subsidies work far less well in a world where more and more things are "unbundled" (to use Nick Carr's term).


• Technology Review: Between Friends - Some social graphs visualization from Tech Review.


• China Eats Crow Over Faked Photo Of Rare Antelope - WSJ.com - Widely reprinted photo was a fake.


• Shark tour leader was warned of danger, diver says - CNN.com - You don't say: "The leader of a shark tour whose customer was mauled to death Saturday was warned that his practice of allowing people to swim close to hungry sharks could lead to tragedy, a colleague said."


• Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online : Apple: More On New Macs, Higher Margins, Weak iPods and iPhones; Where Has Steve Jobs Been Flying? - That's some air travel bill: "The company spent $550,000 on Steve’s airplane expenses in the quarter, which she says is 3x the average over the prior six quarters."


• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - On the other hand, some things that people find useful but aren't willing to pay for may just go away.

Links for 02-23-2008

• Microsoft runs its datacenters on ‘Autopilot’ | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com - A look at the technologies used by Microsoft for Live. It is an interesting question what Microsoft does if they acquire Yahoo in this area.


• Barney Alliances and the Downfall of HD DVD | Epicenter from Wired.com - I'm not especially convinced it was a factor here (MSFT did have an HD-DVD drive for the Xbox)), but the point that "partnerships" and endorsements consisting solely of press release-ware aren't worth much is worth noting.


• To DNG, or not to DNG ... - Inside Lightroom - I've switched to using DNG myself in Lightroom; I like keeping all the metadata together in one file rather than using XMP sidecards. Just less potential for separation down the road--although, yes, replicating global metadata changes get more painful.


• Mpix.com Online Digital Imaging Service - Order digital photo prints online from professional imaging lab - Matt at Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips (and a number of commenters) recommend these guys. Prices have really come down for ordering larger prints.


• SF Signal: FINALISTS: 2007 Nebula Awards - Many of the shorter pieces are available online.

Links for 02-22-2008

• tecosystems » Linux vs OpenSolaris…Again: The Q&A - I pretty much concur with all of Stephen's points.


• Schneier on Security: Cold Boot Attacks Against Disk Encryption - " it is very difficult to secure data when the attacker has physical control of the machine the data is stored on."


• Will Social Bookmarking Pay Dividends with Search Result Augmentation? - ReadWriteWeb - "the researchers at Stanford outlined a number of ways in which social bookmarking sites could be used to theoretically improve search engines, if not yet on a grand scale."


• Multitouch and Minority Report - O'Reilly Radar - We've been in an input device rut for a while now. Multitouch would seem to be at least one path forward.


• Hacking NetFlix : Do You Suffer From Netflix Burnout? - Interesting (true) comment: "I think Netflix puts pressure on some personality types (or people who are cheap like me) to feel like they are getting the most value out of the service. When I go through a lull watching movies, I cancel my account."


• Poll: Which is better, Aperture or Lightroom? | Underexposed - CNET News.com - "I don't like switching back and forth between editing and tagging." I agree. This is a similar issue to what I have with Office 2007. Let me customize and I could stay with a single set of controls 95% of the time.


• Ink: Tesla Slept Here: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker - "“Everything that can be invented has been invented”—an 1899 statement attributed to a U.S. patent commissioner (which, if not apocryphal, might rival “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended” as the Least Accurate Remark Ever Uttered by a Senior Government Official."


• Sorry Mike, Digg is NOT a User-Generated Content Site | CenterNetworks - Old I know :-) FWIW, I look at digg and its ilk as recommenders/filters. Or, to be more precise, as a crowd-based version of same. Comments on digg are the lowest level of blather. It makes slashdot look erudite.


• Linkin Park To Participate In Upcoming New York Apple Event - Mac Forums - Off-topic/Love comment "I'm so avant garde I hate every band ever. I only listen to acts that play in their own garages. As soon as they get a pub gig I reject them as lyrical sell-outs and move on. I also post about it on the internet."


• Nature revealed at World Photographic Awards - Telegraph - Some great shots here.


• Kleptography - Don Ellis - Richard Franiec's Components - More Canon G9 accessories.


• Lensmateonline - Canon PowerShot G9/G7 - Various accessories.


• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Andrea Jung is making my life a living hell - A particularly good one.


• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Crowd control at eBay - Great post looking at the breakdown of bottoms-up regulation system over time.


• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Sun's new focus? Storage. No, Java. No, MySQL. No, Linux. No, supercomputers. - Funny. Mean. But funny.

Links for 02-13-2008

• How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook -- Facebook -- InformationWeek - This isn't particularly new but it's very perceptive.


• apophenia: just because we can, doesn't mean we should - "Being socially exposed is AOK when you hold a lot of privilege, when people cannot hold meaningful power over you, or when you can route around such efforts. Such is the life of most of the tech geeks living in Silicon Valley."


• (Really) Stunning Desktop Wallpapers | Graphics | Smashing Magazine - "desktop wallpapers related to typography, art, technology, photography and abstract themes."


• PlagiarismToday - » My Disappointment With Creative Commons - This mirrors a lot of my own thinking on the topic.


• Study: 6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks - ReadWriteWeb - "Heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000,"


• Writers Strike Over and Still No Web Profits in Sight! | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD - "That there is precious little money being made online by anyone does not seem to have mattered, as the struggle metastasized into a symbolic battle over all the wrenching changes that digital technologies have made on the industry..."


• PicLens Brings Cover Flow-style Photo Viewing to the Web - ReadWriteWeb - Looks interesting.


• Presentation Zen: Deep or wide? You decide. - I've been listening to some MIT Open Course Ware lectures recently. The professor's approach there seems to be to deep dive into a few topics in lecture and leave the rest for independent reading or "recitation" sections with TAs.


• Wi-Fi Networking News: Starbucks Switches to AT&T, the Next Day - A lot more detail and background about the AT&T-Starbucks deal. I see this coming in very handy when I'm traveling.


• Digital Camera Batteries Chargers Memory Cards Readers - I need some new/extra Lithium-ion camera batteries. This outfit seems to be highly recommended on photo.net. (My impression of Canon brand is they're about 4x price and nothing great.)


• Exclusive Lifehacker Download: DVD Rip Automates One-Click DVD Ripping - The comments collectively give a pretty good overview of what's available for ripping DVDs these days.


• VirtualBox_architecture - VirtualBox - A good detailed overview of the VirtualBox architecture.

Links for 02-11-2008

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Does Microsoft need consumers? Yes. - As he often is, Nick is spot on: "But the importance of the consumer market to Microsoft goes well beyond money. There is no bright line between the use of Office in businesses and the use of Office in homes and schools. "


• Cool Tool: Big Green Egg - Looks like an awesome smoker.


• Complex Diagrams » Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti - Always interested in new ways of presenting complex data. I haven't checked this out yet.


• Microsoft will pay high price for failing to learn history lessons | Media | The Observer - via Matt Asay. Check out the second paragraph--it's too good to quote only partially here.


• Starbucks ditches T-Mobile for AT&T | The Social - CNET News.com - This is welcome and exciting news.


• James Governor’s Monkchips » Note To Furl: should you be more del.ici.ous? - It's striking how little has changed. This post was written 4!! years ago.


• Subtraction: Charityware - The problem is that OLPC was never setup for end user sales. So the consequences of being pressured into it (for both financial and community pressure reasons) aren't especially surprising.


• Tiinker is the Anti-Digg - ReadWriteWeb - Something else to check out.


• Web 3.0: Is It About Personalization? - ReadWriteWeb - I'm starting to spend some time getting my arms around where the web is evolving to.


• apophenia: a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared - I've read similar stories with respect to Flickr. This is another face of the data transportability issue in addition to the security one.


• Printing photos onto canvas- Photo on canvas poster printing equipment: Photogonia.com - I've seen some photos output like this. Quite impressive. Don't know about this specific vendor.


• The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives | WHDb - Not all the alternatives are that comparable to the proprietary packages but this list offers up a lot of things to check out--especially if you just need something lightweight.


• The Economics of Online Backup - Inside Lightroom - A good look at the costs of backing up online in the context of photos. Bottom line: it's not especially cheap. I've tried it but for the ~200GB I'd need, the extra security isn't worth it.


• PhotoKeywords | Microstock Diaries - I'm very bad about metadata. Wonder if this would help?


• Wired News from the Past - The history of the AP.


• Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future - Definitions remain fuzzy here but some interesting trends popping up above the noise.


• tecosystems » Where’s the Network? - SOG's views on this largely mirror mine. If you believe we'll have five "computers" (rather than 100s or 1000s), I'm not sure premium "arms merchant" is where you want to be.


• YouTube - Pachelbel Rant - Very funny. A friend sent this to me after I mentioned I sometimes use a "mix tape" of Canon in D variants as background for writing.

Links for 02-07-2008

• YouTube - You Suck at Photoshop #1 - This series is pretty funny and even instructive.


• Linux.com :: A GPL requirement could have a chilling effect on derivative distros - Downstream distros apparently need to make all source available--not just for changed packages. As I noted previously, such a requirement could raise issues for anyone providing access to GPLd binaries.


• Linux.com :: The Free Software hardliner, the corporation, and the shotgun wedding - I don't agree with everything here but there are a lot of good points--for example, with respect to plug-in architectures.


• Marginal Revolution: Is Grand Central Station still a focal point? - For some reason, I find this fascinating. Time of day aside, for Cambridge MA there's also an obvious focal point (leaving aside MIT bias--in which case it would be the 77 Mass Ave steps)--the front of the Harvard Coop or Out of Town News across the street.

Links for 01-31-2008

• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Looking at a see-through world - "transparency is erasing the advantages that once went to the intrepid, the dogged, and the resourceful." and other unintended consequences.


• Music Research Blogs - Duke Listens! - A window into what's going on in the world of music recommendations and other such things.


• Cranky Geeks - I've been watching some of these on TiVo. Dvorak can be a parody of himself sometimes but some of these shows are very good. e.g. check out Episode 97 with John Markoff and Gregg Zachary of the NYT.


• AppleInsider | Apple seen introducing cheaper, more innovative Wi-Fi iPods - This is another interesting thread in the mobile convergence thread that's deparate from the cell phone.

Links for 01-30-2008

• Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: Pulling the Flickr sword out of the Yahoo stone - An interesting discussion of what Yahoo's troubles could imply for Flickr (which I'm guessing most people don't even know is owned by Flickr).


• Edward Tufte on the iPhone - Looks worth checking out.


• HipMojo.com » How Yahoo! Stacks Up in Key Verticals - This post focuses on Yahoo but it's also a good overview of Web advertising by vertical.


• :CueCat is back! - Joel on Software - "... sometimes the elders are right, and the youngsters really are too young to know the history of the idea they think that they've just invented."


• eBay Forums: Ebay changes feedback policy ... - Upcoming feedback system changes have a lot of sellers up in arms.

Links for 01-29-2008

• Please pirate my Sundance film. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine - "The pattern I've described puts the lie to several pet theories. One is that piracy brings undiscovered or obscure films to arty audiences that are otherwise suppressed."


• VMware Revenue Falls Short, Shares Plummet - Still nice growth numbers but it's hard to maintain a torrid pace as you grow--and there are a lot of pricing/competitive pressures on the company.


• FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 Apple’s $300 million gray market dilemma « - I (again) find the comments so funny. There's a very radical Open Source community dynamic--question the great god Steve and you clearly have an ulterior financial motive.


• TG Daily - HD DVD buys Super Bowl ad - I believe the words of Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler" are apropos.


• Miscjunk - Looks like some useful info and resources for Garmin GPS maps.

Links for 01-28-2008

• The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You
  &quot;what happens to a blog post once you hit the 'publish' button.&quot;
  [tags: blogging,publishing,visualization]
• How to Change the World: Forget the A-List After All
  &quot;In contrast to influential marketing, Watt’s believes the key factor is the readiness of the market: “If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can.”&quot;
  [tags: business]
• Monday Inspiration: Graphics In Motion | Graphics, Monday Inspiration | Smashing Magazine
  Some very cool videos.
  [tags: video]
• Why ETech is O'Reilly's Most Important Conference
  &quot;Part of breaking the PC paradigm will be a whole new generation of user interfaces.&quot; The Wii may be playing a role in getting people thinking about alternatives.
  [tags: input]
• John Naughton: Thanks, Gutenberg - but we're too pressed for time to read | Media | The Observer
  &quot;The First Law of Technology says we invariably overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies while underestimating their longer-term effects.&quot;
  [tags: books,tech,history]
• Neatorama » Blog Archive » The Wonderful World of Early Computing
  Nice pictoral tour through the history of computing.
  [tags: computerhistory,computers]
• OLPC angering donors: &quot;Give 1 Get 1... some day... probably&quot;
  One of the problems here is that OLPC was never setup to sell (and service) computers retail. This is just the tip of the iceberg once people do receive machines and they don't work.
  [tags: olpc]
• FORTUNE: Apple 2.0 The case of the 1.4 million missing iPhones «
  I love the comments. How dare someone even question Apple?!? Never mind that they haven't been exactly forthcoming with detail behind their shipment numbers.
  [tags: apple]
• TasteBook.com: Create cookbooks, search recipes, share recipes
  Create a custom cookbook.
  [tags: cooking,publishing]
• Chris Kelly: Wicked and Artful Men - Politics on The Huffington Post
  &quot;Everything is a crisis in Boston. Quick: How many people died in the Boston &quot;Massacre&quot;? Five. As crowd control goes, that would be a pretty quiet twenty-minutes in Iraq.&quot;
  [tags: boston]
• Music: 22,000 Songs and Nothing to Listen To (Seattle Weekly)
  Continuing the Death of the Album thought--with so many choices, for better or worse, we're far less inclined to listen to what we perceive is second tier just because it's from a given artist. [via Paul Lamere]
  [tags: music]
• The obscure game-theory problem that explains why rich countries are rich. - By Tim Harford - Slate Magazine
  The stag hunt game theory model that's applicable to many situations where cooperation is needed.
  [tags: games]
• Jive Talks: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services
  Some interesting discussion about XMPP and cloud computing protocols.
  [tags: saas,cloud,webservices]
• Scrabulous and the New Social Operating System: How Facebook Gave Birth to an Industry - Knowledge@Wharton
  This article is focused on Facebook but calling it an &quot;operating system&quot; implicitly raises some interesting points. Is the application contract that matters changing?
  [tags: web2.0]

Links for 01-25-2008

• Usability and Interface Design Books | Know-How | Smashing Magazine - Looks like a good collection of books and usability and (especially Web) design.


• Booksthatmakeyoudumb - This is really quite good. A mashup of Facebook's most popular books at colleges with the average SAT scores at the same schools.


• GMAN: FlickrDown - Program for mass download of flickr photos. Looks handy although I can this being used to massively suck down photos for unlicensed uses too.


• Local News - Disgruntled Worker Accused of Deleting $2.5 Million of Files - ""The lesson to be learned here is that you can't depend on having just one set of records or files and having your employees have access to them. You've got to have some kind of backup," Jefferson said." You don't say.


• fd's Flickr Toys: Do fun stuff with your photos


• Harnessing the power of P2P | CNET News.com - "This distributed model is a much more efficient and cost effective way for distributing large files than the traditional client-server model..." Actually no--except from the POV of the person distributing the content.


• DRM-Free Music Spells Trouble - Columns by PC Magazine - I don't agree with at least half of this--e.g., I think subscription services have their place alongside other models--but I do think he's right that eliminating DRM, while a good step, isn't a panacea.


• Writing a Book in Google Docs - It's an interesting (and mostly true) point that it's often quite difficult to write when you're not hooked up to the Internet anyway. I know I often find that to be the case.

Links for 01-23-2008

• Super Bowl for a Crowd : Tex-Mex-style game-day grub - CHOW - Go Patriots!


• Techdirt: Did Slate Violate Copyright Law? - This is basically the Richter Scales redux. That parody is involved doesn't create a 'get out of jail free' copyright exemption. But yet another illustration of the unresolved issues with reuse in a digital age.


• The Album is Dead... | Mark Cuban's blog - CNET Blogs - The album apologists seem to be idealizing an approach that's more about technology and business approaches than artistic vision.


• Audiophoolery - A somewhat oldie, but a goodie.


• The video revolution will NOT be televised, because it’s boring. « Joe Duck - Video (like podcasts/audio) can't be quickly scanned like text can.


• OnOne acquires novel image-resizing software | Underexposed - CNET News.com - Looks potentially useful -- probably more so in print than online.

Links for 01-18-2008

• Don't miss lessons Radiohead, Reznor offer | Tech news blog - CNET News.com - "If we end up ridding the world of labels, we'll only have to re-create them--in some other, probably more nimble form."


• Comments on ‘Mandriva and TurboLinux unveil 10-person strong Manbo’ | The Register - I love this comment: "There are far too many over inflated egos in FOSS world for that [one Linux] to ever happen. These people still regard which text editor they use as a fundamental tenet of their belief system"


• ZIPskinny - Get the Skinny on that ZIP (demographics by ZIP Code) - I can see this being a timewasting application.

Links for 01-17-2008

• ITunes Movie Rentals and Netflix Online: Different Markets - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog - Good analysis of why these serve different needs.


• Joyent Outage Tied to Software Updates - Data Center Knowledge - One of the problems with being on the bleeding edge.


• Maison Fleury: SUN acquires MySQL for $1Gazillion - "There will not be an open source company that goes public for the foreseeable future. Liquidity is too good and too hard to pass up. The players are too big with too much at stake. That's a shame... I wanted to see an ecosystem of independent companies."


• Dynamist Blog: Phishing at Flickr - Flickr apparently claims to be unable to restore a maiciously-deleted account.


• Greg Matter : Weblog - "A decade later, databases matter even more. They are to storage what application containers are to computing. "


• tecosystems » Give Me a M: The MySQL/Sun Q&A - " if Red Hat is seeking an open source database alternative to complete its stack and compete with the larger entities, they’re [EnterpriseDB] probably the best remaining candidate."


• Old School BBS: The Chinese Social Networking Phenomenon - ReadWriteWeb - As a one-time active BBS user, I found this interesting.


• BurtonGroupResponseFinal.pdf (application/pdf Object) - ODF response to Burton Group report.


• Why I'm disappointed in Apple's ultraslim new laptop. - By Paul Boutin - Slate Magazine - This Slate article echoes some of my thoughts from yesterday. My biggest issue with the Air isn't a missing optical drive or something silly like that; it's the kluginess of connecting to anything but WiFi.


• Mandriva, Turbolinux enter Linux alliance | Underexposed - CNET News.com - "Forgive me if I sound skeptical, but during the nine years I've covered Linux, not once have I seen a favorable outcome to the partnership of the type Mandriva and Turbolinux announced Wednesday.


• Library of Congress Blog » My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven (Library of Congress) - A very interesting development; the LOC is starting to make photos from its collections available on flickr.

Links for 01-16-2008

• The Celestial Jukebox is here - Duke Listens! - "We are now starting to see the next generation of music apps hit the web that no longer are beholden to the rules of Internet radio."


• The Danger of Free - ReadWriteWeb - I've written about parts of this theme recently. I recommend checking this piece out.


• 10 Things You Need to Know About the Future of Broadband - GigaOM - Some good insights.


• Apple unveils the Apple TV, take 2 - Engadget - I still don't like being locked into the Apple ecosystem. Also I hate how this "must watch within 24 hours after starting" is becoming an industry standard. I often start something and get interrupted.


• Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey - William Patry: " Among those commenting on the exhibit was Mark Vallen, who ... published online a lengthy, fairly savage attack on Fairey's unattributed appropriation from a vast number of sources."


• PlagiarismToday » Articles DMCA Legal Issues News Prevention » Artists Express Concern Over PhotoBucket - " Nowhere on the front page of the site or the registration page does PhotoBucket mention that, by default, prints of your work will be available to anyone finds your account."

Links for 01-15-2008

• Games Without Frontiers: Explosion of Indie Games Kills 'Best of' Column - Indie games to check out.


• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Wikipedia Turns Seven, Lessons for MSFT and Zagat? - "Connecting the dots (humor me), I see Zagat a bit like The Britannica: a wonderful brand that previous generations love and respect, but desperately searching for an identity in the 21st century. "


• Apple doesn't care about music. - Duke Listens! - "Apple is still foregoing incredible opportunities."


• How to Brew - By John Palmer - Contents - I don't bew as frequently as I did at one point, but I'll take a look at this.


• Ford: Car owners are pirates if they distribute pictures of their own cars - Boing Boing - The headline is predictably overblown. This is actually a trademark issue about reproduction for products being sold. See this comment: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/13/ford-car-owners-are.html#comment-104978 (But still seems excessive.)


• Black Star Rising - Why Photographers Hate Creative Commons - More Creative Commons discussion.


• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Dear Gizmodo: Don't even think about fucking with the screens at our show - This is good.


• Why people believe weird things about money - Los Angeles Times - I took a course in school called Behavioral Decision Theory that went into a lot of these non-rational economic behaviors. They have a lot of implications for marketing, advertising, etc.


• Photographer Taryn Simon Shoots America's Best-Kept Secrets - I saw an exhibit of her photos at the Whitney in NY relatively recently. Good stuff. (The photos at the exhibit were quite large so some of the effect is lost here unfortunately.)


• Serious Eats: Zagat Survey Up for Sale - I like Zagat's but the $24.95 annually for online always seemed just a bit steep. I agree with the general point of this post that they may not have done as much with online as they could.


• The Old New Thing : No matter where you put an advanced setting, somebody will tell you that you are an idiot - So very true.


• Maison Fleury: Ruby company raises $3.5 from Benchmark - "It is embarrassing for the zealots that in this day and age one of the most successful companies is a proprietary software model. What? my ideology is not perfect?"


• 3 Hidden Trends in 2008 - eMarketer - "advertisers and their agencies who want to engage with today’s consumers will have to start turning their ads into content. "


• HD DVD fires back, slashes hardware & software prices - Engadget - In other news, there are a lot of great bargains on Betamax recorders out there.


• ‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’ almost enough to make us forgive Fox for canning ‘Firefly’ « Quaedam - I like good science fiction, of which there's very little on TV--even less than fanboys would have you think. This pilot wasn't bad at all.

Links for 01-14-2008

• That little Misunderstood PowerShot G9 « Musings on Photography - The G9 isn't quite the ideal smaller camera but it's probably as close as I'm going to get at the moment.


• Dan Heller's Photography Business Blog: A Proposal for the Creative Commons - This seems rather over-engineered. In my view, a bigger issue with CC today is complexity.


• List Of The Day: Great Olan Mills photos - Thanks Stephen for pointing me to this. Very funny.


• Photophlow puts a fresh face on Flickr | Underexposed - CNET News.com - Even if you take the social angle out of it, the interactivity of the interface is also very nice.


• PlagiarismToday » Articles Punditry » Why Your Copyright Protection is Second Rate - I've seen related discussions in a couple of places. Basically, most individuals don't register copyrights which limits damages they can collect even if a corporation infringes.


• ASCII by Jason Scott: My Delicious Slaves - As I've said before, I'm not sure why the tagging/bookmarking sites have remained squarely in the second tier of Web 2.0.


• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Plenty of Fish: Disrupting the Disrupted - "I think as the article suggests, because the site is free, people put up with a lot more… maybe this is just one more nail in the coffin for anything paid."


• Data Mining: Mapping The Blogosphere - Interesting blogosphere link maps via Smashing.


• Flickr Photo Download: Flickr User Model, v0.3 - Flickr user model


• A VC: The Long Tail Of Business Models - A list of Web media business models.

Links for 01-11-2008

• CrunchGear » Archive » On Gizmodo’s douchery and blogging - Probably the best, semi-inside take on the whole CES/Gizmodo thing that I've read.


• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of | Tutorials | Smashing Magazine - A cornucopia of Photoshop tutorials.

Links for 01-10-2008

• » Is Blu-ray any less dead than HD DVD? | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com - A lot of this meme going around. I'm unconvinced downloadable movies play a big role in the near-term but I'm not sure most people care enough about picture quality to both upgrading from regular DVD (at least until it's a no-brainer).


• Semantic Web: What Is The Killer App? - ReadWriteWeb - "There is a misunderstanding about the Semantic Web which is floating around, which equates the Semantic Web with ability to solve really hard problems. It is simply not true." IOW, it's only incremental.


• What's the best Web site for geotagged photos? | Underexposed - CNET News.com - Good overview of how various photo sites handle location-tagged photographs.


• 10 Creepiest Old Ads - Some (most) of these: OMG.


• Baby Dies in Fire, Iomega Says "Burn, Baby, Burn!" » Adrants - The sometimes problems of contextual advertising. This is apparently old but real AFAIK.


• Ten Reasons We're Doomed: CES Edition - This is actually pretty good. One item (I kid you not): "Designer Tasers"


• PlagiarismToday » The Public Domain Trend - "readers are not served by authors permitting plagiarism. Doing so allows the public to be duped by liars who artificially inflate their reputation, to receive outdated information that is often outright incorrect, to be buried by spam (spammers can now t


• HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » Guaranteed Path to Deadpool: Bad Advisers - "Yes, it’s good to see the forest through the trees… but you also don’t want to spend too much time thinking big when you have tactical, micro-level operational issues to tend to."


• People Over Process » IT Management for The Big Switch - Mid-afternoon Speculation and Blue-skying - "Part of the down in the much issue rests on the question of how much the cloud idea is about hardware running in the cloud vs. software running in the cloud."


• Digital photo frames have arrived | (parent . thesis) - Parenting and technology with Amy and Michael Tiemann - CNET Blogs - I've thought about getting one for my dad but the good ones are still pretty pricey.

Links for 01-09-2008

• » Response to InfoWorld’s Choices on 2007’s Top Technology | Virtually Speaking | ZDNet.com - Some other lesser-known technologies that are part of the overall virtualization landscape.


• Official Google Maps API Blog: 2007 Wrap Up: A Map-tastic Year! - A good overview of what was new with Google Maps in 2007. I have a small application that I'll have to get finished one of these days.


• Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog » Blog Archive » How to Install a Lightroom Export Plugin - Handy plugin for Adobe Lightroom and flickr.


• Hacking NetFlix : Paramount To Ditch HD DVD, Too? - "I was joking about selling my HD DVD player, but I'm not buying any more HD DVD discs." I'm in the same boat. I just have a few, so no big deal. The question now seems when not if. There's too much momentum in one direction to stop.


• ASCII by Jason Scott: The Long Hosting Goodbye - Moving things offsite on a small scale. "Letting go is hard, but after a while you realize you're not keeping up patching, you're not using your bandwidth properly, and you're spending hours doing things that others are paid to do all day and do it better


• Virtualization in the Enterprise Survey: Your Virtualized State in 2008 - Some interesting survey numbers about virtualization.


• Deconstructing Real Google Searches: Why Powerset Matters - ReadWriteWeb - All good points (intel--as in intelligence) and Intel is one that I run into). To some degree, however, as commenters note you may just need to learn a very few basics about more advanced search techniques.


• Linux and GPLv3 - "In the end, what we have is a stable system by reason of inertia. It may eventually shift, but not anytime soon."


• Dynamist Blog: Who Needs 1,000 Typefaces? - "'Having an idea for a typeface used to be like having an idea for a new-model car,' says Bierut. Now the distance between idea and execution, designer and user, has contracted." Unfortunately the full article is behind a firewall.


• PC World - Microsoft: No HD DVD Xbox - Unsurprisingly, it looks like Microsoft is also tiptoeing away from the HD DVD camp.


• Comcast introduces open-cable platform | CNET News.com - Is Comcast actually opening up their platform a bit without being dragged totally kicking and screaming?