News for me

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Old-fashioned Storytime with Grandma Patti at 10:00 AM

2010-03-09T15:00:00Z

Join us for Storytime.

Location: Serra Mesa-Kearny Mesa

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Preschool Storytime at 10:00 AM

2010-03-09T15:00:00Z

The first storytime of the month includes a craft activity.

Location: Carmel Mountain Ranch

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Infant/Toddler Storytime at 10:00 AM

2010-03-09T15:00:00Z

For Children ages 0 to 2. Older siblings are also welcome. Registration not required

Location: Carmel Valley

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- ESL Family Literacy & Conversation at 9:30 AM

2010-03-09T14:30:00Z

ESL Classes for the entire family! Adults will learn conversational English and American Customs. Children will improve their language skills. Each session lasts six weeks and meets twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:30 a.m. Registration is required per session. You can either register in advance at the library or on the day of the first class. Early registration is encouraged, since class size is limited. For further information or to register, please call the library.

Location: Rancho Peñasquitos

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Friends of the Tierrasanta Library Booksale at 9:30 AM

2010-03-09T14:30:00Z

Great finds and great buys for gifts and yourself!

Location: Tierrasanta

Truly Open Data

2010-03-09T14:00:00Z

I'm kicking myself. I have spent a non-trivial number of hours talking to government departments and scientists about open data, talking up an "open source approach" to data, pushing hard to get them to release datasets in machine readable formats with reuse-friendly licenses. I've had more successes than failures, met and helped some wonderful people, and now have more mail about open data in my inbox than about open source. So why am I kicking myself?

I'm kicking myself because I've been taking far too narrow an interpretation of "an open source approach". I've been focused on getting people to release data. That's the data analogue of tossing code over the wall, and we know it takes more than a tarball on an FTP server to get the benefits of open source. The same is true of data.

Open source discourages laziness (because everyone can see the corners you've cut), it can get bugs fixed or at least identified much faster (many eyes), it promotes collaboration, and it's a great training ground for skills development. I see no reason why open data shouldn't bring the same opportunities to data projects.

And a lot of data projects need these things. From talking to government folks and scientists, it's become obvious that serious problems exist in some datasets. Sometimes corners were cut in gathering the data, or there's a poor chain of provenance for the data so it's impossible to figure out what's trustworthy and what's not. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball, then immediately forks as all the users add their new records to their own copy and don't share the additions. Sometimes the dataset is delivered as a tarball but nobody has provided a way for users to collaborate even if they want to.

So lately I've been asking myself: What if we applied the best thinking and practices from open source to open data? What if we ran an open data project like an open source project? What would this look like?

First, we'd collaboratively build the dataset. This means we'd have a curator who is the equivalent of a project leader, taking patches and filtering for quality. Successful open source project leaders foster a group of developers of different skills, rewarding on merit while fostering new talent. Like open source projects, the nirvana state is to have a project that can survive the retirement or death of its founder.

But collaboration takes more than leadership--open source projects have tools that help. An open data project would need a mailing list to collaborate on, IRC or equivalent to chat in real-time, and a bug-tracker to identify what needs work and ensure that the users' needs are being met. The official dataset of New Zealand school zones has errors but there's nobody to report them to, much less a way to submit a fix to a maintainer. Oh, and don't forget a way to acknowledge and credit contributors—think not just of credits.txt but also of the difference between patch submitter, committer, and project maintainer.

Open source software developers have a powerful set of tools to make distributed authoring of software possible: diff to identify what's changed, patch to apply those changes elsewhere, version control to track changes over time and show provenance. Patch management would be just as important in a collaborative open data project, where users and other researchers might be submitting new or revised data. What would git for data look like? Heck, what would a local branch look like? I have a new attribute, you have a different projection, she has new rows, how does this all tie back together? (I eagerly await claims that RDF will solve this problem and all others)

That's just development. The interface between developers and users is the release. State of the art for a lot of government data is the equivalent of source.tar.gz. No version numbers, much the ability to download older versions of the datasets or separate stable and development branches.

Why would we want to download the historic version of a dataset? Because a paper used it and we want to test the analysis software that the paper used to ensure we get the same answer. Or because we want to see what our analysis technique would have shown with the knowledge that was available back then. Or simply to be able to track defects.

The users of data will have to adapt to the idea of versions, like the users of software have. The maintainers of the dataset might release five different versions of it while you're writing your analysis code, so it can't be a painful process to incorporate the revised data into your project. With software we have shared libraries and dynamic libraries, supported by autotools and such packages. Our code has interfaces and a branch that promises backwards compatibility. What would that look like for data? And what is the data version of the dependency hell that software developers know all-too-well (M 1.5 depends on N 1.7 and P 2.0, but P 2.0 requires N 2.0, and upgrading N to 2.0 breaks M which expects the 1.x set of interfaces from N ...).

And, of course, there's documentation. As with software, I imagine we'll see some docs structured and some unstructured. The state of the art isn't great for government datasets, it has to be said: if you're lucky you get a "code X means ABCD" but rarely are you told exactly how the data were generated, the limits on its accuracy, situations where it shouldn't be used, etc.

Finally, we need to change attitudes and social systems. Data is produced as the product of work done, and is rarely conceived of as having a life outside the original work that produced it. Some datasets will (some won't--think of how many projects fail to interest anyone but the person who started them). This means thinking of yourself not just as the person who does the work, but the person who leads a project of interested outsiders and (in some cases) collaborators and who is building something that will last beyond their time. This is not a natural mindset within government nor, in many cases, science. Funding and budgeting systems at the moment may prevent this, and would need to change.

The good news is that while government datasets are rarely generated collaboratively, science is a little further along. PubMed and GenBank are just two examples of great science collaborations that we can learn from, and I'm sure there are more. Beyond science, OpenStreetMap is an important example of collaborative data gathering and the Open Knowledge Foundation folks may have work in this area already. I'm keen to learn more about the open data projects that are more than just data-over-the-wall and share what I find. Time to stop kicking myself and start learning!

Caktus Consulting Group: Django and Hudson CI (Day 1)

2010-03-09T13:51:01Z

We’re always looking for new tools to make our development environment more robust here at Caktus. We write a lot of tests to ensure proper functionality as new features land and bug fixes are added to our projects. The next step is to integrate with a continuous integration system to automate the process and regularly [...]

Arne Brodowski: Einladung zur Django-UserGroup Hamburg am 23. März

2010-03-09T13:51:01Z

Das nächste Treffen der Django-UserGroup Hamburg findet am Dienstag, den 23.03.2010 um 19:30 statt. Wie bei den letzten Malen treffen wir uns wieder in den Räumen der CoreMedia AG in der Ludwig-Erhard-Straße 18 in 20459 Hamburg (Anfahrtsbeschreibung auf Google Maps).

Bitte am Eingang bei CoreMedia AG klingeln, in den 3. Stock fahren und oben am Empfang nach der Django-UserGroup fragen.

Da wir in den Räumlichkeiten einen Beamer zur Verfügung haben hat jeder Teilnehmer die Möglichkeit einen kurzen Vortrag (Format: Lightning Talks oder etwas länger) zu halten. Die meisten Vorträge ergeben sich erfahrungsgemäß vor Ort.

Eingeladen ist wie immer jeder der Interesse hat sich mit anderen Djangonauten auszutauschen. Eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich.

Weitere Informationen über die UserGroup gibt es in unserem Git Repository unter www.dughh.de und im Wiki des Deutschen Django-Vereins.

Financial Reform

2010-03-09T13:50:35Z

Published on March 09, 2010 FINANCIAL REGULATION – LESSONS FROM ICELAND Dean Baker: . . . [Iceland’s experience] makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day.

Leucadia Exec Gets Big Pay to Stay…

2010-03-09T13:34:55Z

The Change in Control terms for executives at Leucadia National Corp. (LUK) were already generous, but for Vice President Justin R. Wheeler, they just got a lot better.

Late last Friday afternoon, Leucadia filed this 8-K and an attached letter agreement to set out Wheeler’s new deal with the company. According to the document, the new terms were “…intended to induce you to remain in the employ of Leucadia National Corporation.”

Frankly, why would he refuse?

Dated March 1, 2010, the agreement states that if within the next five years Wheeler continues to be an executive officer of Leucadia, but neither Ian M. Cumming (Chairman of the Board) nor Joseph S. Steinberg (president) is then serving as Leucadia’s Chief Executive Officer, then Wheeler can make a profitable departure. If he exercises his written option to do so within six months of the stated change in control, he can terminate his employment and receive $2.5 million. That amount can be reduced if it would subject Wheeler to Excise tax liability or if he were to act negligently or breach his duties to the company.

(Of course, if either Cumming or Steinberg leaves the company under certain circumstances between now and 2015, provisions at the bottom of p. 28 of the April, 2009 proxy obligate the company to pay each man $5.1 million. However, that is not a new disclosure.)

But even if Cumming or Steinberg don’t leave, Wheeler may get the money anyway. The second page of the letter states:

7.) At the end of the five year period from the date hereof and if a “Change of Control” has not occurred, the Board of Directors of LUK, may upon the recommendation of LUK’s Compensation Committee, choose, in its sole discretion, and based upon its evaluation of your performance during the five year period, to award you all or any portion of the Payment.

So regardless of whether the company changes hands, or whether Wheeler stays or leaves at the end of 2015, he may get $2.5 million – just to continue doing his job.

Image source: Gala Darling

Sony’s New 3-D TV Warns Kids If They’re Too Close

2010-03-09T13:30:32Z

For parents tired of nagging their kids about sitting too close to the television, Sony says its new 3-D television will do it for you.

: A Japanese graphic describes what happens when a child gets too close to the new Sony television.

A camera sensor built into the television’s bottom bezel, just below the Sony logo, detects if a child comes within one meter, or about 40 inches. After a couple of seconds, an alarm is triggered and the screen will go dark, displaying a message telling the child to back away.

How can the television tell the difference between a child and the child’s nearsighted grandfather moving closer for a better look?

A Sony spokesman says the technology behind the sensor is similar to one used in the company’s Cyber-shot digital cameras. Using an algorithm and geometrical data, the sensor is able to determine whether it’s a child or adult standing in front of the TV.

This feature, which is called the Intelligent Presence Sensor, will only be available in Sony’s upcoming 3-D televisions, and the feature works in both 2-D mode and 3-D mode. So far, Sony has announced the new 3-D television will debut in Japan on June 10 and it is expected to launch globally at nearly the same time.

It won’t come cheap. A 46-inch LCD television will sell for about 350,000 yen (nearly $3,900) although it will likely sell for cheaper in the U.S.

It’s not the first time Sony has incorporated sensors into its televisions. Previous LCD televisions have come with an energy-saving feature using an infrared sensor to automatically turn off the TV if there was no motion or body heat in the TV’s vicinity after a period of time set by the user.

Sony has taken that feature one step further with this new sensor.

The sensor detects when a viewer is not looking at the screen. If after 10 minutes (or whatever pre-set time the user decides), the person is still not looking at the screen, the television screen goes darker to save on energy.

After an additional 30 minutes of the person not looking at the screen, the TV will turn itself off. However, if at any point during this time, the person starts looking at the screen again, the TV returns to its regular illumination.

One more thing this sensor does is find out where people are sitting in relation to the television. For example, if a viewer is not sitting directly in front of the set and is off to the side, the television detects that and funnels the audio in that direction.

50% Efficiency Boost From New Fuel Injection System

2010-03-09T13:14:00Z

chudnall notes a Technology Review story on a new gas engine injection system that promises increased efficiency of up to 50%. "The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that 'activates' it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Austin Startups You Should Meet While You’re at SXSW

2010-03-09T13:00:31Z

Since more than 30,000 people are coming here to Austin for South by Southwest, I figured I’d offer up a list of local companies that members of the digerati should take the time to meet while they’re in town. Austin has a ton of startups, but I tried to highlight the ones doing things that Austinites do well (such as enterprise social media efforts and hardware) as well as those I think are about to break out and become bigger.

A note to those folks following the manufactured Foursquare-Gowalla smackdown: Gowalla is not listed because most people have already met with Josh Williams, Gowalla’s founder, and I wanted to save room for some unknown Austinites.

Gendai Games — This is the company behind GameSalad, a platform that anyone can use to build iPhone games. Its software could become to App Store game development what Microsoft’s Frontpage software was for creating web sites without having to know HTML. One local tech watcher says he thinks that Gendai’s platform could be Apple’s answer to Flash.
Smooth-Stone — I write about this company all the time because I’m intrigued by its plan to use ARM-based chips in servers as a way to conserve energy and match the processing power to the workload required by web-scale companies.
Plerts — A stealthy startup doing some form of personal alerts on the iPhone. I’m hoping the company will launch at SXSW.
Whurleyvision — William Hurley, better known as Whurley, is an Austin tech celebrity, but visit his R&D firm to discuss the future of augmented reality and his rather passionate call for better AR hardware.
ATX Innovation — These are the developers behind the TabbedOut app, which connects with a bar’s payment system and allows you to track and then settle your bar tab with one click. Having waited around for more than 20 minutes for my tab on many occasions, I’m loving this. The app is free and users pay a 99-cent fee on each transaction. It’s available for iPhones, and is being tested right now in several Austin bars and restaurants.
Infochimps — I love this startup because I love anything that makes access to data easier. Infochimps aggregates and then licenses data sets in formats that folks can then use to create new apps, demographic models or whatever; public data sets are free and private ones (or ones that Infochimps has scrubbed) cost money. Anyone can submit a data set.
AreYouWatchingThis.com — If you’ve ever blown off a football game after the first quarter and later found out that your team rebounded in the fourth to win in an upset, you need RUWT. This 3-year-old startup has built a bot that factors in items such as games going into overtime, when talented teams are unexpectedly losing and other indications of an exciting match-up, and then sends out an alert via text or email so that true sports fans never miss out.
LugIron — This company founded by ex-Cisco guys wants to be the middleware between social media and enterprise customer relationship management or business intelligence software. The goal is to provide software that can correlate information from Twitter or Facebook to how it affects your business.
Appozite — This two-man (actually one man and one woman) startup is behind @cheaptweet, which has 22,000 followers and scours Twitter for savings. If you don’t meet with them, at least follow them so you can score some savings.
OtherInbox — Email isn’t going away, but it is becoming increasingly cumbersome. OtherInbox allows users to organize their email, automatically routing messages that come via Facebook or iTunes receipts into folders that you can ignore until you have space time. The endgame is to grab relevant information from your inbox and surface it easily, but we’re not there yet.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Igor Bespamnatyov

Motorola's Backflip Will Make You Come Unhinged

2010-03-09T13:00:00Z

Despite some of forward-thinking hardware, Moto's Backflip is crippled by a horrid Android skin. And there's only so much one can do with 3.1 inches.

Guide to Microsoft Police Forensic Services

2010-03-09T12:59:01Z

The "Microsoft Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook (U.S. Domestic Version)" (also can be found here, here, and here) outlines exactly what Microsoft will do upon police request. Here's a good summary of what's in it:

The Global Criminal Compliance Handbook is a quasi-comprehensive explanatory document meant for law enforcement officials seeking access to Microsoft's stored user information. It also provides sample language for subpoenas and diagrams on how to understand server logs.
I call it "quasi-comprehensive" because, at a mere 22 pages, it doesn't explore the nitty-gritty of Microsoft's systems; it's more like a data-hunting guide for dummies.

When it was first leaked, Microsoft tried to scrub it from the Internet. But they quickly realized that it was futile and relented.

Lots more information.

Small Businesses Turn More Pessimistic

2010-03-09T12:32:41Z

Small-business owners in the U.S. turned slightly more pessimistic in February, although employment readings grew a shade more positive.

The Small Business Optimism Index lost 1.3 points to 88.0 last month, reported the National Federation of Independent Business in a press release Tuesday. The NFIB noted that only two of 10 components posted gains last month.

The subindex covering expected business conditions dropped 10 points to a -9 reading, and sales expectations dropped three points to zero.

The report said the drop in sales expectations may explain why fewer owners planned to increase inventories. The inventory index dropped three points to -7 in February. Small-business owners saw some improvement in earnings, although the trend remained negative. The index for better earnings rose three points to -39.

The job-creation index was unchanged at -1 in February. But the pace of layoffs slowed dramatically, and slightly more owners, on net, reported job openings were hard to fill. Consequently, the report said, “Net job creation will appear in coming months, but the gains will be painfully slow.”

Inflationary pressures were nearly nonexistent last month. Seasonally adjusted, the net percentage of owners raising prices was -21%, down 3 points from January; more small businesses were cutting prices than raising them.

When RealNetworks Settled on DVD Copying, We All Lost

2010-03-09T12:32:36Z

Photo: Roman Pinzon-Soto

RealNetworks just screwed us all by settling lawsuits in which it might have lost--but which might also have given some new life to fair use for digital media. The post-RealDVD world means that unless there's a major change to the law surrounding copy protection, there will never be a legal way to perform legal acts of copying or shifting protected movies, music, and games. Take it from a guy who has a special E Ticket. The major movie studios can never sue me nor four other individuals ever for a variety of media-moving activities that you and 300 million other Americans could be subject to. It's like a superpower. More on how we got this pass later. The suits in question revolve around RealDVD, software Real introduced in September 2008 that would copy the full contents of a video DVD to a file that could be played back on a Windows system. RealDVD is not a DVD ripper: those programs use one of many methods to strip the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DRM that wraps up DVD content, and other defensive techniques.

CSS and its ilk aren't precisely defended by technology--the standards are too weak or poorly executed--but by law. The much-excoriated Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits "circumvention" of software that's designed to prevent copying. Breaking DRM encryption breaks the law.

But Real went through the steps to obtain a license from the DVD Copy Control Association (DCCA), which controls CSS on behalf of the movie industry. RealDVD decrypted the DVD, copied it, and then locked it tight. Up to five PCs licensed by the same person could play back the discs. (Real also broke through a couple of unrelated protection efforts.)

RealNetworks must have calculated that as a company with a large war chest, it could succeed where others didn't dare to tread. As soon as it released RealDVD, it preemptively sued the DCCA and several studios to establish that it had the right to use CSS in the way RealDVD did. The studios and DCCA sued in return, and got software sales halted. The studios won in August 2009; Real appealed.

The settlement on Monday clears all the suits by RealNetworks agreeing to never sell the software again, refund the money to about 2,700 RealDVD purchasers, disable an associated metadata service, and pay $4.5 million to several movie studios, its Rhapsody partner Viacom, and the DCCA to cover legal and other expenses.

Some people may truly hate RealNetworks for its mediocre RealPlayer software (once a technical miracle) that was bundled with poorly disclosed third-party adware programs. But RealDVD was a thin blade trying to shimmy open the door of fair use.

Fair use is a maddeningly ambiguous set of rules enshrined in copyright law that mention nothing whatsoever about personal use and copying. Court decisions have shaped fair-use exemptions to copyright laws. Congress has passed extremely narrow copyright exclusions for personal use as well.

Without testing specific ideas about fair use or copyright scope in court, there's no sure way to know whether your particular software program, Web site, tweet, or steampunk-based laser decrypter isn't in violation. When the MPAA or a studio sues you, you could potentially plow through millions of dollars with no idea of the outcome.

You can always be sued, but you want to make sure that you have some basis on which to defend yourself, especially if the law and court decisions firmly back you up.

As BoingBoing recently reported about its battle with MagicJack, a group without crazily deep pockets can win and recover costs when it has a strong idea it is in the right. (BoingBoing benefitted from the California strategic lawsuit against public participation or SLAPP, which wouldn't apply to software and hardware.)

That what was made the RealDVD suits so exciting, because Real has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank, and had a pugnacious CEO, Rob Glaser. Glaser faced down Microsoft over unfair competition and got nearly $800 million from the Windows maker. (Glaser was forced out as head of Real a few weeks ago, although he intended to move on after an executive search; he remains chairman of the board and owns nearly 40 percent of the firm.)

Even better, Real wasn't promoting piracy, or the broad right to rip DVDs into an unprotected format and then move them onto all kinds of devices for playback. RealDVD was very very narrow in purpose: can individuals buy software that converts one kind of protected content on a specific physical medium into another, with even stronger encryption?

Back in 2002, I joined a model lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, what became known as Newmark v Turner (after Craig Newmark of craigslist, one of four other co-plaintiffs). The EFF wanted Newmark v to be joined to a lawsuit originated in 2001 by 28 movie studios, TV production firms, and cable operators against SonicBlue, which made ReplayTV, a digital video recorder that was at one point mildly superior to TiVo.

You may recall the ReplayTV suit, which begat the statement in a magazine interview from then chief executive of Turner Broadcasting that skipping ads was "theft," and that not watching ads was breaking a contract. He said, "There's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom." The industry later tried to backpedal from these statements.

Our suit was a way to try to establish that consumers had rights in this fight among firms: that time-shifting (recording for later consumption) and space-shifting (moving among devices under our control for personal use) were perfectly acceptable, and that we were in danger of losing such rights. Ad skipping was also part of the suit.

Remarkably, a judge agreed to join us in the fight, to the surprise, we think, of the 28 media firms. That would have been ugly had we gone to trial. We faced some potential (though unlikely) penalties were it to be proved that we had violated copyright in our efforts to establish we had used media fairly.

The media firms had a big problem, though, in that it would have been an ugly public-relations battle to try to paint Craig Newmark, your humble reporter, and three other mild-mannered individuals as horrible scofflaws.

Had we won, we would have enshrined a judicial opinion that would have perhaps emboldened consumer-electronics firms and software makers to create products that put much more control over recorded programs in the hands of consumers.

Instead, SonicBlue went bankrupt and sold its assets to another firm that removed the features in question in 2003. The media firms then dismissed its lawsuit against the companies involved.

Here's where it gets interesting. I had completely forgotten until researching the case to write this editorial that the 28 firms gave Craig, me, and our three fellow plaintiffs a "covenant not to sue" for the acts in question. That essentially nullified the suit because we had no more fear of litigation. (The EFF tried to get the same rights for all ReplayTV owners, just 5,000 people, but failed when the judge wouldn't move the case into class-action status.)

So we are copyright superheroes, with the ability to advance ads in a single click, shift content among hardware, and watch at our leisure! Behold us, and despair, for you will not see our like again.

RealNetworks needs to work with studios, so it settled and paid less than 1 percent of its still-giant cash horde--last year, the company's cash was of greater value than its market capitalization for several months--to be able to move forward on content licensing.

I can understand why they did it, but it resembles the Google Book Settlement, a massive effort by Google to get a special judicial and settlement right to not be sued for selling works to which the owner cannot be found and to which it does not have assigned rights (so-called orphan works).

If Google succeeds, then no other firm will go through the expensive litigation that allowed Google to reach the point where it can settle and win in cooperation with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. Google will have a de facto monopoly.

It's unlikely that any other firm with the resources to challenge the media industry will release software or hardware that would allow DVD conversion in a manner that a court could find legal. Real was the last, great hope, because any other similar firm already has multi-million to multi-billion-dollar deals in play. Apple, Microsoft, and others aren't going to release anything that jeopardized how they work with giant copyright holders.

That leads to the conclusion that in order to make legal copies, you are obliged to be a pirate. Media companies failure to accommodate the notion that people may have legitimate purposes for making digital copies for their own use dooms them to eternal piracy.

We're all screwed. Well, I'm not, probably. But you are.

(Disclosure: About a decade ago, a company I helped incubate was bought by RealNetworks, and I received a modest amount of stock, long sold.)

Marko Samastur: N900 applications I miss

2010-03-09T12:24:23Z

I love using N900, but there are applications or features I miss. This post is a reminder to me on what I might do if I find more time. Since list is too long for me to do everything (unless I suddenly win lottery), feel free to pick an idea you like and run with it. Just let me know afterwards where I can see results of your work or participate in development.

Offline Wikipedia. When I am not behind a computer or reading, I like to be outdoors and even though cheap always available Internet was supposed to be here any day now, I regularly find myself information hungry in places with a very slow or no Internet connection. N900 with SD card could pretty much store everything I wanted and building an app that process and display information from Wikipedia dumps doesn’t look like a too difficult task.

QStarDict port for Maemo is great and it has become one of my favorite applications. However its user interface suffers from being a direct port of a desktop version one and could be improved with one that wastes less space and is orientation aware. Reading dictionary is one of few things I wish I could do in portrait mode.

Web platform for Maemo. Wouldn’t it be great if you could build Maemo applications with web technologies? QtWebKit is a great place to start and I am certain I could expose new functionality through addToJavascriptWindowObject of QWebFrame class. Beside exposing this stuff I would also like to create tools and interfaces for developers and users alike with which they can easily package a web application as a standalone Maemo application or in case of users, turn a website into an application (I know you can add a bookmark to a website but it is not quite the same thing).

Caffeine for N900. I would like to pick “Switch profile to silent for <x time>” and know N900 will turn back normal profile when that time period expires. I always forget to turn ringing back on after I leave cinema.

Monitor unknown calls. I don’t want to pollute my address book with every phone number under the sun, but I would appreciate if I could get a hint if I ever talked or called the number in question. Bonus points for using public phone books to fetch name for given number and parsing number for clues (which country or part of it is call coming from).

This is not a complete list of things I want, but rest are mostly feature requests (except email client which currently really kind of sucks). For example I wish calendar had support for CalDAV or PDF viewer for screen rotate, search and fit to width.

I am aware that Maemo should be called MeeGo now, but a habit of years can’t be changed in few weeks. I searched for above applications and didn’t find them, but if you know of any I missed, then please let me know.

The factory in the center

2010-03-09T12:15:06Z

Old time factories had a linear layout, because there was just one steam engine driving one drive shaft. Every machine in the shop had to line up under the shaft (connected by a pulley) in order to get power.

That metaphor extended to the people working in the factory. Each person was hired and trained and arranged to maximize output. The goal was to engage the factory, to feed it, maintain it and have it produce efficiently.

Distribution was designed in sync with the factory. You wanted to have the right number of trucks and drivers to handle whatever the factory produced and to get it where it needed to go.

Marketing was driven by the factory as well. The goal of marketing was to sell whatever the factory could produce in a given month, for as much money and as little overhead as possible.

And things like customer service and community relations were expenses, things you did in order to keep the factory out of trouble.

So...

What happens when the factory goes away?

What if the organization has no engine in the center that makes something. What if that's outsourced? What if you produce a service or traffic in ideas? What happens when the revolution comes along (the post-industrial revolution) and now all the value lies in the stuff you used to do because you had to, not because you wanted to?

Now it doesn't matter where you sit. Now it doesn't matter whether or not you're adding to the efficiency or productivity of the machine. Now you don't market to sell what you made, you make to satisfy the market. Now, the market and the consumer and idea trump the system.

Suddenly, the power is in a different place, and the organization must change or else the donut collapses.

Muharem Hrnjadovic: Smartphones are game changing technology!

2010-03-09T12:03:50Z

I received my Motorola Milestone android smartphone last Friday and have now first hand experience of the utility of such a device. It is a

navigation device
great “communicator” (micro-blogging, email, irc, instant messaging etc.)
e-reader (rss feeds, electronic books in a variety of formats)
mobile media player
voip/sip device

all neatly packaged in a gadget that fits in your pocket. Oh, and yes, you can also use it place or receive phone calls
So, just in case you don’t have a smartphone yet: get one! It’s a game changer.

Recent example: I took my mum to airport this morning (30 minute drive). After seeing her off I checked for new audio-casts (using Google listen) and saw one that interested me (Hadoop with Philip Zeyliger).
It was downloaded in no time and I could listen to it while driving back home which was a great use of my time.

Here’s some additional software I installed over the last couple of days:

twidroid for twitter and identica
NewsRob a Google reader client
Google listen for audio-casts etc.
Astro file manager not used that much yet
Meebo IM for instant messaging

Any other cool stuff out there that I missed?

The High Cost of Clutter

2010-03-09T12:00:48Z

This post is from new staff writer Sierra Black. Sierra writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale at Childwild.com. Last week, J.D. wrote about Stuff; today, Sierra shares her thoughts on the costs of clutter.

Do you have piles of papers lurking on your desk? Mountains of laundry looming beside your bed? Shelves double-stacked with knick-knacks? I have a bit of a clutter problem myself. The other day, I spent an hour looking for the vacuum cleaner, which eventually turned up buried under a pile of laundry almost as tall as I am.

All that clutter isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive. That’s right: Excess Stuff can keep costing you money even after it’s been bought and paid for.

How expensive is your Stuff? Professional organizer Jen Hunter of Find Your Floor in Boston says clutter can cost us real money in a lot of ways:

Buying replacement Stuff: Somewhere in your closet is that pair of running shoes you bought last year. Probably next to the ones you bought the spring before that. Clutter costs us dollars and time when we have to buy duplicates of stuff we know we own but just can’t find.

Damage to your Stuff: When you have more Stuff than space, storage can become a problem. Things can get stepped on, stored improperly and broken, water-damaged or just so buried they can’t be retrieved when needed.

Missing deadlines: When your Stuff is disorganized, you wind up paying hundreds of dollars a year in bank fees, late charges, library fines, overdue fees and tax penalties. Trust me on this one. I speak from years of painful experience.

Renting storage space: Almost 10% of U.S. families rent storage space for belongings that don’t fit in their homes. That’s a lot of dollars going to serve your Stuff instead of your life. Even those that don’t rent space may choose larger homes than they need so that they can store more Stuff.

Health costs: Out of control clutter can pose health risks from falling, and encourage the growth of allergens like dust and mold. Treatments for those can get expensive. Clutter can also affect your mental health. Writer Ariel Gore saw a therapist until she realized that what she really wanted was a clean home. So she hired a housekeeper for less than she paid the therapist and lived happily ever after.

To Hunter, the biggest cost is an intangible. “It’s the impediment that it presents to people’s lives,” she says.

Stacy J. Kaplan of Clutter Away in San Diego agrees. “You can’t function at your optimum level if you’re disorganized,” Kaplan says. “You wouldn’t run a business without a business plan. If you’re not organized your business will fail. A house is a small business in a way. It’s the operating structure behind what your family is doing.”

Clutter stops us from working as effectively as we otherwise might. At its most basic level, time spent looking for your car keys is time you’re not spending working, playing or relaxing.

It also costs us time because all that Stuff demands attention. While clutter might be a sign of neglect, it requires us to spend time working around it to accomplish basic household tasks like paying bills or preparing a meal. Those extra hours of housework are a drain on time and energy that could go into creative side projects, education or any number of other productive pursuits.

We can become prisoners of our Stuff. J.D. has written a lot here about how Stuff ties up our money. We can inadvertently tie up a lot of our earnings in rarely used sports equipment, video games, and other pricey toys. Selling that unused Stuff frees up not only your cash but your energy. When there’s too much Stuff around you, you’re like a plant in a too-small pot. It’s hard to grow or thrive when hemmed in by clutter.

Of course, the answer isn’t to move to a bigger place. There are families who live happily in 100-square-foot apartments. They just have less Stuff than we do.

The solution is to put your space on a diet. Some basic steps to get started:

Consider adopting The Compact, an agreement to buy nothing new for one year. This should cut the flow of Stuff coming in down to a trickle.

To deal with the Stuff you have, go through one small area at a time. Don’t try to do the whole house at once. Choose a room, a closet, a desk, or even just a kitchen drawer.

A good rule of thumb: Get rid of anything you don’t use or love.

A habit of clutter can be hard to give up. If you’re used to having a lot of Stuff around you, a pared-down space can feel too spare and empty. Before you rush to fill that void, try sitting with it for awhile and really setting an intention for you want to replace your clutter with. It might be original art, new bookcases, workshop space or just more breathing room.

Whatever you choose to do with your space, you can use the same techniques you used to clear it to keep it clean. Don’t keep Stuff you don’t use or need. Don’t buy Stuff you don’t want or need. Spend a little time each day keeping your space organized.

Here are the top three clutter-busting tips from GRS Twitter followers:

“Throw clutter in bags, put them in the attic. As you need something, take it from the bag. After 6mo, donate bags.” — @jacobmlee
“For clutter: I’m using @gretchenrubin’s rules: Make your bed and the 1-min rule: if you can do it in 1 min, do it now!” — @jc_losangeles
“My fave declutter advice: Spend 15 Mins a day!” — @BudgetsAreSexy

I know we just talked about Stuff last week, but how do you combat clutter? What tips and tricks can you share with readers?

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Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

Ned Batchelder: Max 18

2010-03-09T11:46:48Z

Today is my son Max's 18th birthday. Although he is not my oldest, in many ways he is my eldest. It's been a pleasure watching and helping him grow into a man, and it will be difficult to let him go off to college in the fall.

He's made various appearances in this blog over the years, making a micro Lego AT-AT and social disturbances at 10, a Flash movie at 11, scientific observations and programming first steps at 13, innovative cinema at 14, a stop-motion movie for French class and an OS X application at 16.

I'm very proud of Max and everything he's done, and I'm looking forward to what's next.

Happy Birthday, Max!

Computing Prize Winner Did Not Rest On His Laurels

2010-03-09T11:00:24Z

Computing organizations, like groups in other disciplines, regularly hand out awards to pioneers who helped shape the field. Charles Thacker certainly did that, but didn’t stop there.

: National Academy of Engineering; Charles Thacker

The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday is naming Thacker the latest recipient of the A.M. Turing award, which comes with $250,000 and carries prestige akin to a Nobel Prize in the industry. Thacker is being recognized largely for the Alto, a machine developed in 1974 at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center that is often called the world’s first personal computer. The ACM is also citing Thacker’s contributions at Xerox PARC to the invention of Ethernet–the most widely used technology for local networks–as well as work on tablet-style computers since becoming a researcher at Microsoft in the 1990s.

“This guy is a real genius,” says Alan Kay, a researcher who worked with Thacker at PARC and a fellow Turing award winner. “We don’t like to sling that word around in our field, but he is one. He is magic.”

Thacker says the manager in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor, was a psychologist who inspired scientists there to pursue a broad vision of computers as devices that could transform documents and other communications media. But to most people at the time they were a lot less inspiring, managed largely by interacting with green-screen terminals that could only display simple text.

Thacker, who is 67, says his work to fulfill Taylor’s vision was aided by advances such as dynamic random-access memory chips–pioneered by Intel–which could store data temporarily at a lower cost than prior technologies. That allowed the PARC team to equip the Alto with what came to be known as “bit-mapped” computer displays; these could render more complex images, such as pages with text in multiple fonts that looked like paper documents. The display technology was the foundation of the Alto’s graphical user interface, a software technology that would later be a distinguishing feature of Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

Another key invention at PARC was the first laser printer, an outgrowth of Xerox’s heritage in document-handling. Ethernet, Thacker recalls, was largely dreamed up as a way to help the Alto send files to the new device for printing. “We really wanted to use that printer,” he says.

After leaving PARC in 1983, Thacker helped start a new lab for Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, where he spent 13 years. He later joined Microsoft–first at a lab started in Cambridge, England, and subsequently at a lab the software giant set up in Silicon Valley lab, where he remains.

Thacker’s chores in the 1990s included working on the company’s version of a tablet computer, which in those days was seen mainly as a device that could be used to take notes with a pen-style pointing device. After suffering a series of stumbles, Microsoft managed to work many of the bugs out of such devices–which now offer handwriting recognition in the range of 92% accuracy, Thacker estimates–and convinced computer makers to make and sell them. “I totally credit him with the resurrection of the tablet,” says Gordon Bell, another well-known computer researcher who started at DEC and now works for Microsoft.

But tablets have so far largely been confined to specialized business applications. “We saw nothing like the hockey-stick growth we thought would happen,” Thacker says. (He declines to express an opinion yet about Apple’s iPad. “I haven’t figured it out,” he says).

Thacker’s most celebrated contribution in recent years stems from economic and technological changes in the electronics industry. The phenomenon known as Moore’s Law, an oft-quoted aphorism for how quickly chip makers shrink their circuitry, is good for buyers of those products but causes problems for people who want to develop and test new computer designs.

Creating chips using the latest manufacturing process now can take years and millions of dollars. “It’s too expensive to build the kind of hardware we used to,” Thacker says.

But Moore’s Law simultaneously helped provide a solution. The trend has boosted the capability of chips known as FPGAs–field programmable gate arrays–which companies use as an alternative to designing chips from scratch for some kinds of applications.

Thacker was urged to exploit the technology by David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley (Thacker’s alma mater). Microsoft helped fund the development of what is called Bee3, for Berkeley Emulation Engine–which is essentially a circuit board with four FPGA chips that can be programmed to act like a parallel computer to allow students to develop and test computer designs. Thacker says 100 of the systems are in use at leading universities that work on hardware designs, and the technology is also being used by Microsoft research.

“His most recent project is one of his most significant,” says Patterson of Thacker. “He’s not a guy who has ever thought about retiring.”

The Turing award is named for Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computing pioneer who is credited with helping Allied forces crack the German Enigma code during World War II. One of the other notable aspects to Thacker winning the prize is the fact that he is a hardware specialist; since Maurice Wilkes won the award in 1967, recipients have primarily been known for achievements in software or other aspects of computing.

“I never expected to get this award,” Thacker says. “I was just flabbergasted.”

Tech Today: Venture-Capital Firms Struggle, Tough Road for Google’s Network

2010-03-09T11:00:13Z

Tech Today gathers all the biggest technology news of the morning’s Wall Street Journal into one place for your reading pleasure.

Venture-Capital Firms Struggle: The technology bubble popped a decade ago, but the venture-capital industry that helped finance the boom stayed largely intact. Now venture-capital firms are going through their own brutal culling.

Where Clouds Displace Forests: With a combination of cheap hydroelectric power and favorable climate conditions, Prineville, Ore. is joining what has become the Pacific Northwest’s latest gold rush: housing electronic data.

Tokyo Exchange Investigates Fujitsu: The Tokyo Stock Exchange is investigating whether Japanese technology services firm Fujitsu intentionally hid information regarding the resignation of its president last year.

Tough Road for Google’s Network: Google’s plan to provide ultrahigh-speed Internet connections faces a big challenge: building the network and making sure there are services available to take advantage of it.

Google Tests TV Search Service: Google is testing a new television programming search service with Dish Network, which allows users to search content from Dish and the Web.

Verizon Will Carry NFL’s RedZone: The NFL and Verizon Wireless struck a deal to distribute live games and the league’s popular RedZone Channel beginning next season.

Four short links: 9 March 2010

2010-03-09T11:00:00Z

Cooperative Behaviour Spreads Through a Group, But So Does Cheating (Not Exactly Rocket Science) -- Fowler and Christakis suggest that people tend to mimic the actions of those they played with. They could be directly imitating the actions of other players, or they could be looking out for cues that tell them the 'right' or 'normal' way of behaving. Whether it's specific actions or social norms that are spreading, the result is the same - a ripple effect that causes groups of people to act in similar ways. People copy the modeled behaviour that they see. This is why, when you start a new social site, you should seed it with people who behave the way that you wish newcomers to behave.
Tulip -- open source 3D visualisation software of large graphs, homepage here. (via hjl on Delicious)
Six Months of Hacker News Front Page Data -- half a million archived records from the Hacker News front page, captured every 15m.
Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention (World Changing) -- a very thought-provoking post that challenges the idea that all we need to do to help the citizens of (insert censored country here) is to have more people using Tor. I wonder whether we’re looking closely enough at the fundamental limitations of circumvention as a strategy and asking ourselves what we’re hoping internet freedom will do for users in closed societies. [...] o figure out how to promote internet freedom, I believe we need to start addressing the question: “How do we think the Internet changes closed societies?” In other words, do we have a “theory of change” behind our desire to ensure people in Iran, Burma, China, etc. can access the internet? Why do we believe this is a priority for the State Department or for public diplomacy as a whole? (via BoingBoing)

Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Tracking tax paperwork

2010-03-09T10:48:23Z

Doing your taxes is never fun (unless, you know, you're one of those people who're into that sort of thing). That's why erikdw's tip is great — it takes away some of the stress when tax time comes around:

When I do my taxes each year I have to gather together a copious amount of paperwork (ESPP, mortgage, property taxes, W2s, many 1099s, cost basis for various things, etc.).

In the past I have just used a plain text document to track the gathering of the various paperwork.

However, this year I am using RTM to track this. I created a "Taxes" list, and I have just added items for all the forms I have needed in the past (by harvesting that info out of an old text document), and when I remember another form then I add it to the list. If I receive a form in the mail then I check off the entry. Some of the paperwork I need never arrives though, so instead of needing to remember to print it out myself, I can look at my Taxes list and see that I still have not received it and probably need to print it out. Once I have completed all my items, I know I am ready to do my taxes.

Then next year I can just "uncomplete" all of the items from this list and start the cycle again.

An added benefit is that this is a central place for me to note any new taxable events/account openings that occur during this year, so that I will remember to gather paperwork for those items when tax season rolls around again.

Obviously, you should not put account numbers or any super sensitive info like that into your TODO lists. e.g., for investment accounts, I just put a bank/brokerage name, account type, and form needed (e.g., BofA savings 1099-INT).

Thanks for sharing this tip, erikdw! You're our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week. :)

Do you have a suggestion for our weekly Tips & Tricks post? Got an interesting set-up or idea? Head over to the Tips & Tricks forum and add a new thread and let us know how you use RTM. Each week we'll give away a 1 year Pro account to the user whose idea inspires the Tips & Tricks Tuesday blog post for that week.

Making Sense of CPU and GPU Model Numbers?

2010-03-09T10:20:00Z

b4dc0d3r writes "How do you make sense of the various model numbers or naming schemes for CPUs, graphics cards, and the related chipsets? All I want is something that will run Oblivion and output full 1080 video to a TV. Last time I built my own computer I just went to Pricewatch, made a few easy choices, and everything came to my door. Do I really have to research the differences among Core i5, Core 2 Duo, Pentium 4, Pentium D, Semperon, Athlon, Phenom...? And that's just the processor. Is there a reference somewhere? In short, how do you buy a computer these days?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Song Packaging in the Hindi Film Industry – The Concluding Part

2010-03-09T10:18:40Z

Continuing my previous post on Song Packaging, I thought I’ll follow up the post with some new additions, many of which have been suggested by my readers and some that I might have missed out in my earlier post.

To reiterate the disclaimer, I may have missed out on a number of songs that have cinematic excellence attached to it. These are the songs that came to my mind off the top of my head. I did not conduct an extensive research, or carry out a poll to arrive at these songs. I am sure that there are plenty of songs out there who deserve a spot here. You can add those in the comments section and I can evaluate and add them to following posts on this topic (if any).

Kya Karoon – Wake Up Sid (2009); Singer: Clinton Cerejo; Music: Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Director: Ayan Mukherji; Starring: Ranbir Kapoor, Konkona Sen Sharma

A song that captures the youth in its essence. If you want to understand the mind of today’s teenager who wants to live life for today rather than worry and think about tomorrow, here’s a song that tells you exactly that. What especially stands out in this song is that this song is the typical day in the life of a fresh, college-going student. Guess it takes a young director to bring out the emotions and feelings of the younger generation.

The scene where Ranbir seems to be floating in the air without a care in the world is the defining moment of the song and is representative of a feeling that every teenager must have experienced at some point in time in some way or the other. Generalistic, but true.

Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan – CID (1956); Singers: Md Rafi, Geeta Dutt; Music: OP Nayyar; Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri; Director: Raj Khosla; Starring: Dev Anand, Shakila, Johnny Walker

If there is one song that defines the characteristic of a city like Mumbai, it is this one, which has rung true since the year it was produced. The practical nature of the song is overwhelming and one can really identify with this song. This is also one of the few songs that have been entirely picturized on a comedian (although a song featuring Johnny Walker was but obvious in a Guru Dutt production) and has survived through the ages. Even today, people can’t picture anyone but Johnny Walker singing this song as he roams the streets of Mumbai characterizing everything in sight and telling the story of the city through a crude but true lens.

Dost Dost Na Raha – Sangam (1964); Singer: Mukesh; Music: Shankar Jaikishan; Lyrics: Shailendra; Director: Raj Kapoor; Starring: Raj Kapoor, Vyajanthimala, Rajendra Kumar

Raj Kapoor’s first color magnum opus was a runaway success and brought out one of the best films that Indian Cinema has ever seen – the second coming of the Great Showman. Raj Kapoor’s acting prowess is best noticed in this song when he sings this song knowing fully well what transpired between his wife and his best friend. The pain is evident in his expressions with a sort of self-submission to his ill-fate when he faces the camera and is accentuated very well by Mukesh’s voice. But, the moment he looks at Rajendra Kumar and Vyajanthimala, while he pretends to not know anything, his furtive glances tell them that he is fully aware, but prefers to not acknowledge it.

Rajendra Kumar and Vyajanthimala’s expressions are filled with guilt, and moments of their togetherness float by their eyes, which has been captured extremely well by the cinematographer and the director. Just proves to the world at large that one doesn’t have to bleed or shout in anger to express emotions, unlike today’s movies. This is called ‘acting’, where not a word is spoken, but emotions are communicated via looks.

I have intentionally included the song in 3 parts, where the buildup to the song, the main song, and the concluding portion of the song play out all the emotions of one of the most powerful moments in Indian cinema. A majestic masterpiece.

Roz Shaam Aati Thi* – Imtihan (1974); Singer: Lata Mangeshkar; Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal; Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri; Director: Madan Sinha; Starring: Vinod Khanna, Tanuja

*My dad’s suggestion

One of the few songs that have been experimented with and shot at twilight in the 70s. The colors are magnificient and completes this song. Camerawork and lighting were immaculate in the challenged days when no digital photography existed and means were limited. While the song may not be an all-time favourite, it is one which is apt for the mood that the surroundings suggest.

Dhoom Taana – Om Shanti Om (2007); Singers: Abhijeet, Shreya Ghoshal; Music: Pyarelal; Lyrics: Javed Akhtar; Director: Farah Khan; Starring: Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone

This is the second song from the movie Om Shanti Om that has been featured in this series of posts. There are only 3 reasons why this song makes the cut:

a) The music has been composed by Pyarelal, yet he doesn’t find mention in the inlay card of the CD. This is incidentally, the only song that he has composed after his partner’s death (Laxmikant).

b) Digital morphing and photography at it’s best when Deepika Padukone is seen dancing with superstars of yester-years. Very cleverly done. Makes me imagine and wonder what if these stars were brought back to their glorious days and asked to act in movies today.

c) Fantastic set design. The screen comes to life.

Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam – Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959); Singer: Geeta Dutt; Music: SD Burman; Lyrics: Kaifi Azmi; Director: Guru Dutt; Actors: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman

If there was one director that significantly changed the way we looked at Indian Cinema, it was Guru Dutt. Any list would be incomplete without having a song featuring one of his movies/himself. Guru Dutt’s sheer genius comes to the fore in this song. Note once again, that this song does not have any lip syncing, but the actors’ emotions speak louder than words. The lighting and effect of the scene have a lingering effect that tells the story of the entire movie in a matter of a few minutes.

The final shot of the song is one that associates itself with the sad demise of the director and is the one last lingering memory that Hindi film lovers hang onto till today and will forever continue to do so. That was the magic of Guru Dutt.

Bade Achche Lagte Hain – Balika Badhu (1976); Singers: Amit Kumar, Rajni Sharma; Music: RD Burman; Lyrics: Anand Bakshi; Director: Tarun Majumder; Actors: Sachin, Rajni Sharma

Innocence personified. A young, engaged couple sitting near the banks of the river let their emotions flow without being explicit about it. One of RD Burman’s best compositions and Amit Kumar’s first hit song.

Jeena Yahan Marna Yahan – Mera Naam Joker (1970); Singer: Mukesh; Music: Shankar Jaikishan; Lyrics: Shailendra; Director: Raj Kapoor; Actor: Raj Kapoor

The perfect song to end this chapter. A song that will make you teary-eyed even if you have no context to the song. The autobiography of a man who was an entertainer till his last dying breath. Incidentally, this movie bombed at the box office and left the Greatest Showman on Earth penniless and heartbroken on seeing that a subject which was so close to him was shunned by the public to which he had dedicated his entire life to.

If you were to watch this song again, this is perhaps the song that sums up Raj Kapoor’s life in totality and leaves you in awe. It is safe to assume that Hindi Cinema will never see another Raj Kapoor ever.

Score: 0 (0 votes cast)

Varnam: How Tom Hanks makes History Interesting

2010-03-09T09:00:40Z

The current issue of Time features Tom Hanks on the cover. They have anointed him as America’s Historian in Chief for producing From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific. The article then mentions his idea of making history interesting

What differentiates Hanks from the academic past masters is his conviction that the historical experience should be a very personal one. He harbors a pugnacious indignation against history as data gathering, preferring the work of popular historians like McCullough, Ambrose, Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin. He wants viewers to identify with their ancestors, allowing them to ponder the prevalence of moral ambiguity, human willpower and plain dumb luck in shaping the past. And he wants to be transported back in time, with a Sousa band banging the drum loudly.

As Hanks’ star rose in the 1990s, he sought out new sources of what he calls “entertainable historical knowledge.” Leon Uris’ fact-anchored novels — Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus — taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did, but the entertainment level had to be hyperkinetic to hold his attention. It was the same with most academic histories. “The writing is often too dull to grab regular people by the lapel,” he says.

The way he found was to make it a mix of spectacle and drama, drawing on his own cultural influences.

His favorite book as a teen was Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which he thought was far scarier than any Hitchcock psychodrama because it had actually happened to a particular family in Holcomb, Kans. “Capote’s horror,” Hanks says, “has stuck with me.” Capote called his work a nonfiction novel — informed by reporting but drawing on the techniques of fiction for its dramatic power. It’s a fair description of Hanks’ productions, in which historical events and figures are drawn together along fictionalized story arcs, and characters have the psychological interiority of characters in novels.[Tom Hanks on 'Pacific' HBO Series, World War II, History]

Web’s Buildout Boosting Server Chip Demand

2010-03-09T08:45:53Z

A few days ago, Jay Adelson, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based social media company, Digg, told me that his company now has hundreds of servers. And the size of its infrastructure was continuing to grow with its usage. And that is after the company has started to maximize its CPU usage after tapping the power of open source software such as Cassandra and Hadoop for data analytics and data mining.

And it is not just Digg, but most mid-sized web companies like them are beginning to see the demands on their infrastructure increase, especially as they start to cater to more and more visitors, including those accessing them from smart mobile devices. Add to this the demand for enterprises, it is clear that we could soon see a bump in the sales of servers and by extension chips that power these servers.

These strong trends are already visible in the sales of AMD and Intel. While AMD saw the sales of its server unit go up 21 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009, Intel’s data center group posted a 21 percent gain in revenues for that same period. Semiconductor sector from analyst Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech thinks that people are underestimating the server demand and as a result he expected strong demand for Intel’s Nehalem EX – Westmere and AMD’s Maranello line up of server chips. are likely to materially benefit from a contemporaneous recovery in enterprise spending.

In a note to his clients this morning, Freedman wrote that he expects that there will be 14.1 million server chips sold during 2010, up from his previous estimate of 13.9 million. Of the 14.1 million MPUs, he expects Intel to sell 12.4 million with an average selling price of $519. He expects Intel to bring in about $6.45 billion in 2010 revenues. In comparison, AMD will sell 1.68 million units at an average price of $411.

This growth is coming at a time when large web companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are choosing to build their own finely tuned servers and using them in increasingly large volumes. The growth in demand and the sheer size of the revenues is one of the main reasons we are seeing many start-ups such as SeaMicro start to tinker and come up with alternative server architectures.

Stacey has pointed out in several posts that the increasingly ARM-based processors are looking to take on Intel and AMD in the server chip business and change the economics of the server business. But for now Intel and AMD can continue to party, thanks to demand for servers from guys like Digg.

Should Akram be opening his mouth?

2010-03-09T08:18:01Z

(Also in www.cricketaakash.com)

Today, Wasim Akram came out with a statement exonerating Kamran Akmal and other Pakistani cricketers of corruption in cricket.

This sounds fine on the outset. After all, Akram is Big Brother to many of the kids, and a big hand of support on the shoulders feels wonderful. Akram’s done the right thing.

He’s done the right thing, but is Akram right?

To answer that, we need to know Wasim Akram. Not the Akram who has been the finest left-arm pacer in the history of cricket. But the other Akram. The Akram who was among the many who had to appear before Justice Qayyum during the inquiry into match-fixing in Pakistan in 2001.
Of course, Akram was exonerated.

But Qayyum wrote in his report: “This commission feels that all is not well and that Wasim Akram is not above board. He has not co-operated with this Commission. It is only by giving Wasim Akram the benefit of the doubt after Ata-ur-Rehman changed his testimony in suspicious circumstances that he has not been found guilty of match-fixing. He cannot be said to be above suspicion.”

That’s the Wasim Akram we are discussing here. The Akram who was ‘not above suspicion’.

That was 2001. Cut to 2006, and the Cricinfo article filed by my friend Siddharth Vaidyanathan after meeting Qayyum: “Qayyum told us that he hadn’t wanted a great player like Wasim to be banned, especially towards the end of his career. I had some soft corner for Wasim. He was a very great player, and I was his fan. I didn’t want that towards the end of his career, he should be banned or something like that.”

So Wasim Akram, dare we say it, wasn’t totally honest. And despite the truth of his interaction with Qayyum being made public by Cricinfo, Akram remains at large. No harm in that as such, except that Akram really shouldn’t be issuing certificates to players on the subject of match-fixing. And, well, Akmal and the others may well be honest, but Akram’s certificate, to my mind, weakens their case somewhat.

Reinout van Rees: Long-running GIS web application: ideas needed

2010-03-09T08:01:00Z

I'm working on a Django web application that displays a map and lots of GIS data from various sources. A pretty elaborate mapping application, so two things are a priority:

Interaction must be fast.
The map's current viewpoint should stay mostly intact. So: if you're zoomed in to an area, you should stay zoomed in on that area next time.

The current solution is to build up almost the entire page with a javascript library (Isomorphic's SmartClient) in an iframe. So sidebar with tree-like navigation, main content area, bar at the top: all handled by SmartClient. In the main content area, OpenLayers shows the map. If there's other content to be shown, an iframe with the other content (mostly html) is shown over the map. So the actual map stays loaded with the current location, zoom level and everything intact.

I have several problems with this solution:

Reloading a page takes a long time. Reloading is not what's supposed to be happening, but anyway: initial load takes 30 seconds. I suspect SmartClient instead of the map, but I can't do a real comparison test yet.
The UI is handled by SmartClient, so poof goes most of Django's default template handling. I'd much prefer to use Django's template system to build up my UI instead of some javascript library.
All the usual iframe drawbacks like non-bookmarkable URLs.

My questions in search of ideas/feedback:

Is there a recommended way to keep track of a bunch of map settings? Zoom level, center, enabled layers? In a Django and OpenLayers environment? Continuously sending the data via ajax back to the server and storing it in the user's settings or whatever?
Is there an alternative to keep a map alive between requests? Perhaps some dirty hack with a separate window?
Should I be afraid of re-loading maps or is that normally not a problem?
I'm wondering about ajaxifying most of the django interface: replacing divs (or hiding existing divs) and injecting the main content from another django page into it. Is that practical?

Apple’s iTunes LP 6 Months Later: LP What?

2010-03-09T08:00:40Z

When it was first unveiled, Apple’s new iTunes LP format -– codenamed “Cocktail” and introduced at a “rock and roll event” in San Francisco -– promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs. Offering expanded cover art, lyrics, videos, animation and other digital goodies, iTunes LP was intended to evoke the feeling of spinning an LP record and holding the jacket in your hands. Especially when paired with a tablet computer (then rumored, now real) that would provide a new way to view large-format art, consumers were promised a digital experience that mimicked a physical one.

Six months later, however, iTunes LP doesn’t prompt much consumer recognition, and none of the industry sources with whom I spoke said they viewed it as being anywhere close to game-changing from a format perspective. Rather, it’s considered more of a curiosity. Like an enhanced CD or a DVD packaged with a physical album, iTunes LP’s bonus materials may interest super-fans, but they aren’t generating much buzz among mainstream consumers, and don’t appear to be stimulating LP sales at all. “It’s something most people will look at once,” is how one person put it.

It’s somewhat ironic that the very company that atomized the album in order to sell individual tracks -– one of many causes for the music industry’s decade-long tailspin –- has encouraged the rebundling of songs with iTunes LP. But I’m told by an industry source who preferred to remain anonymous that iTunes LP wasn’t Apple’s idea in the first place. Rather, it’s the result of the same renegotiations between Apple and the major record labels that yielded DRM-free songs and flexible pricing early last year, a concession by Cupertino to make a gesture in favor of album sales as consumers increasingly show a preference for digital singles.

One person who worked on an iTunes LP project said Apple subsidized the initial group of LP editions, which were created by the company’s handpicked third-party developer at costs of up to $60,000. All are issued in “deluxe edition” releases that feature extra tracks, typically priced a few dollars higher than iTunes’ customary $9.99. Neither Apple nor anyone else I spoke with was able to break out sales figures, but sources in various parts of the music industry agreed that the financial impact of iTunes LP on record sales has been tiny, if it’s had any effect at all.

Only 29 LPs are currently for sale in the iTunes store, about a dozen of which were available when the format was launched. Several are catalog albums, meaning that only a couple of new releases each month appear as iTunes LPs. The same person who participated in an iTunes LP project said, “If it costs $50,000 or $60,000, we’re not going to do it again,” although at the same time, acknowledged that Apple’s extra promotion of the release in conjunction with iTunes LP helped it become a moneymaker after all.

Not every project will cost so much. Apple opened a developer kit for iTunes LP in the fall, enabling artists to craft album packages independently. Direct-to-fan marketing tools developer Topspin Media handled a December release for Pixies spinoff band The Everybody, touting it as the first iTunes LP release sold outside the iTunes store. But a Topspin spokesman told me interest in iTunes LP was generally quite meager among artists with which Topspin had worked.

Although the format was initially seen as tailor-made for tablet computing, Apple hasn’t yet done much to promote the iPad as a music device. When Jobs stepped onstage again in January to introduce the iPad, iTunes LP was barely present. The music segment of the presentation was less than 60 seconds long, and although an iTunes LP was visible as Jobs spoke, he never mentioned the format. No one I spoke to said the imminent availability of the iPad had generated interest in new iTunes LP projects.

As it turns out, most artists and labels are pursuing a different avenue for their digital goodies: iTunes’ wildly popular App Store. Numerous artists have released lyrics, videos and other content in both free and paid apps, which also serve as channels for artist news and can be updated with new content anytime.

It’s still possible that once a few million iPads are in consumers’ hands, and with a few more ambitious iTunes LP releases — like the 760-megabyte package for the new album from Gorillaz — the format will prove to be an essential component of a digital album. It’s also possible that iTunes LP will continue to have a miniscule financial impact on record sales, merely providing a small bonus for a dwindling audience of album-oriented fans. At least with its effort and investment in the format, Apple can say it made a redoubled effort to undo the damage it did to last century’s record industry by selling songs one at a time.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Hot Topic: Apple’s iPad

OpenSSH 5.4 released

2010-03-09T07:27:47Z

Damien Miller (djm@) posted to announce@ with the announcement of OpenSSH 5.4. Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new 'netcat mode', many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.

Please read on for the full release announcement: Read more...

Edit places using Street View images

2010-03-09T07:23:35Z

Last week we announced that you can edit details about a business listing directly through the Place Page. But sometimes you may find a place in Google Maps that isn't quite positioned where it should be. Let's say you know that your favorite pizzeria is near the corner but the marker for it appears further down the block. You want all hungry pizza-cravers to be able to find this great spot, so you want to make sure the marker leads them directly to the storefront. You could use our map editing feature (the "move marker" edit) to move it to the right place, but moving the marker to the right location is not always that easy, especially in denser urban areas, if the only reference you have are maps or satellite images because you can only get a view from above. So now we have added one more very handy reference for making a map marker edit: Street View images. It makes the edit much easier.

Let me show you how the editing feature works.

When you find a place that is in a wrong location, click on the marker and get an infowindow open as what you did before.

Click on the "edit" link, and then click the "Move marker" link in the updated infowindow. You'll see two jumping markers in the map and the Street View image appear, which means both of them can be dragged. When you drag the marker on the map to a new position, the marker inside the panorama will be updated correspondingly, and vice versa.

Since you can now view a street-level image of where the marker will be placed, it's not difficult to find the exact spot in the image and place the marker to the right position. Isn't that convenient? After editing, all you need to do is to click the "Save" button above the Street View panorama. If you're not happy with the edit, or just not sure if it is correct, you can always hit the "Cancel" button. Edits with Street View images tend to be more accurate and precise because looking at the ground-level images provides very helpful local detail.

With the editing feature, we encourage our users to put the marker at the entrance of the place. However, users sometimes put the marker in the center of a street block, and we don't have an easy way of detecting this. By introducing this feature, we know approximately where the facades are from Street View images. Based on the information, we can snap the dragged markers to the closest facades automatically by using street view information. Of course, we have a threshold for the snapping: if you attempt to put a marker inside a large place with no Street View image (for example, a park or a stadium), we may end up with the marker in the center and a message box indicating there isn't a Street View image available.

Now you can make sure that everyone searching for your favorite businesses in your hometown can be directed to exactly the right spot, so do your part and move those markers.

Posted by Jie Shao, Software Engineer

NSA Still Ahead In Crypto, But Not By Much

2010-03-09T07:22:00Z

Hugh Pickens writes "Network World summarizes an RSA Conference panel discussion in which former NSA technical director Brian Snow said that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years, but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. 'I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years,' says Snow. 'I think we've got the edge still.' Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. 'Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field.' The NSA has one key advantage (besides their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes): 'We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research,' he said. Snow's claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members on the panel. Adi Shamir, the "S" in the RSA encryption algorithm, said that when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, none of them included public key encryption; 'That demonstrates that NSA was behind,' said Shamir. Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Shree Shree Ravi Shankar & MF Hussein

2010-03-09T07:21:43Z

Now Shree Shree Ravi Shankar has got into the act condemning Hussein's paintings of Indian Goddesses in the nude. I did not say naked. There is a difference. Nude implies a point of view of the artist, and having seen the paintings I would definitely say that that the artists, in exploring the Goddesses as nude, was exploring purity. Condemn me for that. I am willing to argue.

The argument that Hussein should now try and paint Muslim Icons in the nude is a silly , provocative, adversarial statement and a completely political point of view. Nothing to do with Art.

So I amazed at the stand that Shree Shree Ravi Shankar has taken. I have never visited his Ashram , but I always imagined that the words "Art of Living" would be more encompassing and compassionate. I would imagine his movement, called Art of Living, embodies a wider and more artistic creative and holistic way of life. What prompted him then, I wonder, to condemn Hussein and challenge him to paint Muslim icons in the nude ?

Christianity has forever painted Christ in the nude and indeed at crucification often naked too. As have the Greeks and their Gods and Goddesses forever. Nudity has been a tradition in Indian and Hindu art, but never in Islamic art. So why the comparison. As if Hussein went out to create a political statement ? No, it was an artists exploration.

Hussein, on the other hand is alive and well. And very Rich. Rich as never before, painting as never before, and at 95 who could ask for more ? especially from someone that started as a street artist painting film posters. Most of us at 95, if not dead, would be happy to not be in a wheel chair and be able to speak coherently. Hussein paints, has become a genius at marketing himself. As all successful artists (and Guru's) are. There is much to be said for creativity and ageing here.

So lets not feel sorry for M F Hussein. More sorry for ourselves really.

iPhone developer EULA turns programmers into serfs

2010-03-09T07:09:32Z

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published the Apple iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, a secretive document that requires its signatories to agree to a gag order on the terms of the deal. EFF got the agreement by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to NASA, who had signed onto it in order to release its app. EFF Senior IP Attorney Fred von Lohmann has some pithy analysis of just how awful this agreement is for the programmers who gets sucked into it:

Overall, the Agreement is a very one-sided contract, favoring Apple at every turn. That's not unusual where end-user license agreements are concerned (and not all the terms may ultimately be enforceable), but it's a bit of a surprise as applied to the more than 100,000 developers for the iPhone, including many large public companies. How can Apple get away with it? Because it is the sole gateway to the more than 40 million iPhones that have been sold. In other words, it's only because Apple still "owns" the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform.
In short, no competition among app stores means no competition for the license terms that apply to iPhone developers.
If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition (or "generativity," in the words of Prof. Jonathan Zittrain) than the PC era that came before. It's frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads. If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms and customers who love their iPhones should back them.

It's amazing all the ways that the iPhone manages to screw the people that love it: saddling iPhone owners with crappy contracts with abusive mobile companies, limiting their access to programs and forcing them into one-sided EULAs, then screwing the developers with equally abusive agreements. I guess that's one way to think different.

All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement

Previously:

draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04

2010-03-09T06:56:53Z

The latest URI Template draft is now available: draft-gregorio-uritemplate-04. Warning that the syntax has changed substantially from -03 if you haven't been following along. As always, please direct feedback to the W3C URI mailing list.

Beyond breaking firewalls: how to fight net-censorship

2010-03-09T06:34:14Z

Ethan Zuckerman's new piece on Worldchanging, "Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention," looks at the technical and social limitations of circumvention of censoring firewalls that we love so much as a tool for helping people in repressive regimes liberate themselves. It's an excellent and thought-provoking piece that raises more questions than it answers, but it points to some very meaty research problems that people who care about technology and freedom need to attend to.

- We need to shift our thinking from helping users in closed societies access blocked content to helping publishers reach all audiences. In doing so, we may gain those publishers as a valuable new set of allies as well as opening a new class of technical solutions.
- If our goal is to allow people in closed societies to access an online public sphere, or to use online tools to organize protests, we need to bring the administrators of these tools into the dialog. Secretary Clinton suggests that we make free speech part of the American brand identity - let's find ways to challenge companies to build blocking resistance into their platforms and to consider internet freedom to be a central part of their business mission. We need to address the fact that making their platforms unblockable has a cost for content hosts and that their business models currently don't reward them for providing service to these users.
- The US government should treat internet filtering - and more aggressive hacking and DDoS attacks - as a barrier to trade. The US should strongly pressure governments in open societies like Australia and France to resist the temptation to restrict internet access, as their behavior helps China and Iran make the case that their censorship is in line with international norms. And we need to fix US treasury regulations make it difficult and legally ambiguous for companies like Microsoft and projects like SourceForge to operate in closed societies. If we believe in Internet Freedom, a first step needs to be rethinking these policies so they don't hurt ordinary internet users.

Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention

(Image: Great Firewall of China, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from chidorian's photostream)

Previously:

Smart auto-sorting bolt/screw/nut box

2010-03-09T06:20:14Z

Wulf from Craftster built this uber-clever workshop-bits sorting box after getting sick of manually sorting out the buckets of loose bits of metal that built up around his shop: "At the shop where I work we just toss loose screws, bolts, nails and other bits and pieces of hardware from the workbenches and the floor into a bucket and, every couple of years when the bucket gets too full, somebody has to dump the whole mess out and sort everything back to where it belongs. When that job fell to me this Spring, I decided there had to be a better solution. So I designed a bin that would help to at least divide things by type to make the final sorting easier. Though built for an industrial situation, it would work equally well in the home craft room for jewellery findings, sewing notions, etc."

Self-sorting (sorta) bin (via Dinosaurs and Robots)

Previously:

Clock made from a whirling, strobing hard-drive

2010-03-09T06:02:18Z

This Strobeshnik clock is made from an old hard drive: "The digits are etched in the original platter and they're strobed from behind with leds. The HDD motor is driven by a custom circuit without feedback, hence poor startup performance and awful noise. Rotational feedback is provided by an IR LED/phototransistor pair near the place where the head arm formerly was."

The result is a whirling, grinding, eye-catching, unreadable kinetic sculpture. Now that's a timepiece!

Strobeshnik (final) (via JWZ!)

Previously:

Stomach-churning details of CIA waterboarding crimes

2010-03-09T05:58:17Z

Salon's Mark Benjamin went spelunking in the recently released CIA torture memos and comes back with a stomach-churning account of the waterboarding practiced at Gitmo. This fine-tuned torture process repeatedly took its victims to the brink of death (one victim was waterboarded 180+ times) until many of them simply gave up on breathing and tried to allow themselves to drown, only to be revived by unethical medical personnel who collaborated with the war criminals conducting the torture.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session - and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session - a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding - the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.
"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, 'This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

Waterboarding for dummies

Fafblog on the Iraq elections

2010-03-09T05:51:42Z

Fafblog, one of my favorite satirical sites, has a scorching and unfortunately accurate take on the Iraq election:

VICTOREEEEEEEEE! After nineteen years of bombs and wars and torture and bombs and torture and ethnic cleansing and torture, America's mission in Iraq has finally been re-reaccomplished through the miracle of symbolic purple-fingered brown people! Oh sure, all the cynics and the critics and the nattering nabobs of payingattentionism will say "Oh but Giblets haven't we had five or six of these already, what makes these purple fingers different from previous purple fingers" and the answer to that is shut up. These purple fingers are the most purplest-fingeriest purple fingers to ever have been symbolically purpled! They stand as unique and compelling evidence of our nation's sincere generational commitment to transform a brutal impoverished dictatorship into a brutal, more impoverished dictatorship by freeing Iraq from the deadly menace of Iraqis.

Freedom On The Lurch

Previously:

Rhizome's 7 on 7: 7 geeks, 7 artists co-create in NYC

2010-03-09T05:47:58Z

Fred sez,

If you're in NYC on April 17th, definitely consider attending Rhizome.org's new conference, Seven on Seven.
The idea behind Seven on Seven is to pair seven leading artists with seven technologists to see what they can produce. There's already a lot of buzz about the event, and for good reason, our lineup is stellar:
Artists: Cao Fei, Evan Roth, Aaron Koblin, Monica Narula, Ryan Trecartin, Tauba Auerbach, and Marc Andre Robinson
Technologists: Jeff Hammerbacher, Joshua Schachter, Matt Mullenweg, Andrew Kortina, Hilary Mason, Ayah Bdeir, and David Karp
Check the link for full details, artist and technologist pairings, and ticket prices.

Seven on Seven - Rhizome (Thanks, Fred!)

Mike Pirnat: Ten Years

2010-03-09T05:43:21Z

Today (technically yesterday at this point, I suppose) was my ten year anniversary at AG Interactive.

I’m frankly astounded that it’s been so long, so soon.

Once upon a time, there was a 23-year-old version of me, leaving behind the miseries of being an IBM road warrior to sling code for an internet startup with its sights set on an IPO, where lunches were free and the foosball was fast and furious. I was psyched to be able to see both my fianceé and the inside of my apartment on a daily basis. I was a Perl zealot, but willing and curious to learn Python (in spite of my perception that it Just Wasn’t That Great).

Since then I’ve fallen out of love with Perl (she was nuts, man!) and found that Python might in fact be my soul mate of programming languages. We didn’t IPO, the free lunches have long since passed, and I don’t play nearly as much foosball as I used to, but the culture’s still a lot of fun. (At the very least, daily finger missile battles keep us on our toes!) The apartment has been upgraded to a house, the fianceé to wife (that’s another ten year anniversary coming up soon!), and we’ve added cats and a kid to the domestic mix.

All in all, it’s been a decent ten years. I just can’t believe they happened so fast!

QUOTE: The competitor to be feared is one who never

2010-03-09T05:15:00Z

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

—Henry Ford

Shutter Island: Good but Predictable

2010-03-09T05:04:06Z

In the space of Noire movies, this movie is like a wannabe. Like a shy new entrant trying to be more Noire than what is necessary. This is certainly a tense, taught thriller from Scorsese and I was glad I saw this movie. But there were several scenes that needlessly hinted as to what the ending might be. Story tellers, who try to blind-side the audience at the end, try to drive the audience in one particular (wrong) direction and at the same time leave certain dialogs and scenes subject to multiple interpretations at the end of the movie. The key is to neither overdo the decoy part nor make obvious the scenes that have multiple-interpretations aspects to it. Sixth Sense succeeded in hiding the scenes that could be interpreted either way more vigilantly than it hid the ending. This movie misses exactly that aspect.

In fact, there was a scene here that reminded me of another good movie - Mullholland Drive - that bared and flaunted a specific multiple-interpretation scene to needlessly and abruptly drop a hint rather in the middle of the movie. When you use a scene as a hint dropper and not a narrative driver, you give away the ending. (This is the scene where this aspiring actress meets a cowboy in a boxing ring). The movie was significantly less interesting after that point. That scene was disconnected, random and unreal. The entire movie was like that. But that scene was a little bit more of all that than it needed to be.

In Shutter Island, Scorsese starts by working with a consistent and needless penchant to show too many images flashing through DiCaprio's mind. On top of it he experiments with nested dream sequences that probably work better as a decoy in a novel than in a movie. He might as well put a caption saying "I am going to seed something now". And then finally in a scene where DiCaprio is found alone talking to a severely injured and disfigured mental patient, Scorsese gives away the ending. This movie simply fails to supress too many scenes/events/dialogs and is unable to push it to the background. They just float and strut about winking at the audience.

Therein lies the key to good Noire. Directors who make great movies in this genre resist the urge to use overly clever dialogs during moments that has to both be consistent with the illusion being created but at the same time play the role of a ticking bomb that will explode with multiple interpretations later on. Scorsese has been unable to resist the urge and makes the scene needlessly out of synch with the flow of the movie. After this give-away scene, the movie becomes a little bit of a disappointing journey towards the obvious. The pay load in the end is not a satisfying single moment that reveals everything and connects all the loose ends in a single stroke. The payload comes in several installments, which go about painfully describing 'how it happened' in slow detail. Once again, this movie is for a big part a gripping tale. Definitely recommend a watch. But more was expected from Scorsese (or whoever was responsible for the adapted screenplay).

Paul B. Farrell: The rise and certain fall of the American Empire

2010-03-09T05:01:00Z

A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge.

March 9, 1454: This Man Is a Continent ... or Two

2010-03-09T05:00:00Z

Amerigo Vespucci is remembered in the names of two continents, not because he was first to visit them, but because he was first to realize that they were something new to Europeans.

Mike Pirnat: “Teach Me Dependency Injection” at Clepy

2010-03-09T04:57:50Z

The stars finally aligned in a configuration that allowed me to return to Clepy, our local Python group. It was really nice to see some folks that I hadn’t in forever, including some long-lost ex-AGI people that I hadn’t caught up with in what seemed like forever.

We did tonight’s meeting in the “Teach Me X” format made popular by Steve Holden’s “Teach Me Twisted” open space at Pycon 2009. One of our newer compatriots, Chris Miller, had been hearing a lot of buzz about dependency injection and wanted a deeper exposure to it, so he played the questioner while David Stanek played ringleader to the group discussion. The format was a lot of fun, and a good way to engage the group without having a more straightforward and less-interactive “eyes-forward” Powerpoint extravaganza of death, though the conversation did seem to be dominated by a few voices that had had the most experience with DI in their professional lives. But overall it was good, and I think that at least a few people had lightbulb moments, and I suspect that even us seasoned DI nerds achieved some insights into the subject as well.

I’m eager to try out the “Teach Me…” format at work, where I’ve got some peer education to-dos that I’ve been struggling to figure out how to structure without causing roomfuls of eyes to glaze over.

In other news, Cleveland Give Camp is coming up in July, and they’re eager for all types of participation–so whether you want to help organize the event or want to participate (they’re particularly seeking code-slingers and graphic designers), this looks like a great opportunity to Do Some Good.

Clepy are a nice bunch of smart folks; meetings are held on the first Monday of the month aboard LeanDog’s awesome boat. And now we have an official pizza and beer fund, so we can enjoy a bit of a treat whilst geeking about. If you’re in Cleveland and are interested in Python, it’s definitely worth joining in. I certainly hope to make it a regular part of my extracurricular life again.

A Room in Your Head

2010-03-09T04:55:00Z

The quote of the day comes from a post by Roger Ebert:

Resentment is allowing someone to live rent-free in a room in your head.

You might say that the whole world lives rent-free in our heads—but in the daily-activity room, where we sit everyday, we choose who gets to sit with us. We choose whether it’s sunny or cloudy, whether we’re happy or pissed off. So the next time you’re in a bad mood, look around that room: there’s a guest there you need to eject.

Ebert’s post, by the way, was a reaction to the moving feature on him by Chris Jones in Esquire. (Both links via email from Peter.)

And yes, if I get bored of being a novelist, I can always turn to writing self-help books. With the help of an elegant polyster robe, a PR firm, and a few days of not shaving, I could even become a Godman. I can see myself gathering my disciples one day and saying, ‘The day has come, shishyo. The day has come for me to take you, once and for all, to Nirvana!’

‘Yes, guruji, yes,’ they shout, excited. A few of the women start moaning, rapturously remembering the private lessons I have previously imparted. I walk over to the side table. ‘Are you ready?’ I ask. ‘Are you ready for Nirvana?’

‘Yes, Guruji,’ they say. ‘Nirvana! Nirvana!’

I press the ‘play’ button on my iPod. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” starts to play. Happiness flows into the inner room.

The India Uncut Blog © 2007 Amit Varma. All rights reserved.
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Jobs Says No Tethering iPad To iPhone

2010-03-09T04:31:00Z

tugfoigel writes "Anyone who currently owns an iPhone and was hoping they would be able to use it as a mobile Web access point for a Wi-Fi iPad just got some bad news. Reportedly, Steve Jobs has said this will not happen. Swedish blog Slashat.se claims they e-mailed Jobs directly to ask him whether or not you'd be able to tether your iPad and iPhone and received a terse 'No' in reply. According to the report, the email headers made it plausible that the reply had come from Jobs's iPhone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back to Firefox

2010-03-09T03:54:23Z

After a good while (I can’t search my Twitter stream) on Chrome I’m switching back to Firefox as my primary browser, and actually uninstalled Chrome. Why? I was getting the “Oh snap” failure page all the time, even on Google’s own Youtube! The only support I was pointed to was this page, and when I followed the instructions there when I restarted Chrome everything was gone. The sentence “copy the relevant files from the “Backup User Data” folder to your new “User Data” folder.” is useless when you consider the folder has 50+ files to sort through and I wasn’t sure which one was causing my previous problems. So back to Firefox, and thanks to Xmarks all of my stuff is there. I’m also using this persona which is pretty sweet. The feature I missed most on Chrome was lame: the ability to click and hold a folder then release on a bookmark I wanted to open. On Chrome you have to click twice. It bugged me. Now back on Firefox I feel like the browser has a large head.

Beautiful collision of two colored smoke rings

2010-03-09T03:52:25Z

A red smoke ring and a blue smoke ring collide, with spectacular results. (Via Forgetomori)

VIDEO: Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed

2010-03-09T03:42:00Z

Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed today. Move in scheduled sometime in July. Full story, floor plans, and vision shortly.

Can a Gaming Addiction Kill Someone?

2010-03-09T03:40:36Z

Can a Gaming Addiction Kill Someone? is a post from Chris Pirillo

The answer, tragically, is yes. NextWeb reports that a couple in Korea has been arrested for allowing their premature infant baby starve to death while they were busy nurturing their online child in the game Prius Online.

The couple reportedly fed their baby only once a day between 12-hour stretches of play-time with with their game. The autopsy report of their baby showed the death was a result of a long period of malnutrition. “The couple seemed to have lost their will to live a normal life, because they didn’t have jobs and gave birth to a premature baby,” said South Korean police officer Chung Jin-won. “They indulged themselves in the online game of raising a virtual character so as to escape from reality, which led to the death of their real baby.”

This goes to show how very real and horrific that gaming addiction can be. It may not always lead to such dire consequences, but it can. Is even that slight risk really worth it? If you know someone who may addicted to video games – either machine-based or online – I urge you to get help for them. I pray to never read another story such as this.

What other things have you come across in YOUR reading today? Hopefully, you’ve taken the time to see what the people right here in our community have been up to.

Don’t forget to stop by our software download center to see what great new deals we’ve posted for you today!

2010-03-09T02:37:00Z

geek4 sends in an analysis indicating that Microsoft may have the most to lose if hedge-fund operator Elliot buys Novell. (The eWeekEurope piece is based on a longer and geekier writeup by Andy Updegrove on how the mechanics of unsolicited tender offers can play out in the tech world.) To avoid meltdown or asset-stripping, Novell can try and find a preferred bidder — a company with some interest in running Novell as a business, and preferrably a tech company. Or another company may make a move independently. But who might that be? A couple of analysts have suggested IBM, Oracle, or SAP. These all have problems... Microsoft is in a similar category, with one added problem. ... Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution. If Novell falls to bits, then Microsoft's efforts to gain open source cred pretty much disappear with it. It's something that would have been impossible to imagine a few years back, but if we're looking for someone to prop Novell up, Microsoft would now be a prime candidate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Senior Fed Official Lays Out More Exit Detail

2010-03-09T02:30:11Z

The Federal Reserve pumped more than $1 trillion dollars into the economy at a lightning pace, but it plans to take it out glacially, a senior Fed official said in a speech Monday.

Brian Sack, who runs the markets group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, laid out more detail on the Fed’s plans to reduce its massive holdings of mortgage backed securities and Treasurys in a speech to the National Association of Business Economics in Washington.

The Fed is on course to own more than $1.25 trillion worth of mortgage backed securities by the end of March. As the economy improves it wants to reduce those holdings, but officials don’t want to do it in a jarring way. Mr. Sack noted that some of these holdings will run off naturally. By the end of 2011, more than $200 billion worth of mortgage securities mature or will be prepaid by borrowers. The Fed can shrink its balance sheet by not reinvesting proceeds from these securities as they’re paid off by borrowers, helping its own balance sheet to “shrink meaningfully.”

Mr. Sack noted that another $140 billion worth of Treasury securities mature by the end of 2011. Right now the Fed is reinvesting cash it gets as Treasury securities mature, but it could decide to let those securities run off too, shrinking its balance sheet even more, he noted.

“With this approach, the FOMC would be shrinking its balance sheet in a gradual and passive manner,” he said. “That, in my view, is a crucial message for the markets.

“A decision to shrink the balance sheet more aggressively could be disruptive to market functioning,” he said, adding, “A more aggressive approach would risk an immediate and substantial rise in longer-term yields that, at this time, would be counterproductive for achieving the (Fed’s economic growth) objectives.”

Mr. Sack also offered noteworthy insights into how the Fed believes markets are positioning for possible interest rate increases in the months ahead.

“The current configuration of yields and asset prices incorporates expectations that short-term interest rates will begin to rise around the end of this year,” he noted. “Thus, the markets seem prepared for the risks toward tighter policy.

Mr. Sack doesn’t make decisions about interest rates, but he does give Fed decision makers important guidance on how they can expect markets to react if the Fed moves rates higher. The message here seems to be that markets wouldn’t be jolted if rate hikes come later in the year.

“Looking out to longer maturities, the shape of the Treasury yield curve appears to incorporate not only expectations of policy tightening, but a decent-sized term premium on longer-term securities,” he noted.
“Indeed, the term premium is well above the levels observed over most of the past several years, even though inflation is likely to be low and upside inflation risks are limited. This should help to diminish the chances of a sizable upward shift in yields.”

Translation: Don’t expect long-term yields to shoot higher if the Fed nudges short-term rates up.

The Gold Standard: Know not, know not they know not

2010-03-09T02:13:13Z

Banks refuse to learn. We had Mr. Peter Sands of Standard Chartered Bank criticising most regulatory proposals including that of the proposal to separate proprietary trading, floated by Paul Volcker in the US. There were news that Royal Bank of Scotland was setting aside large sum as bonuses although UK Treasury approved the bonus pools. There were various stories of US and other banks helping Greece to hide its debt. Now, they have turned around and perhaps bought Credit Default swaps (insurance against Greek debt default) on Greek debt. Most EU regulators and commentators were not amused. It amounts to insider trading, at some level. We covered the topic here.

Not a surprise, then, UK’s Treasury Minister says the following:

The risk is now that their confidence has not been sufficiently dented; that they have not truly learned their lesson [More here]

Of course, this news item in UK’s Guardian, in my view, is a clever piece of journalism. It is not clear yet that EU governments have decided to block US based banks from participating in EU Governments’ debt auctions. But, Guardian news story makes it out to be.

This column by John Lichfield in ‘Independent’ puts the message across funnily and effectively. That sums up the title of this post.

OK, Daddy, I understand that. It’s very naughty of them. But isn’t this still a case of the banks biting the hand that fed them?

Er, no, son, it’s worse that that. It’s like the banks complaining that governments are naked after taking their clothes. But the markets (i.e. banks) don’t think that way. If they smell blood, they pile in like hyenas after a limping zebra. It’s called a market opportunity. [More here]

The world has changed. Bankers have not yet noticed it. It is clear that hubris is the cataract in their eyes that prevents them from seeing it. Investors should not be that myopic.

Drunken Lactating Kentuckian charged with squirting Human White Russian into jailer's face

2010-03-09T01:45:08Z

Crime Over Spilt Milk

After Toni Tramel, 31, was arrested last Thursday for public intoxication, [...] Tramel "took off her bra, grabbed her breast and squirted breast milk, hitting me in the face and neck region," reported Brown. Tramel attempted a second lactation assault, "but was unsuccessful," added Brown. [...] As for Brown, a jail press release noted that the officer was successfully able to "clean the bio-hazard off her."

Previously, previously.

New in Labs: Refresh POP accounts

2010-03-09T01:31:31Z

Posted by Emmanuel Pellereau, Software Engineer

My little sister recently setup her Gmail account to retrieve messages from her school address, so she can check all of her email accounts in one place. She no longer has to constantly log in to two email programs, and she likes using Gmail's powerful interface for all her mail.

However, sometimes she knows an email has already been sent to her school address, and she just can't wait for the next scheduled fetch to have it show up in her Gmail inbox. As any big brother would, I tried to solve this issue for her and millions of Gmail users.

Turn on "Refresh POP accounts" from the Labs tab under Settings, and the refresh link at the top of your inbox will not only update your inbox with your new Gmail messages, it will also fetch messages from any other accounts which you have set up.

Try it out, and let us know if you have any feedback.

Mike Driscoll: A Simple Step-by-Step Reportlab Tutorial

2010-03-09T01:03:23Z

The subtitle for this article could easily be “How To Create PDFs with Python”, but WordPress doesn’t support that. Anyway, the premier PDF library in Python is Reportlab. It is not distributed with that standard library, so you’ll need to download it if you want to run the examples in this tutorial. There will also be at least one example of how to put an image into a PDF, which means you’ll also need the Python Image Library (PIL). As I understand it, Reportlab is compatible with Python 2.x, IronPython and Jython. They are currently working on a port for Python 3.x (or will be soon).

Installation

Reportlab supports most of the normal Python installation methods. You have the option of downloading the source and running “python setup.py install” or running a binary installer (on Windows). There was a recent thread on their mailing list that seemed to indicate that they may also support pip soon. The threads I’ve read about Reportlab’s support of easy_install are confusing, so I’m not sure if they already support that method or not.

Creating a Simple PDF

Reportlab has decent documentation. What I mean by that is that the documentation gives you just enough to get started, but when you find something slightly complex to do, you get to figure it out on your own. Just recently, they added a Code Snippets section to their website that will hopefully become a recipe book of cool tips and tricks and also help ameliorate this issue. But enough about that. Let’s see how to actually create something!

In Reportlab, the lowest-level component that’s used regularly is the canvas object from the pdfgen package. The functions in this package allow you to “paint” a document with your text, images, lines or whatever. I’ve heard some people describe this as writing in PostScript. I doubt it’s really that bad. In my experience, it’s actually a lot like using a GUI toolkit to layout widgets in specific locations. Let’s see how the canvas object works:

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
 
c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf")
c.drawString(100,750,"Welcome to Reportlab!")
c.save()

You should end up with a PDF that looks something like this:

The first thing to notice about this code is that if we want to save the PDF, we need to supply a file name to the Canvas object. This can be an absolute path or a relative path. In this example, it should create the PDF in the same location that you run the script from. The next piece of the puzzle is the drawString method. This will draw text wherever you tell it to. When using the canvas object, it starts at the bottom left of the page, so for this example, we told it to draw the string 100 points from the left margin and 750 points from the bottom of the page (1 point = 1/72 inch). You can change this default in the Canvas constructor by passing a zero to the bottomup keyword argument. However, I’m not exactly sure what will happen if you do that as the Reportlab user guide isn’t clear on this topic. I think it will change the start point to the top left though. The final piece in the code above is to save your PDF.

That was easy! You’ve just created a really simple PDF! Note that the default Canvas size is A4, so if you happen to be American, you’ll probably want to change that to letter size. This is easy to do in Reportlab. All you need to do is the following:

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
 
canvas = canvas.Canvas('myfile.pdf', pagesize=letter)
width, height = letter

The main reason to grab the width and height is that you can use them for calculations to decide when to add a page break or help define margins. Let’s take a quick look at the constructor for the Canvas object to see what other options we have:

def __init__(self,filename,
    pagesize=letter,
    bottomup = 1,
    pageCompression=0,
    encoding=rl_config.defaultEncoding,
    verbosity=0
    encrypt=None):

The above was pulled directly from the Reportlab User Guide, page 11. You can read about the other options in their guide if you want the full details.

Now let’s do something a little more complicated and useful.

A Little Form, Little Function

In this example, we’ll create a partial printable form. As far as I can tell, Reportlab doesn’t support the fillable forms that were added to Adobe products a few years ago. Anyway, let’s take a look at some code!

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
 
canvas = canvas.Canvas("form.pdf", pagesize=letter)
canvas.setLineWidth(.3)
canvas.setFont('Helvetica', 12)
 
canvas.drawString(30,750,'OFFICIAL COMMUNIQUE')
canvas.drawString(30,735,'OF ACME INDUSTRIES')
canvas.drawString(500,750,"12/12/2010")
canvas.line(480,747,580,747)
 
canvas.drawString(275,725,'AMOUNT OWED:')
canvas.drawString(500,725,"$1,000.00")
canvas.line(378,723,580,723)
 
canvas.drawString(30,703,'RECEIVED BY:')
canvas.line(120,700,580,700)
canvas.drawString(120,703,"JOHN DOE")
 
canvas.save()

This is based on an actual receipt I created at work. The main difference between this one and the previous example is the canvas.line code. You can use it to draw lines on your documents by passing two X/Y pairs. I’ve used this functionality to create grids, although it’s pretty tedious. Other points of interest in this code include the setLineWidth(.3) command, which tells Reportlab how thick or thin the line should be; and the setFont(‘Helvetica’, 12) command, which allows us to specify a specific font and point size.

Our next example will build on what we’ve learned so far, but also introduce us to the concept of “flowables”.

Going with the Flow

If you’re in advertising or do any kind of work with form letters, then Reportlab makes for an excellent addition to your arsenal. We use it to create form letters for people who have overdue parking tickets. The following example is based on some code I wrote for that application, although the letter is quite a bit different. (Note that the code below will not run without the Python Image Library)

import time
from reportlab.lib.enums import TA_JUSTIFY
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, Image
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet, ParagraphStyle
from reportlab.lib.units import inch
 
doc = SimpleDocTemplate("form_letter.pdf",pagesize=letter,
                        rightMargin=72,leftMargin=72,
                        topMargin=72,bottomMargin=18)
Story=[]
logo = "python_logo.png"
magName = "Pythonista"
issueNum = 12
subPrice = "99.00"
limitedDate = "03/05/2010"
freeGift = "tin foil hat"
 
formatted_time = time.ctime()
full_name = "Mike Driscoll"
address_parts = ["411 State St.", "Marshalltown, IA 50158"]
 
im = Image(logo, 2*inch, 2*inch)
Story.append(im)
 
styles=getSampleStyleSheet()
styles.add(ParagraphStyle(name='Justify', alignment=TA_JUSTIFY))
ptext = '<font size=12>%s</font>' % formatted_time
 
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
 
# Create return address
ptext = '<font size=12>%s</font>' % full_name
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
for part in address_parts:
    ptext = '<font size=12>%s</font>' % part.strip()
    Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
 
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
ptext = '<font size=12>Dear %s:</font>' % full_name.split()[0].strip()
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
 
ptext = '<font size=12>We would like to welcome you to our subscriber base for %s Magazine! \
        You will receive %s issues at the excellent introductory price of $%s. Please respond by\
        %s to start receiving your subscription and get the following free gift: %s.</font>' % (magName,
                                                                                                issueNum,
                                                                                                subPrice,
                                                                                                limitedDate,
                                                                                                freeGift)
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Justify"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
 
 
ptext = '<font size=12>Thank you very much and we look forward to serving you.</font>'
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Justify"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
ptext = '<font size=12>Sincerely,</font>'
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 48))
ptext = '<font size=12>Ima Sucker</font>'
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))
Story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
doc.build(Story)

Well, that’s a lot more code than our previous examples contained. We’ll need to look over it slowly to understand everything that’s going on. When you’re ready, just continue reading.

The first part that we need to look at are the new imports:

from reportlab.lib.enums import TA_JUSTIFY
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, Image
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet, ParagraphStyle
from reportlab.lib.units import inch

From enums, we import “TA_JUSTIFY”, which allows our strings to have the justified format. There are a number of other constants we could import that would allow us to right or left justify our text and do other fun things. Next is the platypus (which stands for Page Layout and Typography Using Scripts) module. It contains lots of modules, but probably the most important of them are the flowables, such as Paragraph. A flowable typically has the following abilities: wrap, draw and sometimes split. They are used to make writing paragraphs, tables and other constructs over multiple pages easier to do.

The SimpleDocTemplate class allows us to set up margins, page size, filename and a bunch of other settings for our document all in one place. A Spacer is good for adding a line of blank space, like a paragraph break. The Image class utilizes the Python Image Library to allow easy insertion and manipulation of images in your PDF.

The getSampleStyleSheet gets a set of default styles that we can use in our PDF. ParagraphStyle is used to set our paragraph’s text alignment in this example, but it can do much more than that (see page 67 of the user guide). Finally, the inch is a unit of measurement to help in positioning items on your PDF. You can see this in action where we position the logo: Image(logo, 2*inch, 2*inch). This means that the logo will be two inches from the top and two inches from the left.

I don’t recall the reason why Reportlab’s examples use a Story list, but that’s how we’ll do it here as well. Basically you create a line of text, a table, and image or whatever and append it to the Story list. You’ll see that throughout the entire example. The first time we use it is when we add the image. Before we look at the next instance, we’ll need to look at how we add a style to our styles object:

styles.add(ParagraphStyle(name='Justify', alignment=TA_JUSTIFY))

The reason this is important is because you can use the style list to apply various paragraph alignment settings (and more) to text in your document. In the code above, we create a ParagraphStyle called “Justify”. All it does is justify our text. You’ll see an example of this later in the text. For now, let’s look at a quick example:

ptext = '<font size=12>%s</font>' % formatted_time
Story.append(Paragraph(ptext, styles["Normal"]))

For our first line of text, we use the Paragraph class. As you can see, the Paragraph class accepts some HTML-like tags. In this instance, we set the font’s point size to 12 and use the normal style (which is left aligned, among other things). The rest of the example is pretty much the same, just with Spacers thrown in here and there. At the end, we call doc.build to create the document.

Wrapping Up

Now you know the basics for creating PDFs in Python using Reportlab. We didn’t even scratch the surface of what all you can do with Reportlab though. Some examples include tables, graphs, paginating, color overprinting, hyperlinks, graphics and much more. I highly recommend that you download the module along with its user guide and give it a try!

Further Reading

Pay for Drinks at SXSW Using Your iPhone

2010-03-09T01:00:20Z

Now here’s a killer app for the throngs of geeks about to descend on Austin later this week: TabbedOut. The iPhone application allows users to order, review and pay for their tabs at local bars. It sounds like the perfect fix for those full-to-the-gills parties SXSW is known for. Unfortunately, TabbedOut is only available at a limited selection of venues for now — just 35 in Austin, including popular SXSW party stops The Blind Pig Club, Beerland and Mohawk.

“Having just launched in January, the integration hurdle is where we are now,” said Rick Orr, CEO of TabbedOut maker ATX Innovation, in a phone interview. But the company is trying to make the most out of an influx of its exact target audience of smartphone users at crowded bars by releasing an Android app on March 15 and handing out three free tabs to all users in Austin during SXSW.

The way TabbedOut works is you store your credit or debit card account on your phone, then file your order through the app. It pops up on the merchant’s point-of-sale system for them to fulfill your order and accept your payment (right now TabbedOut is integrated with Future POS and Jumpware). Users pay a convenience fee of 99 cents.

The concept is similar to one of my favorite iPhone apps, Taxi Magic, which lets me hail and pay for cabs without dealing with a phone dispatcher, cash or credit cards for a $1.50 fee.

Orr said that TabbedOut’s next core locations will be New York, New Jersey, LA and the San Francisco Bay Area. ATX has raised a Series A round from investors including Trellis Partners and Raven Capital Partners.

SXSW seems like an opportune time for other payments startups to have their own coming out parties. We contacted Square — the mobile transaction company founded by Jack Dorsey of previous SXSW breakout success Twitter — to ask about its SXSW plans but haven’t heard back yet.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

The App Developer’s Guide to Choosing a Mobile Platform

Most Dangerous Object in the Office: Shocknife SK-2

2010-03-09T01:00:00Z

There's no sharp point or edge, but the electrodes in the polycarbonate Shocknife deliver a stabbing 7,500 volts. Ouch. Kilo-ouch.

10 Perfect 'Snowicane' Cars, Picked by You

2010-03-09T01:00:00Z

A few of them are completely impractical, and two of them don't actually exist, but damned if you didn't come up with a good list.

Turn an FM Transmitter Into a Micro Pirate Radio

2010-03-09T01:00:00Z

Seize the airwaves to fight corporate radio's preprogrammed junk. It all starts with a soldering iron and a cheapo FM transmitter.

Xeni in Amoeba Records "What's In My Bag?" video feature

2010-03-09T00:51:59Z

Amoeba Records is one of the world's greatest independent record stores, with many thousands of square feet of new and used vinyl, CDs, DVDs, and assorted rarities in film and music. They're in SF, Berkeley, and Hollywood. The kinds folks who run the joint invited me in to pick a handful of items I'm excited about, and the video that resulted is embedded above. I chose:

• The incredible Alan Lomax in Haiti box-set (we'll be blogging more about this one on BB soon!)
• Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru (a tip of the chapeau to Susannah Breslin, and to my brother DJ Carlito for turning me on to this one)
• N.A.S.A. "Spirit of Apollo" (we've premiered a number of the music videos from this project on Boing Boing Video)
• Q-Burns Abstract Message and Eighth Dimension Records (we've used snips from his work as theme music for Boing Boing's audio podcast, and for our video project—I'm a longtime fan!)
• Wilco, "Wilco (The Album)" (I loved their latest record, and I believe they're one of the greatest live acts on the planet.)
• Pronto, "All is Golden" (Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen's side project. "The Cheetah," a digital-only download release, was glitchy electronic minimalism, but the release I grabbed from the bins in this video is "All is Golden," a paean to '70s rock. I also mispronounce Mikael's name horribly in this video... sorry Mikael!)
• Die Antwoord!

Amoeba Records: What's in My Bag? / Xeni Jardin

The complete "What's in My Bag" archives are here, with many interesting past guests.

(thanks, Rachael McGovern. Disclosure: I wasn't paid to appear in this video, but the nice folks at Amoeba gave me a $75 store credit which I plan to use on Radiohead vinyl and old Almodóvar movies!)

A Closer Look at Sony's New Skin for Android Phones

2010-03-09T00:45:00Z

Sony's new user interface is designed as a skin that will go on top of the Android operating system and aggregate social networking feeds. Take a closer look at it how it compares to Motorola's MotoBlur and the HTC Sense.

AIDS Virus Can Hide In Bone Marrow

2010-03-09T00:42:00Z

suraj.sun writes "The virus that causes AIDS can hide in the bone marrow, avoiding drugs and later awakening to cause illness, according to new research that could point the way toward better treatments for the disease. Dr. Kathleen Collins of the University of Michigan and her colleagues report in this week's edition of the journal Nature Medicine that the HIV virus can infect long-lived bone marrow cells that eventually convert into blood cells. The virus is dormant in the bone marrow cells, she said, but when those progenitor cells develop into blood cells, it can be reactivated and cause renewed infection. The virus kills the new blood cells and then moves on to infect other cells, said. In recent years, drugs have reduced AIDS deaths sharply, but patients need to keep taking the medicines for life or the infection comes back, Dr. Collins said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't forget to schedule your mammogram

2010-03-09T00:32:56Z

Don't forget to schedule your mammogram.

Daily Links: Inbox Zero Edition

2010-03-09T00:28:30Z

I did it! After months of struggling and hours upon hours of typing, I’ve finally reached that mythical state of Inbox Zero. My inbox is empty — or nearly so. (I still have a handful of messages about stuff I’m actually working on at this moment, such as publicity for the book.)

I do have a stack of 74 guest-post submissions (including many reader stories), but I’m not including those in this tally. I’ll process those gradually, sending replies as quickly as I can. (If you’ve submitted a guest post, please be patient. I have dozens of them to get through, and can’t answer you all at once.)

While sorting through the last 200 e-mail messages today, I found lots of great stuff you folks had submitted. Here are some of the best bits sent to me over the past few months:

Carmen sent me this article from CNN/Money about living on a cash-only diet. The piece profiles five families that have given up their credit cards and are only using cash. Each family has a different motive and a different story. (Some of this covers ground we explored last month in our discussion about saying “no” to credit cards.)

Jill forwarded an article from (never home)maker in which the author shares five critical reasons you must read your bills. Her mortgage company made a $4,070 mistake. If she hadn’t been paying attention, she would have paid way way too much. Yet another example of how nobody cares more about your money than you do, so stay on top of things!

The folks at Your Money Bus wanted me to mention their work. The “buck-mobile” (my name, not theirs) is traveling around the country, providing a place where financial planners can meet with people and offer free advice. Here’s a list of scheduled stops.

Sam over at Getting Finances Done has begun his 12 weeks to fiscal fitness program. If you’re getting started with personal finance, check this out.

Meanwhile, the people at What Would John Templeton Say? are having a contest for bloggers: Write about some of Templeton’s advice, and you might win $500. (Templeton was a famous investor, and is the Templeton in Franklin Templeton mutual funds.)

Finally, Chris asked me if I could tell you about his project, Be Debt Free America. Apparently this is a tool that helps you create a “debt snowball payoff report”, although the site isn’t transparent enough for my tastes. I’d like to see more screenshots and know more about how this works. Why would I choose this over a free spreadsheet?

Okay, back to work. I have to be sure that nobody has tried to send me e-mail in the past fifteen minutes. Must defend Inbox Zero!

---
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

Gabourey Sidibe's mom, Alice Tan Ridley, is a NYC subway busker

2010-03-09T00:19:42Z

Alice Tan Ridley, mother of Academy Award-nominated Precious star Gabourey Sidibe, performs music — beautifully — in subway stations. Above, her rendition of "I Will Survive." Many more videos of her amazing street performances here, a pity the sound quality's so bad on all of them: The Subway Song Stylings Of Alice Tan Ridley! (stationstops.com), and a US Magazine story about the R&B singer here. (via Farai Chideya)

Related: Here's the raw audition tape that won Gabourey Sidibe her Precious role.

The fight for stable Private Servers

2010-03-09T00:04:09Z

As I’m sure some of you have noticed, the stability of some of our PS servers has been spotty at best from roughly the end of November. What started out as an emergency kernel upgrade to fix some pretty serious newly-released exploits turned into months of non-stop bug hunting that resulted in the discovery of not one bug as we’d originally thought, but 4! To make matters even worse, these 4 bugs were spread across 4 completely separately distributed pieces of the kernel which meant there wasn’t really anyone outside DreamHost who’d been likely to encounter our particular group of issues.

The first symptom we noticed was some hosts (ok, a lot of hosts…on the order of 30/day) were simply rebooting themselves. The problem here was they were rebooting themselves so quickly that most of the time they hadn’t even stored any logs related to what was going on! After closer inspection and a bit of luck, we found the dreaded “PANIC” string in their kernel logs. Here’s the thing: normally when a server runs out of memory, it’s a Really Bad Thing. When you’re talking about a virtual server, however, things are a bit less “doomsday scenario”. It turns out that the Linux-Vserver patch we were using was failing to check exactly what part of the system it was that’d just run out of memory and if any guest ran out, BOOM. Down went the host (we have them set to automatically reboot in such cases to speed their recovery).

Incidentally, the semi-panic caused by the lack of logging for such an immediate crash prompted us to write a new system that lets us remotely log all sorts of debugging activity so we can always be sure it’ll be available for later use. With any luck, we’ll never be delayed in our fixing of a stability issue ever again for lack of information.

So after fixing the suicidal servers we’d been dealing with (that first bug took about a week to track down and roll out fixes for), we were feeling pretty relieved. Then we noticed that while we were no longer having 30 machines crash every day we still had 20! CRAP, we thought, what else could be wrong here? Thankfully it didn’t take long to see that it was a bug in one of the security-related patches we use (thanks to the new-fangled remote logging system!). So off we go to upgrade to the latest release which already fixed the bug (how lucky was that???). And that’s where bug #3 comes in. In one of our average PS hosts, we almost always see around 30,000 file handles in use at any given time (a file handle is basically what’s used by an application to read from or write to anything, be it a regular file, the network, whatever the case may be). After upgrading we noticed something weird. After just a couple hours, file handle usage was TEN TIMES the usual. In order to ease some aspects of management, we decided a while back to boot some of our servers off of network storage. One of the kernel patches that makes that possible is called AUFS (Advanced Unification File System). After much back and forth with its developer, we finally got a patch back that fixed the problem. That took a couple more weeks (and yes, we’re moving away from that system entirely).

Phew, 3 kernel bugs. What are the chances, right? After all, we didn’t make THAT big a jump in order to fix the security holes. We were feeling pretty unlucky, but at least the problems were finally behind us.

That’s when we noticed that we were still having about 10 hosts crash every day (before the upgrade we’d maybe see 2-3 crashes per WEEK). Unlike the old crashes, we no longer saw any real pattern between the machines that were crashing and the ones that were stable. Some used the AUFS code we thought may still be buggy, but some didn’t (the split was actually almost perfectly 50/50 every day). All we knew for sure was that some trigger was spontaneously causing an entire machine to cease being able to process anything at all, requiring a heavy-handed reboot to fix. We spent weeks talking with the Vserver developers, talking with our own in-house kernel developers (the guys working on the CEPH filesystem), and anyone else who would listen. The funny thing about bugs in other peoples’ software is that no matter how much proof you give them that YOU can trigger the bug, they’re rarely willing to put too much effort into fixing it unless you can show THEM how to trigger it themselves. After a week of late nights and little sleep, we finally came up with a reproducible method of triggering the bug (for the more technically inclined, it involved a malloc() of just a bit more memory than was available to the PS environment, followed by an fread() to fill it up and trigger an OOM). Even with the code in hand that proved the bug was, in fact, to be found in the Vserver kernel patch (or potentially the main kernel, though we weren’t able to trigger it there) it was still another week before anyone was able to figure out exactly what was going on. One of the things that both made it so hard to find the bug and so obvious that the bug was either in the mainline kernel or the Vserver patch was the near-complete rewrite of a lot of the code related to what happens when the server runs out of memory. As it turns out, one of the things that the Linux kernel attempts to do when a process is killed in order to free up memory is it gives it the highest priority it can and (and this is the important part) gives it a little bit of extra memory. Yes, when a Linux server triggers its “OMG I’m totally out of memory!” routine, it’s not actually out of memory. And this is where the Vserver patch comes in. The way that it’s designed, it is impossible to get that little extra bit of memory that’s sometimes required for a process to die gracefully. What happens in that case is you suddenly have a process with access to 100% of one CPU core that simply doesn’t have anywhere to go. Once that happens, you can pretty much say goodbye to your server (and all the Private Servers it hosts). The solution from the patch developers? ”Get rid of all our memory management and use the kernel’s built-in Cgroup support”. And this is why we we really like these guys. A lot of software developers out there would let their egos get in the way and demand to come up with their solution. These guys were happy to say “You know what? The kernel already has a pretty complete mechanism for just this thing and we’d hate to duplicate all the functionality.” And in case you were wondering, Cgroups are pretty new and didn’t exist when the first Vserver patches were developed.

We’re still rolling out upgrades to some hosts on an as-needed basis, but the results are extremely promising.

Where does your dairy come from? Look it up on this website

2010-03-09T00:02:01Z

At whereismymilkfrom.com, you can enter the code from a carton of (cow's) milk and find out where that dairy product came from. I know, I know, "Duh, a cow!" — but like, what farm. I only drink veggie milks myself now (almond, soy, coconut, rice) but this seems like a helpful tool for others. When I read the copy on the website like "Just go get the milk out of your fridge!" I hear Dr. Steve Brule's voice, and the word "dummy!" at the end. (via Consumerist)

Microsoft Giving Rival Browsers a Lift

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

gollum123 tips an article at the NY Times on the progress of the European Windows browser choice screen that we have been discussing recently. "Rivals of Microsoft's market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch. Mozilla, whose Firefox browser is the strongest competitor to Microsoft's Internet Explorer worldwide, said that more than 50,000 people had downloaded Firefox via a 'choice screen' that has been popping up on Windows-equipped computers in Europe since the end of last month. ... Opera Software, based in Oslo, said downloads of its browser in Belgium, France, Britain, Poland, and Spain had tripled since the screen began to appear. Microsoft said it was too early to tell whether the choice screen might prompt significant numbers of users to change. The digital ballot is being delivered over the Internet with software updates, and it is expected to take until mid-May to complete the process. The browser choice will also be presented to buyers of new Windows computers across the European Union for five years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

History made, Rajya Sabha passes Women's Bill

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

History was made on Tuesday with the Rajya Sabha passing the historic 108th Constitutional Amendment Bill granting one-third reservation to women in Parliament and state legislatures. The vote was carried by

BJP backs women's bill, but taunts Congress

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

Congress President Sonia Gandhi's writ seems to have run and how! The government in a sudden move, almost deceptively, put the women's bill to voice vote in the Rajya Sabha and opened the new chapter in constitutional history.

Akon gets a taste of Mumbai, SRK-style

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

The singer gets a traditional welcome during his visit to India to record a song for Shah Rukh Khan's latest movie Ra.One.

Images: Vidya Malvade on the LFW runway

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

Designer duo Nidhi and Divya Gambhir showcased the latest line from their label Walnut on Day Five of Lakme Fashion Week. Titled 'Inspired By Romance', the garments were all about reflecting the dual nature of love in dual colours and Vidya Malvade walked the ramp in the showstopper. Take a look.

India's top management gurus

2010-03-09T00:01:00Z

India prides to have some of the world's best management thinkers.

Life in 5-year Chunks

2010-03-09T00:00:02Z

Over the recent Holi holidays, as I sat thinking about life past, present and future, I realized that I could take life in five-year chunks and think of a dominant theme for each of these chunks. So, here goes:

1984-1989: Education (IIT-Bombay and Columbia)
1990-1994: Work and Error (NYNEX, and failed efforts at doing a startup)
1995-1999: IndiaWorld (India’s first Internet portals, sold to Sify in Nov 1999)
2000-2004: Experiments (tried a number of digital ideas; none of them worked)
2005-2009: NetCore’s Growth (put the company on a growth path)

What will the next five years bring? Two things that I would like to do are: ensure NetCore can grow to a dominant consumer mobile data company, and help bring about a change in India’s political and policy climate.

Meet the Winners of Webmonkey's Google I/O Giveaway

2010-03-09T00:00:00Z

We're sending two talented monkeys to the Google I/O developer conference in May. We asked our readers to submit their web creations, and we picked the winners from the best of the submissions.

Hundreds dead in Nigerian violence

2010-03-08T23:48:10Z

"The killers showed no mercy: They didn't spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes." At least 200 people were killed in Nigeria on Sunday, mostly Christians, amid ethnic clashes over land.

Tribe in India, exploited like Na'vi for mining, appeal to James Cameron

2010-03-08T23:44:56Z

In an ad placed in Variety, an indigenous tribe from India known as the Dongria Kondh said: "Appeal to James Cameron. Avatar is fantasy... and real. The Dongria Kondh tribe in India are struggling to defend their land against a mining company hell-bent on destroying their sacred mountain. Please help the Dongria." No word from Cameron yet, but Amesty International has more on the story here, and a video here.

Early Beta of Delicious Chrome extension available

2010-03-08T23:43:18Z

It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned.

The core ethos here was to create a light save and bookmark retrieval process that matches the no-bulk mentality that was taken with Chrome. There is no sidebar. If you click anywhere on the page while the Save frame is opened, it’ll disappear. Some error messages are missing. These are relatively minor issues, but ones we plan to address in the very near future. However, we do most definitely want to hear from you. What rocks, what sucks, what do we need to add and whats going to happen in the last episode of LOST? We’d like feedback on these in our forums.

To install the extension, click here using Google Chrome.

To give you some insight on how this extension came to be, here is the lead engineer Vivek to give you the background:

Yes. We are available on Google Chrome!

That’s true. Delicious has added a new add-on to its belt and that’s for Google Chrome. It’s been a marvelous journey being in the ‘recommended’ list of Firefox Extensions and enjoying the luxury of being downloaded by more than 5 million Delicious lovers. Now it’s time to catch up with the latest browser!

“This missing Chrome plug-in is the main reason I haven’t switched completely from Firefox.” – Delicious user

All the Delicious users who feel the same can now enjoy the availability of Delicious bookmarking on Google Chrome with this add-on. The Delicious add-on for Google Chrome was initially developed as a hack at one of Yahoo!’s in-house hack events. The story goes like this…

“I always believed the hack event is a great platform for developers to demonstrate their ideas that have potential to become a product. I wanted to take advantage of this platform and started by actively participating in the in-house hack events. In 2007, I presented a hack called ‘Delicious on Mobile’ and I could see the product m.delicious.com shaping up.

In 2009, I had a strong feeling that we needed to increase our presence so that we could reach out to a wider audience. So I came up with two different hacks, one of them was ‘Delicious Compact’ which was written in .NET Compact Framework and it would run on all the latest Windows Mobile Devices.

Secondly, I read about Google Chrome and thought let’s build an add-on for this new browser. Since the extension API was under development, I had to use the Dev Channel builds of Google Chrome to experiment. The add-on I developed was simple, just a Delicious button in the address bar (page action) which would open a new popup window containing the Delicious Bookmarklet with current URL information being prefilled.

I was lucky enough to have good Product support at Delicious who encouraged this idea and we started working on a full version of the extension. As the APIs were under development we had to wait until they became available to provide the best possible features for the Chrome extension.”

Sync your Delicious Bookmarks

Now you can sync your Delicious bookmarks in Google Chrome using the add-on. All you need to do is just login to Delicious and all of your Delicious bookmarks are there!

Get your Delicious bookmarks right there in Omnibar

Once all your Delicious bookmarks are synced up you will notice them popping up in the Omnibar. i.e. the address bar of Google Chrome. You don’t need to search for your bookmarks separately as they will come up when you start typing matching words in the address bar.

Bookmark with a button

Now you can bookmark a URL on Delicious just by clicking a Tag button present beside the address bar. You can share the URL on twitter as well as with your friends using the same Tag button.

Regards,
Vivek

Jeff McNeil: Review: Python Testing Beginner's Guide

2010-03-08T23:40:29Z

I've just finished my copy of Python Testing: Beginner's Guide, by Daniel Arbuckle. While I'll fully admit I didn't type each and every code sample into a text editor, I did read this one cover-to-cover. Overall, it serves as a good introduction to Test Driven Development from a Python angle.

I've been rather careful to ensure all of my code is wrapped in automated testing and that they pass. I also run Subversion commit triggers and build across multiple versions of Python. I'm the only Python developer employed and a good chunk of our infrastructure is Python based. I really see testing as a necessity as I can't really afford to get behind with unexpected bugs.

Mr. Arbuckle's book provided a good reality check. Personally, the big take away for me was that I am doing this right. My tests are segregated, my fixtures are complete, and I'm following a lot of the best practices outlined. I'm using Buildbot and I'm integrating coverage.py.

If you're not already using some sort of testing framework, this is a wonderful introduction. It's gentle enough to be of benefit to newcomers.

Here's a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the content covered.

Types of Testing
The introduction. Covers the major types of testing that programmers really concern themselves with. Unit, Integration, and System. You'll understand the differences between the testing "subclasses" after finishing this chapter.

Doctest: The Easiest Testing Tool
I've honestly never written a single doctest. Ever. It was enlightening to see how it all actually works and how the doctest system gets around quirks of the approach with thing such as ellipses and white space normalization. It also helps as you'll begin to notice the limitations of the system. I prefer the control the unittest module provides.

Unit Testing with Doctest
This chapter really reduces the development process to practice through the use of doctest. Good solid information that is useful elsewhere, just swap out the technology. The cycle applies to other languages as well.

Breaking Tight Coupling by using Mock Objects
I've purposefully avoided using mock frameworks in the past as they've always seemed to add more complexity than they're worth. Instead, I've opted for home-grown classes that provide the minimum adherence to a protocol necessary to allow for testing via dependency injection. I'll be 100% honest here: I think I'm 100% wrong. The Mocker libraries seem rather easy to work with and I'll attempt to remove more of the custom code I've written and integrate Mocker.

When Doctest isn't Enough: Unittest to the Rescue
Not much to comment on here. I've been using the unittest module for quite a while, this service as a great introduction.

Running Your Tests: Follow Your Nose
Nose! I love nose! A while back, I integrated a bunch of legacy code with a Twisted server. Nose made that whole process much easier as I didn't have to worry about how tests were really structured. My fixtures were solid and nose just found them.

There were two points that I would have liked to have seen included as they've become quite useful to me over time:

1. Integration with SetupTools/Distribute in order to handle dependencies automagically. It is possible to specify nose as your test runner.
2. Permissions on tests matter!! If they're incorrect, Nose won't discover them! I spent quite a while tracking this down the first time I ran into it.

Developing a Test-Driven Project
This serves as another reduce-to-practice chapter.

Testing Web Application Frontends using Twill
I've said it before - I don't do much web development. I've learned Django, Pylons, and GAE as I feel that that's required knowledge, but I don't do much production web work at all. I'm a back-end guy. Provisioning, statistics, systems management, server integration, and so on. I've seen Twill, I've just never used it for anything more than tinkering. This chapter is a wonderful introduction!

The one part I especially liked was the integration with unittest. With that covered, it's possible to automate your unit, system, integration, and UI testing entirely. It's possible to validate an entire system from top to bottom without needing human intervention. Bad for QA clickers, good for developers and overall code quality.

Integration Testing and System Testing
This, along with the previous chapter, shore up the areas that I believe most developers overlook. We write unit tests, sure, but do we go beyond that? This really walks a developer through doing just that. Very important stuff.

Other Testing Tools and Techniques
The final chapter. Introduces coverage.py and post-commit hooks. Also touches on Buildbot. I honestly did not know that the distributed VCS packages allow local commit hooks. It's logical and makes perfect sense when one things about it, but we're still using SVN. I think I have a little more ammo to push for Mercurial.

One thing I've done, and I would have liked to have seem mentioned, was to throw an exception and cause a BuildBot error report if code coverage drops below a configurable percentage. I don't have the code handy to do this now or I would post it. Maybe if I can dig it up I will.

So, in summary? Good book. Worth putting on your shelf if you're interested in the topic. Python testing is a book the community has needed for a while; this fills that gap. You won't walk away an expert, but you will be off to a great start.

Like I said before, one of the chapters has been placed online for free. If you're a try before you buy type, check it out: Chapter 5: When Doctest isn't Enough: Unittest to the Rescue.

Digital-Ad Spending May Eclipse Print This Year

2010-03-08T23:40:00Z

Spending on digital advertising is poised to surpass print for the first time in 2010, according to a new study prepared even before the announcement of Apple’s iPad, with all of that hardware's game-changing potential. But another view is: So what? It’s bound to happen soon if not this year.

Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly

2010-03-08T23:34:00Z

The Justice Department is moving to break up an alleged electronic voting-machine monopoly. The authorities say Election Systems & Software has a 70 percent market share of voting equipment in the United States.

And the searches go to...

2010-03-08T23:25:46Z

The Oscars®: glitz, glamor, gossip, gold statuettes, much fanfare — and for many fans, Google search is increasingly a part of watching this live TV experience. Before and during the Academy Awards® broadcast in the U.S., we saw related queries on Google dominating the hot searches list on Google Trends. People searched for the TV schedule, printable ballots for voting on favorites, streaming video sites, nominee and film information, celebrity chatter and whatever else caught your attention. Here's a snapshot:

Fashion
Everyone knows the red carpet is all about the gowns. So which actresses made the best (or worst!) dressed list in search? Zoe Saldana's purple Givenchy haute couture gown won the day in searches, with just a few more queries than runner up Miley Cyrus, who walked down the carpet in one of Jenny Packham's finest. Both beat searches for Sandra Bullock's dress (Marchesa) by large margins. Sarah Jessica Parker, always the fashionista, ranked a distant fourth in Chanel. Certain designers were also popular in search, thanks to the stars who wore (and name-dropped) them. Elie Saab (worn by Anna Kendrick), Armani Prive (Amanda Seyfried, Jennifer Lopez) and Marchesa (Sandra Bullock, Vera Farmiga) were all rising trends.

Winners
Throughout the night Oscar®-related searches rose and fell as nominations were introduced and winners announced. Avatar had the most searches before the ceremony, but as The Hurt Locker received more awards, searches for that film exceeded all others and peaked when it won Best Picture. Precious also had a good run throughout the night. Its peak matched that of "Avatar" during the ceremony:

The awards for best actor, best actress and best director are some of the most-anticipated in the program. There was a considerable amount of buzz about Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock and Kathryn Bigelow before last night, and considerable spikes in search volume when they each won. Here's a look at a few of the star searches last night:

Finally, the evening wasn't all about big wins. The awards help expose more obscure films — shorts, documentaries and foreign-language — to a much larger audience. Searches for these titles typically went up tenfold during the evening, and if they took home a gold statue, search volume spiked as much as 100 times higher. Music by Prudence, Logorama, Food, Inc., The Cove and The Secrets in their Eyes all experienced an exponential explosion of queries.

Gossip and memorable moments
People are always eager for more information about the Hollywood stars — personal stats like age, height, family and dating status. During this year’s Oscar® ceremonies, Kathryn Bigelow's height and Miley Cyrus's mother's tattoos were hot topics. Whose girlfriend was most searched for? Easy. George Clooney's (Elisabetta Canalis).

So what were the most memorable moments of the broadcast? When George Clooney wandered off the red carpet to greet the crowd, queries on [clooney] shot through the roof. Ben Stiller’s appearance as a Na'vi was another draw, and queries on him were high during his spoof. Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick’s John Hughes tribute triggered a flood of nostalgia; Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Home Alone all saw huge query spikes as well. During the memorial portion of the show, queries surged for those in the industry who passed away in the last year, including Ron Silver, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Swayze and Brittany Murphy. On a lighter note, Sandra Bullock set off a frenetic amount of searches when she mentioned a Meryl Streep kiss in her acceptance speech.

As we've seen in presidential debates, unusual words also generate great interest. The Oscars led to spikes in searches for [catharsis] (from Robert Downey Jr.'s presentation with Tina Fey) and [spooning] (Colin Farrell talking about Jeremy Renner).

We hope you enjoyed the evening, and want to thank everyone for turning to Google search to see the latest. And our parents deserve huge thanks, and our agent... oh, they're telling me to wrap it up...!

Posted by Qing Wu, Senior Economics Analyst

Major ISPs Help Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research

2010-03-08T23:15:00Z

An anonymous reader writes "I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace, and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference. Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking BitTorrent users (PDF) by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services. They claim their methods allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2. But that's not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been 'funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher' — a broadband ISP consortium. That's right; three major national ISPs funded this round of BitTorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA. Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grab 1,000+ MP3s From SXSW BitTorrent, Free and Legal

2010-03-08T23:00:00Z

Fire up that bit torrent client to download more than 5 gigabytes of free MP3s from bands playing the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas, next week and catch up on the latest in music with just a couple of clicks.

caption this photo of james cameron congratulating x-wife kathryn bigelow

2010-03-08T22:51:44Z

and some background:

http://www.mahalo.com/kathryn-bigelow-acceptance-speech

http://www.mahalo.com/best-picture-oscar-winner-2010

All of Life's Ingredients Found in Orion Nebula

2010-03-08T22:44:44Z

The Herschel Telescope identifies all the ingredients needed for life as we know it, 1,300 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.

Google To Steal Office Web Apps' Thunder?

2010-03-08T22:32:00Z

Barence writes "Google has stepped up its assault on Microsoft's productivity software with the acquisition of a start-up company that allows Office users to edit and share their documents on the Web. The search giant has acquired DocVerse for an undisclosed sum. Product manager Jonathan Rochelle said DocVerse software makes it easier for users and businesses to move their existing PC documents to the cloud, and that Google 'fell in love with what they were doing to make that transition easier.' Microsoft said in an emailed statement that Google's acquisition of DocVerse acknowledges that customers want to use and collaborate with Office documents. 'Furthermore, it reinforces that customers are embracing Microsoft's long-stated strategy of software plus services, which combines rich client software with cloud services.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When It Comes to Social Sharing, Don’t Forget About Email

2010-03-08T22:30:42Z

While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared links and clickthroughs. Email — the original social network — is responsible for 70 percent of total shares and 48 percent of visits generated by shares, according to data collected by link tracker Tynt.

Source: Tynt

Widget maker Gigya recently attributed 44 percent of its shared items to Facebook and 29 percent to Twitter, while competitor AddThis said Facebook accounts for 33 percent of its shared items and Twitter, 9 percent. Both companies gleaned their data from user activities on the buttons they publish on thousands of sites. But Tynt — which has a slightly different method of tracking copy-and-paste activity from users on its 400,000 publisher partner sites — says they’re both way off, with Facebook accounting for 25 percent of shares and Twitter 1 percent, behind email’s 70 percent.

Source: Tynt

Tynt claims that its data is more comprehensive, estimating that 2 percent of the web’s page views results in content sharing via copy and paste, while .04 percent come from button-based sharing and .2 percent from link shorteners. While I find it a bit hard to believe that 2 percent of page views are then shared (I’m a pretty avid sharer, and I don’t think I share that much), some of Tynt’s data tells a compelling story. For instance, Digg accounts for only 0.2 percent of shared links, but 5 percent of new visits generated by shares, meaning Digg users are much more likely to click on links they find on the site (which is, after all, the purpose of Digg). What I’d like to see are figures for sharing via instant messenger — for me, probably the source of links that I’m mostly likely to click through.

In the spirit of this post, I should say that I found the Tynt blog post via the new site Mediagazer, where the company is an advertiser.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Email: The Reports of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Lifescoop caption contest: Win a $50 Amazon gift card!

2010-03-08T22:13:32Z

Mwah ha ha! Eeeee-vil mad scientist! Leave your best caption idea in the comments at Lifescoop for a chance at a $50 Amazon gift card! (See my post at Lifescoop for details.)

Low Tolerance for Pain May Be Genetic

2010-03-08T22:00:00Z

In a study of patients with osteoarthritis, people who reported feeling more pain shared a genetic variant.

Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from Ruby

2010-03-08T21:52:07Z

Vagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments. It uses Oracle's open-source VirtualBox virtualization system along with the Chef configuration management engine along with lots of Ruby goodness to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines for development purposes.

If you thought rolling out new VMs using Amazon EC2 was easy, Vagrant brings an even simpler system to your local development machine. From the command line, starting is as easy as:

sudo gem install vagrant
vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/base.box
mkdir vagrant
vagrant init
vagrant up

Be warned, though - as a 370MB download, adding that box image isn't a quick process! Once you've got it though, you can keep rolling out VMs based on it at will.

Note that VirtualBox is a separate dependency for Vagrant. Vagrant does not come with VirtualBox built in or anything like that. Download VirtualBox for your OS if you want to try Vagrant.

Beyond the basics of getting a VM running, Vagrant can take care of port forwarding, distribution, environment setup, SSH access, shared folders and, importantly, the provisioning of software onto the VM using Chef. If you want to automatically roll out a VM with Apache 2, Rails, Phusion Passenger, or the like, Chef and Vagrant will take care of it for you. This is powerful stuff!

In terms of documentation and having a straight forward official homepage, Vagrant sets a solid benchmark. There's a straightforward guide to getting started with Vagrant, lots of documentation, and a 12 minute getting started video/screencast. Great work guys!

Gas Wants To Kill the Wind

2010-03-08T21:48:00Z

RABarnes writes "Scientific American has posted an article about the political efforts of natural gas and electric utilities to limit the growth of wind-generated electricity. Although several of the points raised by the utilities and carbon-based generators are valid, the basic driver behind their efforts is that wind-generation has now successfully penetrated the wholesale electricity market. Wind was okay until it became a meaningful competitor to the carbon dioxide-producing entities. Among the valid points raised by the carbon-based generators are concerns about how the cost of electricity transmission are allocated and how power quality can be improved (wind generation — from individual sites — is hopelessly variable). But there are fixes for all of the concerns raised by the carbon-based entities and in almost all cases they have been on the other side of the question in the past."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

HP's Windows 7 Slate Strikes at the iPad

2010-03-08T21:42:00Z

HP is set to launch a new tablet that will strike back at Apple's iPad. The new HP slate is a sleek design, startling in its resemblance to the iPad but will offer Flash support.

This week in search 3/7/10

2010-03-08T21:35:23Z

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week's enhancements include:

Stars in search
Every day, we work to improve the four key components of search: comprehensiveness, latency, user experience and relevance. Of these, relevance is dramatically enhanced by more personalized results. This week, we announced a new feature that makes it much easier to mark and rediscover your favorite content. Stars in search are just like the stars you see in Google Toolbar or in Maps — they act like bookmarks. When you star a search result, and it happens to appear again in future results, you'll see that you already found that particular result. Starred items will appear at the top of your results. Stars in search has been rolling out this week, and will be available globally for all users who are signed in to their Google account.

Auto-spell for images
This week, we unveiled automatic spell correction for images. In cases where we're highly confident you had intended to type something else, we'll replace results from the typo query with those from the spell-corrected version — just like when you misspell a query in Google search. Ultimately, this change will reduce the time it takes to get you the result you're looking for (and that's a good thing).

Example searches: [butterflys], [roman architecture] and [apollo ohno]

Sidewiki page owner entry
In September, we launched Sidewiki, which lets you contribute helpful information to any webpage using a sidebar in Google Toolbar or a Chrome extension. Afterward, webmasters asked, "How can I quickly put Sidewiki on all pages of my site?" Now webmasters can create a special entry, called a page owner entry, that appears above all entries written by users. Webmaster tool improvements ultimately create a better web experience for us all, so we're pleased about this. Let us know what you think about our webmaster enhancements.

Stay tuned for next week's news on more search launches.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

News for me

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Old-fashioned Storytime with Grandma Patti at 10:00 AM

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Preschool Storytime at 10:00 AM

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Infant/Toddler Storytime at 10:00 AM

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- ESL Family Literacy & Conversation at 9:30 AM

Tue, Mar 9, 2010 -- Friends of the Tierrasanta Library Booksale at 9:30 AM

Truly Open Data

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Arne Brodowski: Einladung zur Django-UserGroup Hamburg am 23. März

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Drunken Lactating Kentuckian charged with squirting Human White Russian into jailer's face

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Mike Driscoll: A Simple Step-by-Step Reportlab Tutorial

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