danbruno.net/blog

Another one for the blogroll: Live Music Blog. News, songs, and pictures from the jamband scene. Good stuff.

Google is going to hire people to work on OpenOffice.org.

“We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that’s a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry,” he [Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs] said.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Maybe they’ll speed along the Cocoaization process. (via)

Aspyr is going to port Civilization III and IV to Mac, according to a Macworld report. Civ III is due out in December, and will feature built-in expansions and online play; Civ IV is due out early next year.

The Civilization series is the brainchild of “legendary game designer” Sid Meier, as he has been described in promotional materials (and not without merit). I don’t really do computer games anymore, but I’d make an exception for this. (via)

This is definitely something I need:

TagTagger

The Web 2.0 powered tagging site that lets you tag – tags.

Features:

• AJAX powered and developed with Ruby on Rails
• Tag your tags
• Search your tagged tags
• Connect up to other peoples tagged tags
• Even tag your tagged tags

Seriously, though, this is only just far-fetched enough to be parody. I still think that, say, Flickr would benefit immensely from tagging — or maybe just categorizing — tags. I want to be able to create a category “states” and bring up a list like this:

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan

The same could be done for people, towns, things, events, and so on. Wouldn’t that be a lot more efficient than mucking through all my tags to make sense of my Flickr archive? It’d be a perfect marriage of traditional folder-based organization and flat hierarchy.

Halloween Party ‘05-3

Originally uploaded by kilgore.

Probably the best Halloween costumes I’ve ever seen. [via flickr]

That’s the view from my window. The last significant October snowfall was more than two decades ago. Happy birthday to me!

My apologies for the repeated re-blogging of Metafilter and Boing Boing recently, but if you’ve played World of Warcraft and read/seen Lord of the Rings, this might be the funniest animated GIF ever. (via)

You Knit What?? is my favorite blog of the moment. It’s a simple idea: they find ugly knitted garments, post pictures, and make fun of them. It’s truly hilarious what they come up with. (via)

(Also, not that it’s entirely related, but this guy can weave little Mario characters. via)

Air Guitar USA! Apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, air guitarists left their bedrooms and started competing in international tournaments. The “performers” are judged on technical merit, stage presence, and “airness” — “the extent to which a performance transcends the imitation of a real guitar and becomes and art form in and of itself.” Also, there’s an air guitar training camp in Finland, which I’m sure rivals that Berklee Summer Performance Program I went to a couple of summers ago. Make sure to watch the video clips, especially the Conan O’Brien one. (via)

Yesterday Flickr gave us some cool new stuff — namely, photo printing, DVD backup, and stamps with your photos on them, courtesy of EZPrints, Englaze, and Zazzle respectively.

The prints thing is especially cool. You can set who’s allowed to order prints of your photos (mine is set to “anyone,” if you’re interested). As is to be expected of Flickr, the ordering interface is well-integrated — there’s a little button on each photo page that lets you add prints to your shopping cart with Web 2.0-style Ajax awesomeness. Also, as a bonus, you get ten free 4×6 prints.

The Englaze DVD backup looks like it has a few problems. It’s a bit on the expensive side — $26 for an 1000-photo DVD, and then $4 for each additional 1000 (why they measure the number of photos as opposed to the number of megabytes, I have no idea). There are a couple of rough edges in the interface; for example, you can only choose a cover picture from your most recent 200 shots, which is completely arbitrary. And there should really be an option to archive some of your photos. If I ordered a DVD backup of all my photos when I had, say, 5000, what makes them think I’d want to order everything over again when I had 6000? Still, the basics are there (it even archives tags!) and this has long been an important missing feature.

All I really have to say about Zazzle stamps is that I think this would be a good one. It sorta conveys something between the Windows “tada” sound and AOL’s “You’ve got mail!”, don’t you think?

Can you trust Wikipedia? The Guardian showed various experts Wikipedia articles on their areas of expertise and had them judge the articles on a scale from 1-10. Most of the experts were generally happy with the content of the articles, but pointed out the inevitable inaccuracies and poor writing. The scores range from 0 to 8 and average at around 5.5. (via SearchEngineWatch)

In other Wikipedia news, Ben Yates of Wikipedia Blog has a doppelgänger — Matthew White’s WikiWatch. White is unabashedly critical of Wikipedia, and his FAQ outlines why:

Four things distress me.

1. Wikipedia gives instant visibility and credibility to any crackpot notion that you insert. For example, if I wanted to promote the idea that Mussolini was a terrific dancer, I could set up my own web site dedicated to the terpsichorean tyrant, but I’d probably get only one visitor a month who would immediately recognize me a nutcase. Or I could just add a few lines to Wikipedia’s Dance and Mussolini articles, and suddenly my notion has a Google rank of 8. And because the rest of the article seems sensible and has a few footnotes, visitors will believe what I tell them.
2. The surging popularity of Wikipedia is crowding out other sources of information. Most of my Google searches nowadays bring up Wikipedia and a couple of its bastard offspring among the first ten hits. I wouldn’t have a problem with Wikipedia if it didn’t replicate all across the web. After all, I have no problem with the Internet Movie Database dominating its field, but that’s because the IMDB stays in one place.
3. Most articles I see concerning Wikipedia fall into three categories:
   1. Enthusiastic insiders praising it with religion fervor.
   2. Naive outsiders who are overwhelmed, but certainly impressed, by the sheer size of the encyclopedia.
   3. Grumpy Luddites who suspect there’s something wrong, but can’t quite put their fingers on it.
   4. (The missing fourth category would be informed criticism. I haven’t seen much, but I’d like to encourage some.)
4. I’ve had a web site for 8 years, and Wikipedia is the only — repeat, only — place I’ve ever had to police my copyrights. Some Wikipedians seem to think that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.

Now, some responses:

Point one is perhaps true, but by no fault of Wikipedia. Unfortunately, there are people who are naive enough to put their trust in a free encyclopedia — one which openly advertises that anyone can edit it, at any time, for any reason. These are the same people who believe anything they read on the internet, and who cite facts from one source without corroborating them from another. I don’t think there’s anything we can do about people like that. However, there are more intelligent ways to use Wikipedia — it’s “especially useful as a starting point for broader research,” as Andrew Leifer of the Stanford Daily said. “Each article touches briefly on all aspects of a topic and includes links to primary sources.”

Point two is the soundest of the lot, and is the basis for my main complaint against Wikipedia as well. The duplication of information across “bastard” sites is a problem, especially when those sites do not keep up to date with Wikipedia itself. Incorrect or vandalized articles are often fixed by Wikipedians — if not promptly, then eventually — but when such material spreads to all corners of the web, the effect can be tantamount to slander.

Point three isn’t actually a point of contention; it simply states that there are different types of people on the Wikipedia. True enough, and the same can be said of the internet as a whole. What White is presumably going for here is distress over the lack of informed criticism, but I think he might have just missed it. Wikipedians are definitionally self-critical; as Yates and White have both noted, they read WikiWatch to find articles that need improving, and by the time other readers try to see what the problem was, they’ve been fixed.

Point four, frankly, is unprovable and of minimal importance. As White says, Wikipedia’s PageRank of 8 regularly boosts articles to the top of search results. While Wikipedia may be the most visible of any possible copyright infringements, by White’s own logic the crowding out of other information sources would prevent him from seeing any others. Besides, it’s against Wikipedia policy to infringe on copyright, so if he is aware of all these egregious violations, it should be trivial to take them down — certainly it would be preferable to suing an ISP. Of course copyright infringment is a problem, and an especially serious one on the internet, but blaming Wikipedia is not the solution.

Have you ever noticed that eBay apparently buys Google ads for every goddamn word in the dictionary? This Flickr user has. (via Kottke)

Just got back from seeing Jason Robert Brown in concert. It was good, but I felt like I was the only person there who wasn’t absolutely obsessed with him. He’s essentially the Elvis of musical theater — screaming, delusional fans hung on his every word. I’m not sure what his specific appeal is, as opposed to anyone else, but it was a really good show. More on him later.

Google AdSense ads are back. Why? No particular reason. Based on my previous success you’d think I’d wait for a bit more traffic before trying again, but what can I say?

A week or so ago, Apple announced Aperture, a “revolutionary” photo program. You have to dig pretty deep to figure out what it actually does; it seems to be a souped-up iPhoto with a bunch of Photoshop-esque features. (And it uses RAW image files!)

Whatever its purpose, Aperture clearly aimed at professionals — the recommended specs are a dual 2GHz processor and 2GB of RAM, which excludes all but the Power Macs and top-of-the-line iMacs. Interestingly, the student discount cuts the price in half, from $500 down to $250. I wouldn’t think that we’d be a big market for Aperture, but it would appear otherwise. So for all those college kids with $2000 Power Macs, go for it!

EDIT: Mike Zornek has had a chance to play with Aperture, and had this to say:

It’s not a Photoshop killer by any means, but a really good RAW workflow is something the industry needed. Other things it’s not:

• It’s not meant for teams of photographers with a shared library on the network.
• It’s not to be used for masking or compositing (though it will allow you to jump to Photoshop and back again to do so).
• It’s not something you run on a PowerBook for more than a simple contact sheet while on-site.