pineapple-jack, originally uploaded by Kim’s Suitcase.

Filed under: bobslobster, tiki lifestyle · 4 Comments

It seems people are getting stupider. Every morning I read about 500 websites in order get a read on the daily Global Intelligence Number. GIN has been reaching new lows lately, and you know what that means.. with stupid people come stupid advertisements. In this first of many stupid ad posts, here is an ad I saw on a bunch of blogs this morning…

BenTrott: OK Anil, we just launched a new blogging service, so go make us some blog ads!
AnilDash: Um, don’t we already have TypePad *and* LiveJournal?? Why do we need another one??
MenaTrott: Anil, what our market research has shown is that bloggers have *evolved*. Today’s bloggers aren’t the same old bloggers, Anil.
AnilDash: WTF does that mean?
BenTrott: Well, I asked Mena’s mom, and she said that today’s bloggers like circles!
AnilDash: Circles??
BenTrott: And not just any circles.. concentric circles!
MenaTrott: With pink annuli!!
AnilDash: OMG C1RCLEZ!!!!!!!
BenTrott: And they also like slanty lines!
AnilDash: So Vox is MySpace with slanty lines?
MenaTrott: Yes but not too many slanty lines! And throw in some hipsters with Hello Kitty shirts for good measure!
AnilDash: Won’t we get sued?
MenaTrott: *EVIL* Hello Kitty knock-offs, Anil. Get with it!

Filed under: all talk, no code · 3 Comments

About a month ago I was going on about trying to use a newsreader to keep up with all the RSS flying around. I tried Google News Reader, hated it. I tried about 10 other RSS readers, both web based and client software (mac)… I felt like they all missed the point.

When I’m reading RSS, I actually don’t give a monkey’s tail about the RSS. RSS is stupid, unformatted, unstyled text with no soul and even less information. The way to consume RSS coming from websites is to read it in it’s richest form: from the website itself. Some client newsreaders go a short way down this path by giving you button to open the article in your web browser. But this is totally lame. I mean, a drunk dog could open up a web browser and sit there through the World Wide Wait and sift through the blink tags and advertisements and try to read the article.

I am happy to make the first public mention of TikiRobotReader, a Mac OS X application that (eventually) will handle RSS in a way that is not totally dain bramaged. TRR is Open Source, a Cocoa application, and a work in progress.

The basic idea is that for a given Article, TRR will download the link to the article’s web representation and convert it to PDF so the articles are all nice and shiny and ready for your skimming pleasure, no waiting required. Here is what I want TRR to be:

Principles of Operation

• Simple keyboard commands everywhere. Should be operable one-handed while eating lunch.
• RSS is disposable content. It’s not critical like most (personal) Email.
• Read the content as presented by the website, not some random choice of Font and Color.
• Blog posts and status messages from friends are way more important than Yahoo/CNN headlines.
• Streamline the reading process. No nagging feelings of “should I delete this article or save it?”
• Download and cache web pages as PDF. Zero latency when switching articles.
  • PDF loads immediately, vs 1-5 seconds for an HTML page to render
  • PDF is a static page, no blinking and bouncing flash ads and animated GIFs
• RSS is a source of content. Provide easy hooks for the sinks: Sharing and Research.

The current release is ugly as hell, but functional. At this point TRR is best enjoyed by running out of XCode so you can debug crashes and implement nifty features. I will be using it as my daily news reader in this fashion. But the nightly builds are functional and get the idea across. Feel free to contribute! Design ideas are helpful and code contributions are always a good thing. TikiRobotReader is meant to present RSS the way you, the discerning TikiRobot! blog reader, think is best. TRR will be a great place to implement all those Web 2.0/client features we want but can’t get anywhere else.

Link to TikiRobotReader nightly build
Link to TikiRobotReader SourceForge page

Filed under: all talk, apps, cocoa, code code, design, lifehacking, meta, osx, tiki lifestyle · 5 Comments

Filed under: bobslobster, cuuuuute, why are we here? · 2 Comments

I watched this BBC Tetris documentary this morning.. It’s a must-see for Tetris nerds, even though it’s an hour long and starts kind of slow. What makes it really gripping is the home video Henk Rogers shot while travelling to Moscow to negotiate for console rights on behalf of Nintendo. As usual in matters such as these, Alexey Pajitnov, the developer of Tetris, didn’t get any royalities from the original licensing agreements and eventually went to go work for Microsoft, where he continued to design puzzle games. Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov remained friends, and Henk eventually started the Tetris Company, which holds the Tetris trademark, and Blue Planet Software to manages the licensing rights for Tetris. Since the BBC documentary is a bit dated, I searched around and found this story by Vadim Gerasimov, the 16-year old high school student who worked with Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky at the Moscow Academy of Sciences Computer Center and tells a slightly different version of the story. Vadim went on to study at MIT Media Lab and now works in Australia. There’s a lot more interesting Tetris stuff at the tetrisconcept wiki, like a description of the Tetris Guidelines.

Filed under: tronix, video, video games · 4 Comments

Nurz Saz, International Nurse of Mystery, sent word that they’ve launched a website for the Bed Nets for Kids project. The project works to reduce malaria infection rates in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The project is very efficient: a $5 donation provides a child in the DRC an insecticide-treated bed net that is good for five years. From the site:

Recent studies on bed net distribution show that freely distributed nets are not valued. However, the Bed Nets For Kids project is finding that 93% of our kids are using their net appropriately. We attribute this fact to the emotional and financial investment already made by the families with sick children. Follow up visits at home are proving that the free bed net and health education provided at the time of treatment is greatly valued by these families.

This is a great project, donations are tax-deductable, and they make $5 go a long way!

Filed under: inspiration, medicine · 2 Comments

Kevin pointed to some interesting stats on trends in programming language choice as reported by Ohloh. They conclude either ‘The web is being built with PHP’ -or- ‘PHP programmers write lots of extra lines of code compared to programmers using other languages’. But looking at these graphs makes one thing painfully obvious… I was born twenty years too late. Fortunately I have a bunch of friends who are also camped out in the same cave…

Filed under: all talk, no code · 1 Comment

So, for the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing an ad link for $32 lipstick in our sidebar and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. Amazon seems to think I really want it. I’m pretty sure none of you people want lipstick, but in case you do, here’s the stuff i really do like. Burt’s Bees Lip Shimmer True it’ll make your lips tingle like Ben Gay, but you all give your lips a regular workout, right? consider it the lipstick of choice for active lips – at $3.75, you can get them in all available colors and still go out for ice cream.

Filed under: bobslobster · 4 Comments

In 1972, a grad student at Indiana University, William Rapaport, came up with one of the strangest sentences in the English language: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Would you believe that Prof. Rapaport now teaches at State University of New York…… at Buffalo??? The wiki page has a bunch of similar examples, and Prof. Rapaport’s page has a bunch of background, including evidence that others had discovered the same sentence before 1972. This is a garden path sentence; it can’t be parsed word-by-word without backtracking, making it difficult for NLP algorithms to deal with.

Filed under: all talk, no code · 4 Comments

I don’t know a lot about this, but it seems pretty self explanatory. A celebration of LA public transportation, with art from the cobra snake and Shepard Fairey as a guest DJ. Sounds fun! You need to ride public transportation to get in. I will be there as soon as i figure out how…

Filed under: beats, bobslobster, LA · 2 Comments

Google just launched a neat service called Google Co-op that lets you create a customized search engine for a single (or a couple sites) so I created one for TikiRobot and put it in our sidebar (it’s all the way at the bottom). There are some other revenue sharing and customization aspects associated with the service that I haven’t really explored yet, but there’s more info here. In the meantime, you can now find that long-lost-post that you’re pretty sure you saw on this site, but don’t remember what we tagged it (cause even i don’t remember what I tag things).

Filed under: meta, neat, support · 9 Comments

I got to go to the Open Content Alliance Workshop last week.. It was one of the best conferences in recent memory, and I had a blast! The Open Content Alliance is a group that encourages open access to online digital library content. The OCA is like Open Source for the library world.

I got to meet a bunch of great people and got to hear librarians talk about Web APIs! Robin Chandler from the California Digital Library talked about “the Dawn of the Embedded Library” and showed Connotea (social bookmarking for scientists), Library Thing (previously blogged by May, now even public libraries are using it!), and LibX, a Firefox extention for direct library access (who knew?)! Anna Miller from Luna Imaging showed a cool online book reader they made. She works with David Rumsey so we talked a bit about The Maps. Phil Zuckerman of Applewood Books loaned me his laptop so that I could demo the Open Book Factory, which I hope to have online in a couple weeks. Tom Garnett from the Smithsonian gave a moving talk (“Life on this planet is in crisis”), about the ambitious Biodiversity Heritage Library project, which plans to digitize more than 2 million volumes of biodiversity research that is in the public domain and still being actively used by scientists. I talked with Martin Kalfatovic and Suzanne Pilsk from the Smithsonian, and Chris Freeland and Doug Holland from the Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Prof. Lee Giles of Penn State, about how to collaborate with the BHL project. The MoBot team have already built the Botanicus Digital Library and the TROPICOS nomenclature database, and Lee Giles’ team has already built the Citeseer scientific search tool. I talked with Juliet Sutherland of the Distributed Proofreaders about how to collaborate with them. [omg fanboy]I saw Whit Diffie (inventor of PKI) but didn’t get to meet him.[/omg] John Gilmore explained to me that I actually wasn’t on the no-fly list, but was probably on the “selectee list”, which many people call the no-fly list. We also talked about the Ed Rosenthal case. The night ended with Shag and I talking about lots of different projects, including his exciting work on writing linux drivers for the Plustek OpticBook bookedge scanner, which is close to working (It lights up! The scanner arm moves!) but not quite done. I wish I had more spare cycles to help with the drivers, but I’m going to contribute to the front-end. Whew! That’s about all I can remember.. Thanks to Chet Grycz of the Internet Archive and Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins for organizing such a great event!

Filed under: archive, books · 3 Comments

Here is an interesting MeFi thread about Cross Site Request Forgery. It was taking a while for my brain to grok the attack until I came to this comment, in which poster embedded an image that pointed to a GET Web API instead of actually linking to a jpeg (CSRF link since removed). Everyone who read that comment while logged in had that comment marked as a favorite, since their browser happily called the GET url and passed their login information via cookie.

My first thought was that this would be an easy attack to avoid, but it’s crazy scary, unless maybe your web app doesn’t use cookies. Just switching to POST isn’t good enough.

Filed under: support · 1 Comment

Fearless butter lapper and speed demon Kathryn plays the trumpet for a band.

This Halloween, Tuesday October 31st at 12 Galaxies (2565 Mission Street @ 22nd), witness the Extra Action Flag Team rising from the dead with selections from Black Sabbath’s First Album. With the Moon nearly full and the scary people in the Castro doing the same ol’show, the Brass will Howl into the chill of the Mission night air.

Tickets are $10 and you can pick up advance tickets here:

Doors will open just after you have finished your trick-and-treating (i.e. 8 PM)

Filed under: beats, upcoming · 3 Comments

… I love how the word “friend” has been hijacked by web20. As in lists of things like “what your friends are doing.” I mean, on twitter I have two friends. I have two friends on a lot of websites actually, livejournal, hi5, flickr, tons of them. I can’t even remember them all. All these random websites that support the “friends” feature. There seems to be no remorse for the fact that only a fraction of my friends can even use a social networking website, much less whichever one is trendy and featureful at the moment. So as much as I want to have twitter updates from my mom and my ex-girlfriend, it’s just not going to happen.

Everything is so disconnected for no good reason. Hello google, you stitched together web1.0 into a useful mesh, why can’t you do that for web20 instead of messing around with youtube? I know there are efforts like “open friend network” or whatever but it’s just not working.

I guess that’s just the way it is, social networking websites model existing social networks. Some people are in, and some people are out. The one thing that ties my social network together is me: my cell phone, my email, my user id and password on 50 freaking websites, my day-to-day real life interactions with other people. We all implicitly manage our network using the most appropriate medium. Some of my friends *only* call me, even when email makes more sense (annoying!). Some people I interact with almost 100% on iChat, to the extent that phone calls now would feel out of place. It’s like there is a law of gravity for relationships, a type of energy minimization: use the simplest and cheapest form of communication technology available that gets the job done. The funny part is that we get annoyed if someone uses too rich of a form. For example if an acquaintance showed up at your doorstep to hand you a URL on a piece of paper. You would be like … why is this person being such a dork? Don’t they get it?

Filed under: all talk, meta · 2 Comments

Shag noticed that someone had used a bit of tape to alter the street sign for Dore Street (parallel to 9th and 10th, and between Folsom and Howard) to read Dope Street. He then noticed that Google, Yahoo, and Mapquest all mark the street as DOPE in their online maps! In fact, if you lived on Dore, you could tell people you lived on Dope St and they could use Google Maps to get to your house :)

Dear lazyweb: Can someone with a functional camera go take a picture of the Dope Street sign? Thankee!

Filed under: bay area, cartography · 6 Comments

1. The Pineapple Cannon will succeed where other fruit+gadget combinations fail, and it’s Tiki 2.0 compliant!


2. I LOLed! I always lol at xkcd :)


3. Is typing www.getfirefox.com too many letters to deal with when all you want to do is install a web browser that only half-sucks? Try typing www.ie7.com instead.

Filed under: comix · 2 Comments

and i’m already thinking of snow.

This neat toy was made by zefrank

Filed under: design, neat, toys · 4 Comments

is a place where you can find stuff like

• I’M GONNA BE A NEPHEW! and
• Two Guys on Blanket at Dolores Park: One Reading Lolita

khraigslist is a production of kasperhauser. They’ve got a book coming out at the end of the month called SkyMaul: Happy Crap You Can Buy from a Planeand there’s gonna be a party to celebrate (at Cobbs on 11/14). I’m gonna go. you should go too. and buy their book cause my friend John really really needs a new haircut. (actually that’s his twin brother James but they look so much alike…)

Filed under: bay area, bobslobster, books, upcoming · 3 Comments

My landing page at Urban Dictionary was so laugh out loud funny I forgot what I went there to look up in the first place. I’ve never even heard of this:

A “Third Joke” is when someone says something funny, someone else feels the need to follow it with something that may or may not also be funny, and then a third person, trying to keep up, follows up with a third quip, which by this point is most definitely no longer funny.

It is important for others at this point to call “Third Joke” out loud to point out the third individual’s social error, to embarass them for killing the funny.

A truly unskilled individual can Third Joke on the second quip.

Bob: “And then I said, “That’s not my fish!”" Haha!

Bill: “A halibut tale!” Haha!

Ted: “I smell fish!” Ha.. um.

Bob: “Third Joke, Ted.”

Leave it to me to be out of touch with basic modern humor …. I think I should get a medal for being able to Third Joke on the First Joke.

Oh yeah, now I remember my original query: “ropegun”:

1. ropegun
in rock climbing:
(n) ropegun: the person who climbs first and attaches the rope to the safety devices on the way up, allowing everyone else to climb with the rope attached above them. more dangerous and fun.

Link to “third joke” at Urban Dictionary
Link to “ropegun” at Urban Dictionary

Filed under: all talk, counterproductive · 1 Comment

This animation of a cell’s inner workings is absolutely stunning. Here is a bit more about the biology and the animators.

You see an actin filament being manufactured from its constituent monomers; these fibres are instrumental in pulling subcellular structures around the cell and also for providing a framework for materials to be transported around the cell on. A protein comes in and chop the actin fibre – the manufacture and dissociation of both actin and microtubules is a regulated, dynamic process. Similarly you see microtubule formation and a microtubule catastrophe – when microtubules dissociate, it’s very fast. Then the coolest bit of the video – a microtubule motor protein pulls a vesicle to its destination in the cell. The cellular motor proteins really do look like this – their mechanism of action is basically a walk forwards.

Beautiful! (via MoFi)

Filed under: science, video · 1 Comment

OK, not really. But there’s a bit of an exposé over at the New York Times with some behind the scenes action on Frienster’s infamous fall from grace.

It’s funny …. back in day, during the routine of checking into Friendster and giving up in frustration when the home page wouldn’t even load, I always figured I was trying to log into some uppity teenager’s Windows NT Server box. Some kid who’s side project hit it big and couldn’t keep up with being Slashdotted, BoingBoing’ed, Time Magazine’d, the works. Only recently did I find out that Frienster was (and still is) a real company, with a real CEO and real engineers and real millions of dollars in venture funding. $30 million dollars and can’t make a database serve up some web pages? It boggles the mind. I mean really, nerdy college dropouts with some basic PHP skillz seem to be routinely pulling off landslide web plays.

Assistant professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski at the Harvard Business School uses Frienster as a case study:

Friendster’s fate is “a real puzzle,” Professor Piskorski said. “This was a company that had the talent and had the connections.” he said. “They had this great idea that people really took to.”

There is no single reason that explains Friendster’s failures, Professor Piskorski added, which is what makes it academic fodder. “It’s a power story,” he said. “It’s a status story. It’s an ego story.” But largely, he said, Friendster is a “very Silicon Valley story that tells us a lot about how the Valley operates.”

I know that in my days of misguided youth I used to say, famously, “I wouldn’t wipe my ass with the New York Times” … but now I’m over 30, and I think this article, at least, is worth reading.

Link to … just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful slip …

Filed under: all talk, counterproductive · 2 Comments

Today I had the joy of trying to figure out a tough crashing bug somewhere deep inside a Cocoa / Core Data / KVC / KVO application. In case anyone else is running into this crash, it’s not your fault:

Ah, the infamous _NSKeyValueObservationInfoCreateByRemoving crash bug.
That’s shown up with a number of triggers, and is definitely not
reproducible, nor is your code at fault. I filed a bug on it, and Jim
Correia (who often posts on this list) has sent in a reproducible case.

If you can figure out the interface item or binding that’s triggering it,
you may be able to work around it. In my case, I was able to have an object
traverse a relationship for me, instead of binding through the relationship,
and that stopped the crashing.

I was able to avoid this crash by overriding removeObserver:forKeyPath: to do nothing (especially not call NSObject’s implementation, which was doing the crashing).

I’m also getting a crash in -[NSOutlineView _sendDelegateWillDisplayCell:forColumn:row:] which I don’t understand. I’ve turned off all my NSOutlineView customizations….maybe I’m calling reloadData too often. If anyone has ideas, I’m all ears.

Link to a cocoa-dev message I wish I had seen about six hours ago

Filed under: cocoa, code code, osx · 1 Comment

For those following along with The Fart Party, our heroine Julia told the jerks at the café to stuff it, and now she’s hanging out in Vermont. Sounds like she’s having a good time.

Doodling in a sketchbook and then taking a picture of it to keep the comic going while traveling … That’s brilliant! Have fun Julia…

Link to The Fart Party

Filed under: comix, doodles · 1 Comment

For those unfamiliar with ReiserFS, it’s a filesystem authored by a notoriously argumentative dude. Inclusion of ReiserFS in the Linux Kernel has always been controversial because, well … ReiserFS sucks, but for some reason some people want to include it in Linux.

Link to Reiser Murder / Arrest Story

Filed under: code code, counterproductive · 1 Comment