Online maps of the Middle East....

Have you grown weary of the tiny, grayscale maps of Iraq and the Middle East accompanying most newspaper stories on the region? TomPaine.com went in search of better geographic tools, and found them at the University of Texas' Online Library, with links to dozens of maps—political, topographical, historical—of a region many Americans have never scrutinized geographically. [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Doonesbury Does Weblogs

Garry Trudeau has been doing computer jokes since 1972, when he put Mark Slackmeyer to work on a mainframe. He spoofed the PC boom of the '80s, skewered the first generation of glitchy PDAs, and parodied the rise of online culture. During the 2000 presidential campaign, he ran a digital Uncle Duke who took questions in real time. Now he has his characters blogging.

[EdCone.com] [Ye Olde Phart] 

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Avoiding Probate. Save your grieving heirs from the legal headaches. [The Motley Fool] 

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Investing in Retirement. You should play it safe -- but not too safe. [The Motley Fool] 

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What Retirement Will Cost. The rule of thumb says you can retire on 70%-80% of your current income. Fact or fiction? [The Motley Fool] 

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New category: Design & usability guidelines. I've been stumbling across a number of excellent design & usability guidelines, both in the form of documents, and whole sites. I've now decided to group these together in their own category. This is by no means an exhaustive collection,... [Column Two] 

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Check out my new PQI 6 in 1 flash memory card reader. Very nice, about the size of a deck of cards, the USB cable folds into the reader case and then the reader slips into a nice travel cover. It included a 3 ft USB extension I haven't needed. I use the reader plugged into one of two USB ports on my Microsoft Internet Keyboard. $30 at Frys [dws.] 

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Mark Pilgrim has a new innovative use for RSS. He accumulates inbound pointers to specific articles on his site in an RSS 2.0 feed. It's so twisty it drives my mind crazy. In a few minutes this comment will appear in his feed. [Scripting News] 

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Yes, I'm an RSS bigot too. I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing  I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator. [Seblogging News] 

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The Register has details on a new feature in Maxtor's new line of Personal Storage 5000 Family external hard drives called OneTouch. Maxtor's press release has some background on the new release. It's bundled with Dantz Retrospect Express and is available in 80/120/250 GB configurations. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Personal KM - I'm starting to think a lot more about how to manage my personal information.  So I figured I'd start a category for those thoughts and let others see them and give me feedback.  M oreof us find ourselves having always on (often wireless) access to the Internet.  How can we use that power to simplify our lives and organize our personal information?  That's what my Personal KM page will try to address. [Ernie the Attorney] 

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New Financial Tools for Fools. We have updated, and greatly expanded, our roster of financial calculators. [The Motley Fool] 

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Revisiting Your 401(k). Your retirement plan at work may not be the best place for all your savings. [The Motley Fool] 

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CSS and lists. Advanced CSS lists. Mark Newhouse: CSS Design: Taming Lists. "I'll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It's time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page." (41 words) [dive into mark] [McGee's Musings] 

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Regular Expressions. Data mining with regular expressions. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Understanding weblogs. I've been spending the past several weeks messing around with weblogs. Last week, the light bulb went on: I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. (published in tweney report, 2002-08-28) [tweney.com] 

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Compendium of weblog resources. The most useful thing in the aforementioned article was a link to Weblogs Compendium, another good central clearinghouse of blog information and resources, today featuring pointers to useful third-party services such as myMediaList (for adding lists of books, music, and other media to your blog or web page) and blogLinker (for managing a modular link list, much like blogrolling.com). Naturally, there is a Compediumblog as well. [Radio Free Blogistan] 

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Cool the thumbnail maker works great.  I just right clicked the photo on my desktop and selected resize.  I selected to fit it into a 45x45 screen.  It created thumbnail right next to it.  I then dropped it into my Radio images folder.  I check Radio's events page to see if it was upstreamed, it was and I clicked on the link.  I then right click cut and pasted it  into Radio's shortcuts area.  I created a new shortcut called Bush.  So now, if I ever want to include this photo in anything I write, all I need to do is put Bush in double quotes ("...").  See:

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Powertoys for Windows XP.  Ones I downloaded:  an thumbnail maker and a power calculator (I haven't had a scientific calculator for a while). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Dan Gillmor responds to Jack Valenti. Dan Gillmor interviewed Jack Valenti last week in his column and did the impartial thing, representing Valenti's beliefs as fairly as possible. This week, Dan takes Valenti's arguments apart, looking at what Hollywood's agenda really entails:

So the movie and music companies are going back to Congress for another helping. They are asking for laws that would force technology innovators to restrict the capabilities of devices -- cripple PCs and other machines that communicate so they can't make copies the copyright holders don't explicitly allow. Amazingly, the entertainment industry also wants permission to hack into networks and machines they believe are being used to violate copyrights.

Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know.

Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know

From the excellent TopStyle vendor blog I found this: Seven Tricks That Web Users Don't Know.  Nothing here really surprised me but it does a great job of pointing out the difference between computer industry "experts" and Joe User who just wants to get the job done.  There is an excellent commentary on why you shouldn't use 2nd browser windows much if at all and she does a better job than others in describing the problems users have with it.  The one thing that I would be curious to know is if Mac users know more than PC users.  I have no evidence that this is true but I'd suspect so.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Dan Gillmor's reply to Jack Valenti.

Gillmor provides a succinct response to Hollywood's view of intellectual property. The key point:

Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.

[McGee's Musings] 

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Technology Review: Data Extinction.

On the plane this morning got caught up on some magazine reading. I absolutely love MIT's Technology Review - in its latest incarnation, it focuses on all things relating to innovation. The result is a magazine that is full of useful and intriguing information.

This month's cover story is on data extinction (available to subscribers only) - the challenge of preserving access to data as systems, applicaions and operating systems evolve. Some revealing statistics:

• volume of business-related e-mail will rise from 2.6 trillion messages in 2001 to 5.9 trillion messages in 2005 (source: IDC)
• JPEG is becoming outmoded by JPEG 2000; result: in five years it may be difficult for you to view photos taken today with digital cameras.
• Land use and natural resource inventories for the state of New York in the late 60s are no longer accessible - the customized software that produced the inventories no longer exists.
• NASA satellite data from the 70s is completely unreadable today.

Three different approaches to solving this problem:

• Migration: convert current data to future formats. Difficult and unwieldy especially when the volume of data grows. Not scalable, and inevitably some data is lost or modified in some way that may not be immediately apparent.
• Emulation: create an emulator to mimic the hardware/software environment that the data was designed for. Not really a long-term solution, because it puts off a comprehensive solution, and could result in unwieldy chains of emulators - which can become a house of cards.
• Encapsulation: a "way to group digital objects together with descriptive 'wrappers' containing instructions for decoding their bits in the future."

Then there's the long-shot, a "universal virtual computer" - which would simulate the basic functions of a computer, create a basic architecture (memory, registers, rules for exchanging data) and define it in a way that any application on any platform would be able to store two versions of a file - one in the proprietary format and one in the UVC format. The article includes some support for this concept, and early tests indicate it may be possible. The result would be that future applications would have access to data created today.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Learned something interesting here.... Morbus Rides In.  Morbus has created an excellent resource of places to find RSS feeds.... [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

A while back, there was some talk about why LiveJournal sites are ignored.  Someone had said on their blog that users' journals weren't available as RSS, which is incorrect.

LiveJournal is a free service that lets anyone keep an online journal, readable to anyone who happens by and updated whenever you deem necessary. Your journal can also be retrieved in RSS format, simply by adding /rss to the end of your journal's standard URL (like this)...

That's good to know... [jenett.radio] 

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Vintage Music Archive. Dismuke has a 24 hour radio station and RealAudio archive of '20s and '30s music. Some nice stuff in here. (Also check out my favorite music archive, Red Hot Jazz.) Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Ten Things to Teach Kids About Money. Don't stop at the birds and the bees. Tell your kids about the bills and the fees. [The Motley Fool] 

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Retire Early Home Page. "Home schooling, private schooling, or public schooling: wherever the job is being done RIGHT, a "real workplace" exists." [The Motley Fool] 

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Yesterday, AT&T upgraded my cable box to a digital system.  To do that, they sent a cable guy to install it for me.  The installation went smoothly and I spent a little time last night reading up on the box they provided me.  It looked pretty snazzy.  Here it is:

Wow, I thought.  It really looks like a modern product (as opposed to the crappy analog boxes that have been around for a decade).  The picture was clearly superior to the old analog signal.  It also had dozens of new channels.  In fact, the box looked from a quick scan of the back to have lots of great hook-ups to get even better quality out of it (for instance: hooking it into an A/V system and my HDTV).

So, I decided to do a little research.  From the manual it looked good.  S-Video output.  Optical audio output.  Cool, I thought.  This is going to look and sound pretty good.  However, when I attempted to connect these outputs to my stereo system and TiVo, I found that the S-Video and digital optical audio connections weren't included in the system.  They were optioned out of the package.  The slots were there, but they were empty. 

Welcome to my multimedia hell.

It has been increasingly dawning on me that the media industry is caught in a massive quagmire that it cannot extract itself from.  Cable companies like AT&T, continue to roll-out, at great expense, equipment that is obsolete the moment it is installed.  This isn't a problem of snazzy interfaces and compelling interactive media experiences.  This is a problem of basic interoperability and functionality.  How would it be possible for AOL and others to innovate with interactive multimedia when the basic system for media delivery is broken? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Cookie Monster Learns to Program.

Cookie Monster Learns to Program

No.  Really !  And the topic, cookies, makes perfect sense. 

Netscape extensions to CGI. The way cookie work is that webserver give "Set-Cookie:" header with information on cookie, and browser keep track of cookie. Then, when browser access page on same site, it send back list of all cookie for that site. It make me sad that W3 Consortium does not have good final Cookie spec. Me think it never really baked into HTTP standard and Netscape standard is only good definition me can find.

From Kuro5hin.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Wow! mnoGoSearch Rocks!.

Wow!  mnoGoSearch Rocks!

Given my background in search and retrieval (like, oh, 15+ years), it's an absolutely travesty that my websites and my blog aren't searchable.  And, yes, I know it.  A real problem though, when you know a lot in an area, is that you become a perfectionist and are unwilling to not have perfection -- and that doesn't ever exist.  So, alone, unsearchable, my websites and blogs have wandered in the wilderness.  For the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights.  And then a shot rang out !  Well actually John smacked me on the head and basically shamed me into implementing a search engine.  He recommended mnoGoSearch so I ran with it.  After a few errors, wrong turns and some silliness on my part (and more than few difficulties with their "documentation"), I now have a searchable site and a searchable blog.  What's even better is that not only is mnoGoSearch hackable, I've been able to use its url spidering to implement a simple table of contents for my Radio stories on marketing (that url will go away in a few days when I make it better such as eliminating the stories which are still in draft stage).  In the future I'll use it to implement a link checker and other tools that rely on link spidering.  I am still fine tuning the indexing and making changes but the basics of search and retrieval are now quite functional.

Strongly recommended -- if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and grapple with poor documentation and a wee bit of bizarreness.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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WSJ.  The Pentagon is worried that a widely available $39.99, 4-watt, GPS jammer that can disrupt GPS signals for up to 100 miles will significantly impair our ability to use GPS munitions (bombs that can navigate to within 10 ft of targets autonomously).  Given that Baghdad's air defense network was basically untouched in the last war (it was considered too difficult to take out), this is bad news.  If we attack, an inability to use GPS munitions will require that pilots and/or rangers (on the ground) put themselves at significant risk in order to take out high value targets in or near Baghdad (in order to provide high quality terminal navigation to munitions). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Artists to labels: Get bent. The Recording Artists' Coalition are in open rebellion against the labels. The group, which includes Bruce Springsteen, Sting, R.E.M., Bonnie Raitt, Madonna, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel, Elton John, Linkin Park, Aimee Mann, No Doubt, Puddle of Mudd, Staind and Static-X are fighting for regulation of the music industry. They demand reform of:

• Contract lengths
• Accounting practices
• Health and pension benefits
• Copyright and ownership
• Payola

"The record companies are like cartels, like countries, for God's sake," singer/songwriter Tom Waits says. "It's a nightmare to be trapped in one. I'm on a good label (Epitaph) now that's not part of the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose. These corporations don't have feelings, and they don't see themselves as the stewards of the work. They are making shoes, and then they want to go to the Bahamas and get a suntan."

He advises new artists to "get a good lawyer and don't ever sign away your publishing rights. Most people are so anxious to record, they'll sign anything. It's like going across the river on the back of an alligator..."

"Artists really do need to communicate and organize," he says. "Don Henley is willing to get a haircut and go to Washington. I'm all for that."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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The new dailywebthing. One of my other websites, the dailywebthing, has been around since 1999.  It's original focus was syndicating excerpts daily from a number of popular weblogs (with their permission).  Until recently, content was scraped the old-fashioned Perl way and manually edited before publishing.  I recently decided to discontinue the "members' guide" which appeared on the main page and replace it with a new weblog