Yay! Back in May, I suggested to Joi Ito that he organize a blogger party around the Supernova Conference here in Washington.
Looks like he thought it was a good idea: Blogger Party in DC!!
Via Boing Boing, I discovered NewsMonster this morning.
NewsMonster is an RSS aggregator that is integrated into Mozilla. If you’re not using Mozilla . . . well, you should be. It’s way better than IE. (I’ve had to use IE this week for some browser-specific testing. First time I’ve touched it in months, and, man, I could just never go back to non-tabbed browsing again.)
Anyway, if, for some silly reason, you’re not using Mozilla, NewsMonster won’t be of any use to you.
NewsMonster is closer to the news aggregator of my dreams. Like SharpReader it allows me to group my feeds into folders . . . although, unlike SharpReader, it won’t provide an aggregated folder view :-( NewsMonster imports OPML, so I could just pull in my SharpReader subscriptions though importing apparently doesn’t automatically create the folder structure which sorta makes you wonder if they missed the point of OPML. This led me to discover NewsMonster’s managing of folders is much more cumbersome than SharpReader, e.g. no drag and drop, but that’s the price you pay for staying away from .NET. I’m willing to pay.
However, the integration with Mozilla rocks. And NewsMonster does a Blogdex-like analysis of my subscribed feeds to show me the most popular links among my subscriptions, which is immediately useful.
The killer feature, though, is only available in the NewsMonster Pro version ($29.95): an online profile manager that allows you to store your subscription feeds online and synchronize them among multiple installations.
Since I’m a multi-computer guy who works from two to three different boxes that live in different locations, this is key to the news aggregator of my dreams.
I’ll play with NewsMonster for a while, and if I like it as an aggregator, I think the online profile feature will be worth $30 bucks to me. Much more valuable than, for example, paying $40 for Radio Userland’s crappy aggregation and mediocre weblogging tools. Ugh.
Now if I could only get Mozblog to work. And has anybody made an MT plug-in to integrate the Mozilla WYSIWYG HTML editing widget in Movable Type?
Remember when you were a kid and you could say things like, “I call first turn on the Atari when we get back home from Putt-putt!” And the rest of your nine-year old crew would respond, “Awww, man! But I guess we gotta give it to him. I mean, he called it first.”
Apparently patent law has devolved nearly to the point of “calling” things, as evidenced by the that Netflix now has a patent on subscription-based DVD rental, as opposed to per-unit DVD rental. [link via Slashdot]
Sheesh. Somebody needs to take James Rogan out back and whup his ass.
I call the patent on ass-whuppin’!!!
Long ago (like 1996ish) I had a series of arguments on the Future Culture mailing list about why Linux was unusable to the masses. My litmus test: could you put someone’s grandmother in front of a Linux box and have her write and print a letter to her grandchild without help or nervous breakdown.
While apparently an actual grandmother wasn’t used, current Linux usability testing seems to be
moving in the right direction. [link via Slashdot]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has released a report on Internet Blocking in Public Schools. [link via Boing Boing]
I haven’t read the whole report, but the abstract tells me enough:
- The use of Internet blocking software in schools cannot help schools comply with the law because schools do not and cannot set the software to block only the categories required by the law, and because the software is incapable of blocking only the visual depictions required by CIPA. Blocking software overblocks and underblocks, that is, the software blocks access to many web pages protected by the First Amendment and does not block many of the web pages that CIPA would likely prohibit.
- Blocking software does not protect children from exposure to a large volume of material that is harmful to minors within the legal definitions. Blocking software cannot adapt adequately to local community standards. Most schools already have in place alternatives to Internet blocking software, such as adoption and enforcement of Internet use policies, media literacy education, directed use, and supervised use.
- Blocking software in schools damages educational opportunities for students, both by blocking access to web pages that are directly related to state-mandated curriculums and by restricting broader inquiries of both students and teachers. Teachers and students 17 years or older (most high school juniors and seniors) should be exempt, yet suffer the consequences of CIPA implementation.
Beck has a weblog [link via Anil's sidebar].
It’s full of incomprehensible but beautiful statements like this one about their show at Wolftrap, right outside DC:
“the show was our best so far. the audience was throwing down, much more raucous than the tour with the lips. we even had people throwing up their hands and representing acid wash daisy dukes. tomorrow I plan to see who will represent some lavender cucumber exfoliating scrub. shizz…if we come any harder somebody might have to bust some apricot hazelnut foot gel.” []
Apparently in Beck’s world “young grungites” are frequently “throwing down” or are “on the punkmetal tip” and “representing” various objects. Lingo that my thirtysomething ass don’t understand aside, there are, as you might expect, some beautiful lyrical gems in his writing, especially when he talks (all to infrequently, though) about songs, songwriting, and performing.
P.S. If you want to get all tricked out with the lingo, try Snoop Dog’s Shizzolator
It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Dave Winer, but I do agree that Verizon sucks.
I recently signed up for Verizon DSL and haven’t been very happy with it.
I’m not as suprised as Winer that it filled in the Outlook Express email settings and re-branded Internet Explorer. Lots of non-tech folk probably appreciate that (the settings moreso than the re-branding). Doesn’t matter a lot to me since I use Mozilla for browsing and email.
I am annoyed immensely by their support . . . or, rather, lack thereof:
(1) Everytime I send an email from Mozilla email, I get an auto-response from Verizon with the title “URGENT: Updated your E-Mail Settings.” Of course, my email settings are configured precisely according to their instructions. Note that there’s no problem sending email . . . though Verizon seems to think there is. Trying to figure this out started the whole saga with their crappy support processes.
The email contains a link to the support page which contains a link to a form for email support. . . which leads to a dead page. See http://www2.verizon.net/contact/techsup_form.asp for the dead form. It’s been dead for two weeks.
(2) Apparently there is no way to get support by email which just dumbfounds me. The only options are by phone (and I’ve always hung up after being on hold for five minutes) or by the lame-ass “Verizon Online Support Center” which is a Flash-interfaced support app. I don’t have time to waste on hold waiting to ask a question about a a non-critical support issues. Why can’t they let me submit a real ticket via email?
(3) The Verizon Online Support Center installs some stuff that is arguably spyware (Motive SmartBridge and Visual IP Insight) that I’m not exactly clear of the functionality for. Uninstalled Visual IP Insight, but haven’t been able to figure out how to get rid of Motive.
(4) The auto-diagnosis crap built into fails miserably, again telling me that my email configuration is wrong (but not telling me why). It auto-submits a ticket, but I have no way of creating, modiftyin, or viewing what information is contained in the ticket. How friggin’ ridiculous is that?!? It’s my ticket!
(5) The Verizon Online Support Center doesn’t allow you to send email either. It only allows you to initiatie a chat session, but I’ve never been able to get a support rep on the chat. Leaving “messages” there gets no response. No surprise.
(6) Trying to just send an email to “” or “” returns a pop-up alert that those addresses are not valid. It appears that the smtp.verizon.net (or something) is blocking those messages before they’re even set. That’s simply infuriating.
I’m about at my wit’s end. I expect so much more from an ISP support team. I will probably wind up cancelling Verizon DSL because of this.
Of course I’ll have to wait on hold for 20 minutes just for the privilege of cancelling my service. Fuckers.
From the technical side, the DSL has been wonderful, it works brilliantly, the bandwidth is great, etc. It’s a shame that enjoyment of fine technology is runied by crappy attempts at automated support.
Advice or other experiences with Verizon welcome.
[Update 6:15am 7/19/2003: Comments are closed because this entry is getting lots of traffic (apparently through Google searches for "Verizon sucks") and the lunatics are starting to come out of the woodwork. However, I'm really not interested in having a googlelock on "Verizon Sucks," so we'll let this post age gracefully.]
Speaking of copyright, here’s a disturbing graph that indicates the number of creative works that have been prevented from entering the public domain by changes in copryight law over the last 30 years. [link via Lessig's Blog]
In 1992 Congress retroactively applied the copright extension to works back to 1923. What had been a 28 year term became the life of the author plus 70 years (or 95 years for work owned by a corporation).
By extending the copryight term, Congress has robbed the public of over more than half the works that would have entered the public domain in our lifetime.
Simply put, that ended growth of the public domain.
Don’t kid yourself that all of that stuff not in the public domain is “promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (the Constitutional mandate for copyright). Only 2% of that work lost to the public domain has any continuing commercial value. The other 98% of those creative works are out-of-print or out-of-publication material that is locked away behind copyright, languishing, never to see the light of day again in all likelihood. That lost 98% provides no revenue for the copyright holder and is prevented from providing any value to the public.
The online version of PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer published a Q&A on copyright with Stanford law prof and copyright activist, Lawrence Lessig, and Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America.
Definitely well worth a read. I know I’m biased toward Lessig’s position, but even trying to take that bias into account, it seemed to me that Lessig’s responses were so much more carefully thought out and specific, while Oppenheim’s seemed to simplistic and repetitive.
The Daring Fireball weblog complains about TrackBack:
“[T]here are ways to track links that are much simpler than TrackBack. Referrers, for one. When you follow a link from one web page to another, your browser includes referrer information in the HTTP headers of the request. The referrer should be the URL of the page from which you came; if you click on any of the links in this article, for example, the web site you�re heading to will get a referrer from this page at daringfireball.net. ” [link via Scripting News]
TrackBack of course, is the notification technology created by Six Apart. Daring Fireball has created his own referrers script that list referring websites. In doing so he illustrates the fault of his logic.
Read more…