this is awesome. sorry if it's been all over the internet already.

Oh Jesus. So I've had a little trouble with certain folks from New York who handle the tech administration for a certain regional blog (site A) that I do some tech things for. And tonight I learn that at least some of these NY tech staffers are also affiliated with a public transport arrival time SMS service (site B) that invaded site A's comment section after I declined to cover site B, given that my own site A-branded public transport SMS service was about to debut. I chased their apparent spamminess out of site A's comment section with some testy replies.

Man. This kind of explains a lot of the intransigence I've experienced from the NYC gang. And it's kind of a pain in the ass. What a tangled web we weave, when first we write some PHP.

I've been holed up in the apartment coding an Awesome Science Project all weekend, so I'm a bit too exhausted to try this out at the moment — but I just got an email indicating that Mozes has just announced developer support for their text-messaging product.

If you don't remember Mozes' debut, I don't blame you. Basically, they've bought an SMS short code — one of those nifty five-digit phone numbers that you can text things to (instead of using a cumbersome ten digit code like some services I know). You go to their website, register for a keyword that's unique to you, and then... uh... things happen. Maybe. When other folks SMS your keyword to Mozes, they get your contact info. And you can store song titles and stuff. It doesn't make much sense to me, to be honest.

But! Although I don't see the appeal of their SMS-based note-taking functionality, I think the newly-announced developer access is a big, big deal. So far as I can tell, it lets you hook a script up to your Mozes keyword. So you can host a service elsewhere on the web and get free SMS service via Mozes. This is a fairly cool thing to get for free — shortcodes cost $2k to set up, then $1k/month after that — and that's before the charge you have to pay for every SMS you send or receive. Having your users specify your keyword for every query might be a pain, but for simple apps this could be a great way for developers to get SMS capabilities without having to find funding first.

Of course, if you start to make money off of the service you can bet that Mozes will shut you down pretty quickly. Hell, if Mozes starts to make money off of reselling their short code, I imagine the telcos will shut them down pretty quickly.

But it's a neat service, and a step in the right direction. Mobile services are a pretty closed set of systems right now. But that can't last. This stuff is going to continue to get more accessible to the common geek, I think.

Controversy! So, This American Life, the astoundingly good public radio show, finally got around to ditching the irredeemable RealAudio format for its online offerings and put everything up as mp3s. Geeks, doing what they do, immediately created podcast feeds out of this newfound bounty. Then the trouble began.

TAL seems to be run by nice and generous folks, but they sell their episodes through iTunes and Audible.com. They also give royalties to their contributors and the folks they license music from (they have good taste in music). These entanglements mean that they can't endorse the free downloading of permanent copies of their shows — although they seem to be okay with old episodes being streamed off of their website (they wrapped the new mp3s in m3u playlist files; for the non-tech-savvy, this would conceal the downloadability of the underlying mp3s and appear to be a stream-based offering).

TAL has begun contacting the folks who put up the podcast feeds and politely asking them to take their feeds down. The feed maintainers have all complied, so far as I know. But folks aren't uniformly happy about this, or convinced that TAL is unambiguously in the right. BoingBoing has been operating a clearinghouse for the resulting discussion. See here, here, here and here. Folks seem to be backing off due to their fondness for the show, but the copyfighting contingent isn't particularly happy.

That sums up my position pretty well, too. I'm conflicted about this. I love This American Life and I want it to survive. And, after reading this glowing profile, I'm pretty much ready to pledge my undying allegiance to Ira Glass.

On the other hand, I don't really believe in the idea that content producers have a right to restrict how their work is consumed after it's been given away in one format. Consumers shouldn't be begrudged the right to time-shift programming and consume it as they see fit. That's the underlying idea behind DRM, and it'll produce an incredibly irritating system for interacting with our culture if it's allowed to take hold.

So what to do? Compromise — and be discreet. The dopes who submitted their homebrew TAL feed to the iTunes Music Store had precisely the wrong idea. If TAL doesn't want other folks to decide their distribution system on their behalf, I suppose that's fine. So long as they don't bother those of us who quietly make use of technology to more easily enjoy their show, everyone should be happy. I'll admit that it's not a very democratic solution, but it seems like the best one available at the moment.

And on that note, if you happen to have a web hosting account available to you that can run PHP scripts, you might be interested in the one I whipped up this afternoon (you'll probably want to secure it from prying eyes). Also: shhh!

BTD, Unfogged, Kriston — all have been having trouble with their Movable Type 3.2 installations. The culprit in all cases seems to be an overabundance of comments and trackbacks in the junk folders — for some reason these continue to be indexed as part of day-to-day MT operations. Eventually the load gets too large, scripts start timing out, and shared hosting providers shut you down for consuming too many resources. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I'm not convinced — assuming a constant level of spam, these breakdowns have all occurred very close to one another. It looks to me like an inevitable shortcoming of MT 3.2 is surfacing.

From what I hear, SixApart hasn't been very helpful — despite these folks owning licenses. I'm sure this new Vox thing is going to be very cool, but they probably ought to spend some time fixing their existing flagship product, too. It seems to be breaking in a fairly serious way.

For those MT users who haven't crashed yet, all I can suggest is that you delete everything from your junk comment and trackback folders. That hasn't been a cure-all for everybody, but it can't hurt.

UPDATE: Check out the comments for more detail from Becks on the problems Unfogged ran into. Spawning lots of individual Perl processes isn't necessarily a bad thing (or avoidable, given MT's overall architecture), but the scripts clearly need to be made lower-impact — at least until the submission is definitively identified as non-junk (at which point resource consumption can be escalated).

Meanwhile, WordPress, MT's chief rival, continues to not-quite-intrigue me. I like that it's in PHP and that it's open source. But it's not capable of handling load in its default configuration, and it's been built with a nasty coding approach that, while intended to make template designers' lives easier, mostly just infuriates me with its quirkiness, opacity and illogical nature.

Gizmodo has a hands-on with the Sidekick 3, which apparently will be unleashed on T-Mobile customers in 8 days. Perhaps it's just the Gizmodo reviewer's lack of familiarity with the SK platform at work, but I find this piece somewhat discouraging. Yes, there's Bluetooth, an audio player and a slightly better camera, but large parts of this review read exactly like the author is talking about the Sidekick 2:

Little notifier icons in the top right corner inform you when you have a message in IM, mail, or SMS/MMS. Messages appear in a little bubble for a moment before disappearing, so you can assess the value of emails and messages before reading. There is an airplane mode that turns off the wireless and basically lets you browse your mail like a madman but little else.

The trackball is a real winner. It lights up with all the colors of the rainbow—actually about 10...

The battery lasted one full day....

Voice quality was fine and reception as about as good as can be expected. One pet peeve—it would lose its GPRS connection and only a full reboot would get it back...

Ah well. I think the GPRS speeds have been bumped up, too. If that's the case, it's probably enough of a reason to upgrade (the Bluetooth is the main attraction for me). Still, I was hoping for better battery life... maybe even... GPS? I know, I know, I'm asking too much.

Trend prediction! I think that the next skill that IT recruiters are going to be looking for without knowing why is knowledge of KML. It's really just a simple XML format that lets you keep track of geographical locations. Check out that Wikipedia link — KML's not rocket science, but it seems like it's suddenly showing up all over the place.

Maybe it's just my perception of it. Irongeek put together a KML-based hack a while ago allowing a database of unsecured wifi access points to be mapped into Google Earth, but I just saw it today. But there are other, more timely signs: cheap GPS loggers like this one and this one seem to be popping up very quickly. And Mologogo appears to have only gotten KML support in January. I'd say we're hovering near buzzword-dom.

There are plenty of other ways to store geographic data, but Google Earth seems to have tipped the hobbyist balance in favor of KML. Everybody says that location-based stuff is going to hit big in the next year or so. Seems like KML is going to be the format of choice for powering it.

That is all!

Also, I swear, entertaining blogging to resume soon. I'm brainstorming, people.

Because I've been working pretty hard this week, and because my plate of things that have to get done right away turned out to be relatively small today, I decided to treat myself to a little recreational nerdery this afternoon. Sadly, it wasn't successful. But I'm posting anyway in order to help the nerds of the future.

See, I really, really hate that MySpace doesn't let you link directly to songs. Not necessarily the raw MP3 (though my hardline copyfighting inclincations say they should), but at least to the band page with something in the URL that tells it: "Play this particular song. Don't just randomly select one of the other, crappier ones in the featured playlist. I want to send this to my friends, goddammit."

So I fired up Ethereal and the Firefox LiveHTTPHeaders plugin and started looking at the conversation that happens between your computer and MySpace when you click on a song in their Flash audio player.

First things: an XML file comes back, specifying the playlist. It's called mediaxmlprovider.xml, and it's served by a fairly easy-to-find URL (which has to be passed some of the random codes specified in the HTML of the band's page — I didn't bother to confirm this, but it seems pretty likely). The contents of the file look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<profile>
<timestamp><![CDATA[1150454435]]></timestamp>
<name><![CDATA[regina spektor]]></name>
<playstoday><![CDATA[33341]]></playstoday>
<downloadedtoday><![CDATA[0]]></downloadedtoday>
<totalplays><![CDATA[1811136]]></totalplays>
<autoplay><![CDATA[0]]></autoplay>
<allowadd><![CDATA[1]]></allowadd>
<playlist><song bsid="7548074" title="Fidelity" songid="0" plays="685573" comments="" rate="" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs7548074_m.jpg" imagedesc="Begin To Hope<br>2006 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_c4b21abc.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGdB
gorBgEEAYI3WAOuoIGOMIGLBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoH0wewIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAE
CNxa3NiUig5fBBBBZNK8fzHa3nXq%2fQXZNaSJBFClWYkcVz5a2X%2bUe5yft5iC9Cn
mboEQKrW%2fPBrUqXlO7VwTgCxy%2bptjwvoaQsx2O4AAqXzpF63IosE0kZY0bsZ
k1XznxMS9l8rzeTgwz14T9w%3d%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="7494789" title="Better" songid="0" plays="358965" comments="" rate="" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs7494789_m.jpg" imagedesc="Begin To Hope<br>2006 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_141017ab.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=
MIGdBgorBgEEAYI3WAOuoIGOMIGLBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoH0wewIDAgABAgJmAwIC
AMAECLuj4EHcSIfyBBD5z%2fO%2bh8P26LaTqDiG07JMBFBq5PV2kJDM%2b07hGBsp
xCmC3nxdreIiWFPw4nt3onOecM5NqoOaEjWPyNYCOvCD8X77svdho%2bSmW7Ok
a9F67YoFS10RfyZ0UADznDzj6ZJelg%3d%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="67359" title="Us" songid="42627" plays="336564" comments="42627" rate="42627" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs373400284_m.jpg" imagedesc="Soviet Kitsch<br>2004 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_e2b7a709.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGVBgor
BgEEAYI3WAOuoIGGMIGDBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoHUwcwIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAECFG4n
aZwuIbOBBDLD%2flDSGXRFNcjgKaiVaXWBEjwVg5Sd1IoyLFpHt%2fb85q41kwbAwufnVR
CexWU%2fziYdY66mVw7vIGNx37awMxokOQ%2foEtupSdopInRyczeNZCRfb3wI4G1VIM%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/><song bsid="67063" title="Ghost of Corporate Future" songid="42522" plays="387912" comments="42522" rate="42522" downloadable=""
imagename="http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/bs356236944_m.jpg" imagedesc="Soviet Kitsch<br>2004 Sire Records" filename="48/41/3071484/3071484_8fcdc23f.mp3" url="http://home.myspace.com/Services/Media/mediaHitCounter.ashx?i=MIGVBgor
BgEEAYI3WAOuoIGGMIGDBgorBgEEAYI3WAMBoHUwcwIDAgABAgJmAwICAMAECPTQc
TjZI5BPBBDldE4GvP%2bEfHTN%2bZP%2fyPupBEhHCQ6QrxvOGCaM5nRpJPRJO35ivJEb
6%2f%2fTVNDzWOPiZj04wesbPi6WP9jUubZFoXdQ7UIW92EqnCvEOnYM9c1Mqfdoyzy4
ZZ0%3d" lyrics="" purl=""/>
</playlist>
</profile>

Those yellow parts look pretty promising. In fact, it seemed like this might be susceptible to a variation on this method (which has since become outdated). But those mp3 filenames are relative URLs, not absolute, and I got 404s when I tried them against any of the likeliest domains & paths.

It's possible that URLs like http://c.myspace.com/BandSongs/48/41/3071484/3071484_8fcdc23f.mp3 were just being clever, noticing my lack of a myspace.com HTTP referer, and lying to me about the file's presence. But I don't think so: I went to the page of a random band that offers downloads and found that the URLs used to obtain the mp3 look like this:

http://mp3download.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=bandprofile.downloadSong&bsid=11466&song_name=Its Dange&fid=1943559

There's no redirect or anything like that going on here. It looks like they've set up a dedicated mp3 gateway that serves the song out of a non-public part of their filesystem. This lets them lock things down as tightly as they care to — ie, they can check against the database to see if a song is genuinely supposed to be downloadable before sending it out. Nuts.

Of course, the Flash player still has to get the audio somehow. But I don't know enough about Flash to figure out how that happens. If I had to guess I'd say that it might use a proprietary (and secure) Flash streaming audio solution. It's still possible to grab the audio to an mp3 — until we get trusted computing forced on us, it'll always be possible — but for purposes of linking directly to mp3s, there isn't a lot of remaining promise here. Not that I can see, anyway.

Ah well. Perhaps a cleverer geek will pick up the mantle and figure out how to make MySpace mp3bloggable. Or perhaps MySpace will eventually remove its head from its ass and allow incoming links to specify particular songs. Till then I'll maintain the attitude of apathy and gradually-spreading terror that I'd been directing at the site up until this point.

neat to think about - can you believe that just five years ago iPods and social networking sites amongst other ever-present tech and media things weren't part of our day-to-day lives? five years from now, "which products, used by few today, will be essential?"

Unsigned editorials are terrible. I realize that I should be getting into the habit of dutifully reading the ones on offer from the Post and Times so that, during the dinnerparties of the future, I can cluck my tongue insightfully over the latest institutional outrage (in between lighter conversational fare, e.g. "Preschools Are So Expensive Now" and "We Think The Maid Is Stealing From Us").

But I just can't do it. They're like particularly badly-written blog posts, except without a name to offer accountability or references to back up their bizarre arguments-by-fiat. If newspaper editors had any brains they'd ditch the unsigned editorials (and political endorsements) immediately, before people start laughing in their faces in social settings. But I suppose they're too focused on fomenting the next war (how'd that last one work out for you guys, by the way?).

Today's an exception, though, because the Post's anti-net neutrality editorial is so staggeringly dumb that it deserves to be reprinted everywhere — to ring throughout the online universe as an emphatic testament to the fact that Writing, Editing, and Not Being A Total Fucking Idiot are three distinct disciplines.

It appears that Cox Cable is throttling access to Craigslist — presumably because Cox offers its own classified ad service. Via Dave Winer.

Between the LASIK and my generally geeky ways, my friends give me a lot of shit about my potential for becoming a post-human abomination. Digital-themed tattoo? I've thought about it, but probably not. RFID chip? Maybe in a few years. Intracranial bluetooth headset? Eh, I'll wait until I start seeing them in rap videos. I'm not actually all that anxious to modify my body in permanent ways.

But this... Oh man. I want this. The ability to feel electromagnetic fields, people. To tell when a wire is live, or a hard drive is being read, or a transmitter is on, or if a surface is ferrous. It's just a little too cool. Make it safe, then sign me up. Sorry, humanity.

I wrote about the GNU Radio project a long time ago, but my efforts were probably fairly incomprehensible . Today Wired has an excellent story that profiles the project, explains why it's so cool — and does so in more lucid terms.

The signal processing applications that are opened by this project are truly mind-boggling. The linked article mentions that some folks are already using it to track which department store window displays are the most popular by triangulating the cellular keepalive signals emitted by shoppers' cell phones. That's just astoundingly awesome.

Some of you might remember me asking for career advice a while back. I ended up deciding to take the new job, then blogged the first day. Then everyone at work discovered this site (using their strange internet powers), and, aside from some generalities, I haven't mentioned it.

Well, let me fill you in. It's been about six months, I think. People use the phrase "it was the best decision I ever made" to describe getting a hair transplant, or buying a boat, or ordering a Cobb salad. So I'd like to avoid joining their idiomatic ranks, but I can't. It just seems so obvious. These are the smartest, coolest, funniest, most talented people I've ever worked with, and the job itself is interesting, varied and rewarding. I look forward to work every day. Okay, every non-hungover day.

The reason for my gushing: we're hiring. If you're geeky, really smart and interested in working in the non-evil sector, you should think about applying. You'd like it. Seriously.

Prompted by a WSJ article, Bunnie, the man most frequently credited with cracking the copy protection on the original Xbox, lets us in on the work he's doing on the Xbox 360. The recent exploit that allows DVD dual layer backups of commercial games came thanks to the other star of the WSJ article — a guy named TheSpecialist (he didn't release his work, but it was replicated). Bunnie's been mostly quiet about the XB360, implying at times that he wasn't planning to really get his hands dirty with it.

Well, that didn't last. Exposing a chip's silicon and extracting the cryptographic keys hardcoded on it = BAD ASS.

I was talking about Google with Matt last night — more specifically, when they'll fall from grace. He thinks it might be a while, and considers the period when the Gmail Generation begins running for office a likely date for the turn, what with all the secrets that have been entrusted to them.

Personally, I think it'll be much sooner. The cracks in the facade are showing: Google Pages is a bust; Orkut is mostly a bust; Google Talk is mostly a bust; and I'm deeply dubious about Google Base ever turning into anything. Amazon S3 seems to have beaten GDrive to market. We'll see if they ever do a web-based office suite replacement, I suppose — their Writely acquisition is suggestive, but I have doubts about them being able to pull off a really compelling Word replacement in the browser.

There are plenty of failures that I'm forgetting, too. Google fans generally defend this hit-or-miss history by saying the company throws stuff at the wall and sees what sticks. But now they're having trouble with their core offering, too: from what I'm reading, their search difficulties extend beyond the Sitemaps problems I've been having. The "site:" operator hasn't been working correctly, and the debut of a new crawler codenamed "Big Daddy" has been wreaking havoc with folks' PageRanks.

The trouble in search-land seems like big news. If they can't keep a handle on the cornerstone of their business, the company will stop looking quite so much an eclectic whiz kid and begin appearing a bit more like an ADD-addled savant. Now that they're public, a loss in confidence could send their suspiciously dot-commie culture and strategy spiralling off into unpleasant places.

Or maybe I'm just feeling pissy because Gmail has been screwing up all day. Either way, I'm souring on GOOG.

A small victory, it's true. But I had to fight long & hard with Windows XP to get this far. The Mac has a nasty habit of quickly hanging up the connection when the Airport is simultaneously on. I think that's because OS X is clever and tries to save you modem charges when you have cheap wifi. Let's hope it's really clever and doesn't extend this policy to when you're sharing your modem connection over an ad-hoc wifi network.

I'm heading to the beach this Memorial Day weekend, and I'm intent on bringing the internet along with me. Last year I still had a fly-by-night dialup ISP that only charged you in months when you used the service. That business model has since run its course, and I'm casting about for another way to ensure connectivity. Needless to say, the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

So I stopped by the Ver/iz/on store on my way home and signed up for EVDO service. By the numbers: $80/month, $150 for the PC5740 card and — most importantly — 14 days to return it all. I'll still get charged a prorated fee for the service I use, so it's not totally shady. Just mostly.

There's one complication, though: the card doesn't work with Macs. Well, okay, it sort of does: I've already gone through these instructions, but they mean it when they say the account has to be activated on a PC. Sadly, Charles' laptop isn't up to the task (it's always been flaky about PCMCIA cards, and refuses to recognize this one). But we have one sort-of-working PC laptop at work, and a number of EVDO cardholders who've successfully gotten their Powerbooks working with the nominally PC-only technology. So spirits remain high.

Remember when I was singing the praises of Google Sitemaps, only to quickly reconsider? Well, I'm moving from "reconsidering" to "being kind of pissed off".

For those who don't know, the idea behind the sitemap is to give Google a specially formatted file that says "here's where my content is, here's when it was updated, and here's how important each piece of it is relative to the rest". It's supposed to make the Googlebot that crawls your site work more efficiently, and give you better results. Personally, I'm sick of having old-style URLs (e.g. 001234.php) showing up for our site.

But so far the sitemap hasn't managed to do anything except banish every included URL from Google's systems entirely. Which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do. I posted the following message to the Sitemaps Google Group; I'll let you know if I hear anything back.

I hope someone can help me figure out what's going on. Last week I submitted a sitemap for my blog (http://www.zunta.org/sitemap.xml). Everything seems to be working properly according to my Google Sitemaps account dashboard.

However, since submitting the sitemap every page that is in it has been excluded from the index, including many that I know used to have relatively good pageranks. I know that there have been some recent hiccups with the site: operator, but this applies to other queries as well. I wrote an SSH tutorial with the word "sshirking" in its title a while ago that got a number of links and attained a high pagerank for the unusual word "sshirking". The proper permalinked URLs used to be among the top hits; now they can't be found anywhere in the index (as proven by entering the full url as a query, e.g. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/2005/08/30/sshirking_work_1/index.php).

What's more, the old version of these pages -- before I changed permalink naming styles -- are still in the index. http://www.zunta.org/blog/archives/004498.php was the original URL of the above link (it now redirects to the proper URL). Only this second, less descriptive URL (which is NOT in the sitemap) is still in Google's index. It's only the files included in the sitemap that have been dropped from the index.
I tried deleting and resubmitting the map, and have patiently waited since May 18 for a new crawl to include the results. Nothing so far.

Can anyone tell me what's going on? Right now it seems that having a sitemap achieves nothing other than nuking your results from the index entirely.

It turns out that Feed on Feeds + this incredibly simple PHP XML-RPC library = your own Technorati. Well, okay, not quite — you'd still have to write your own app to crawl the internet for new blogs and add them. And I have some concerns about using the FoF RSS reader in a shared hosting environment — seems likely that those lengthy 4x/hour blow-crawling sessions are going to start getting noticed by somebody eventually.

But for now, and for a limited pool of blogs (say, all the DC-related ones), it's working pretty well. You can probably guess where this is going...

Anyway, why would I want to do this instead of just using Technorati's open API? There are a few reasons. One, to restrict the search results to a particular pool of blogs that I have control over. Two, to avoid paying Technorati money. And three, for fun. Sort of.

Hmm. Remember a day or two ago when I mentioned some quick & easy ways to generate a Google Site Map for your MT/WP/Drupal site? Well, you might want to hold off on that — all of a sudden we seem to have dramatically fewer entries in Google. I'm having trouble finding blog posts that I know were available before.

Hopefully this is just a case of Google clearing our their old entries prior to picking up the new ones from the site map. I'm taking some steps to make the sitemap more accessible, then I'll give it a few days to settle down. But right now this seems like a pretty bad way to optimize your site.

Saw this on BoingBoing yesterday and meant to blog it, but then didn't: FeedRinse is a pretty neat idea. Put your various RSS subscriptions in, combine them into channels (if you so desire), then set up filters on various criteria.

Why would you want to do this? Maybe because you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about when I write about tech stuff, and don't care to learn. You could filter out all of the tech posts from our feed and just see the others. Or you could just view posts by Catherine. Or add richer keyword filtering to a Craigslist feed.

Sadly, their site is a little too slick for its own good — in order to keep up with the guy's 19 or so different blogs, I tried to put together a "Kriston" channel. Unfortunately, the dynamic feed-adding process seems to have a bug; when I added new blogs I'd get empty select boxes instead of meaningful UI elements. Oh well.

But it's still a good idea, and probably works just fine in IE or Safari or Camino or Opera or something. And the feed filtering stuff works fine, I believe — it's just the channel-creation feature that's broken. Once they get the kinks sorted out, this will be the kind of thing that ends up being unepectedly useful on a regular basis.

When Google Sitemaps came out I didn't really bother to check it out. Custom-authoring some arcane XML format in order to support one (admittedly gigantic) private company? No thanks.

Well, it's been a while, and folks have gone ahead and done all the hard work for us. So if you want to be sure Google can find everything on your site (and that it'll know when you've updated it), you might want to follow one of these sets of instructions:

• Movable Type (ignore the bit at the end about URL encoding; just submit the sitemap here)
• Wordpress (submits it for you)
• Drupal (ditto)

Alright, it's been a week. How's LastCall holding up?

No huge surprises. I guess I'm a little surprised that more people are using the opentable capability than the movie and music features, but it's pretty close.

Traffic might seem low, but I'm pretty happy with this level. People are using the service, but it's got a lot of spare capacity. And, more importantly, this level of use seems unlikely to provoke the ire of my mobile carrier.

I've gotten requests for a few more movie theaters and two reports of "no trains" being incorrectly returned by the metro component, but otherwise no real complaints. I'll be trying to address those two items — particularly the bug — as soon as I can.

An interesting insight from a Slashdot thread on the Nintendo Wii and its prospects, made by a gentleman named John Hu/mmel, aka "Dark Paladin" (awesome):

it would appear that Nintendo has a lot of 3rd party support time time around, which made me think of why, and then something that Ubisoft president commented on made me figure it out.

Long story short, he made some less then flattering remarks about the PS3 — how it just ups the power. The same could be said for the 360. But that's no the issue for a publisher; for a publisher, all of that extra power and HD requirements goes into cost. Now, a development team needs even bigger hardware, a bigger graphics and sound team to get the same game out, which now increases the cost of the game by a large margin - say from $1 million to $7-$10 million. For a publisher, that means increased risk, reduced margins, and relying ever more on "certain" hits (which can vanish if something goes wrong — look at the Tomb Raider franches, and what they've had to do to get it back).

Nintendo is offering publishers something more than just a gimmick: they're offering them reduced price. Look at "Brain Age" - developed, tested, and ready for market in 90 days, and it hardly needed a graphics team. Since the Wii uses really Gamecube development systems with more power, that's an easy transfer of knowledge, which is why I predict that for the first year, Wii games will look pretty much like Gamecube games, maybe a little smoother.

But for the publisher, once you get past the controller issue, it's reduced cost, reduced time, reduced risk over time. If the Wii takes off at all, it may be that publishers wind up favoring it if for no other reason than it makes them more money over time.

Another commenter follows up:

Your numbers are a little off. My understanding is that a XBox/PS2/Gamecube title costs $8 - $12 million to produce (with some AAA titles going into the 20s), and last I heard HD games were expected to at least double the costs. (Is it any wonder publishers are afraid to take risks with money like that involved?)

...

Yes, sure, it might take more people to program a game for such a complex controller, but you aren't going to need 200 people churning out high res textures that will only be appreciated by people with HDTVs. Nintendo knows what it's doing.

Makes sense to me.

Alright, here's another stab at a legitimate complaint about OS X: my copy can no longer play Flash movies. Every time Flash launches on a webpage it apparently tries to connect to my Bluetooth headset (which is nowhere nearby and hasn't been used in months). I then get a "Bluetooth Audio Failed" message and playback stops — and can't be started! Argh. This despite my decidedly non-headset-oriented settings in Preferences and Flash's settings.

This guy seems to be the only other person on the internet having this problem, and he hasn't got a solution. It's pretty goddamn irritating — I'm missing out on YouTube-based hilarity on a daily basis.

Today is E3, when we'll supposedly learn some more details surround Nintendo's new console and the plans of the Big Three in general. Already revealed: the PS3's $500 price tag — and that's just for the entry-level model without wifi or HD support. Yikes.

I sort of had a PSOne in college — a roommate owned it, but I chipped it — and it was a pretty fun, but not great system. I've always had a grudge against Sony's offerings, though, on the basis of their insanely bad controller. I think they just shot themselves in the foot pretty seriously.

Meanwhile, I'm getting more and more excited for the Nintendo Revolution Wii. Everytime I look at that new controller I get a little more excited.

UPDATE: NYT coverage of the Wii can be found here. In general the various gaming news outlets are saying Nintendo hit it out of the park with their demo, It's getting very favorable comparisons to Sony's presentation. which is being treated as something of a flop (largely because of the huge price tag for the PS3). No word on price for the Wii, but they've previously pledged it'll clock in at under $300. No release date either, other than the disappointingly vague and far away "Q4".

Well, my SMS project has finally been loosed on an unsuspecting world. And yeah, it's for DCist. Go check out the announcement message here — it's got all the details on what the service does and how to use it.

My dirty little secret? Throughput is an unimpressive 4-6 outbound messages per minute. If things don't crash horribly under the announcement traffic, I'll be very surprised. But there's nothing I can do but dive in and see how it handles load. Once it breaks I'll start sorting it all out.

Okay, after reading Steve Rubel's explanation, I think I get it — it's just that there's nothing much to get. Or rather, there's exactly what I thought there was: OPML sharing will be used to determine what people are interested in. Consumers can find new sources of news and marketers can pitch to them more effectively.

This seems like a much bigger win for the marketers than the users, though. RSS empowered content consumers in some obvious ways — it made it much easier to stay on top of many sources of news. OPML provides a slick, hi-tech framework for providing statistically justified blog recommendations, but to be honest I've always felt that blogrolls and interblog links work fine for that sort of thing. OPML's big advantage will be centralizing that data so that it can be more easily mined.

I suppose it may help inject some more ad revenue into the blogosphere, but that's really the only major benefit I can see. I can't imagine a scenario under which an end user would be all that interested in using OPML sharing. This is a technology that'll be implemented in the backend of RSS readers in order to provide a shiny but unnecessary recommendation engine — and, not coincidentally, a new source of marketing data. But that seems to be about it.

I gotta say, I don't really understand what's so exciting about this OPML business. Is it a good format for exporting lists of blogs? Sure, apparently. For note taking and compiling lists of references? I think so, based on what I've read. And could Share OPML.org provide Amazon "people who bought X also bought Y"-style recommendations to the world of blog reading (or at least bring a more accurate version of it, since I'm sure it already exists somewhere)? Sure.

But beyond that, I have to admit that I don't get what the big deal is. There's apparently a community of people really excited about OPML, so I feel pretty confident that I'm missing something. I don't remember, but I can imagine that in the past I might've foolishly said dismissive things about Dave Winer's last XML format — I certainly wasn't able to imagine its usefulness for tracking packages, finding apartments on Craigslist, or powering my screensaver. So I'm trying to be circumspect, and to bite my tongue — I really do want to understand the OPML hoopla. But right now it's lost on me.

New project time. The SMS dealy should be released imminently — I just need to write the help system (and, uh, ignore a persistent bug and elusive bug). I should be able to wrap that up this afternoon.

I've got a new project in mind, though. For a while I've wanted to be able to pipe sound around the computers in the apartment more easily. The Linux server is connected to a pretty nice stereo system, but it's a headless unit. We tried using SliMP3 as a webserver-based MP3 jukebox for a while, but the latency was pretty irritating. And besides, I want to be able to pipe other kinds of audio around — streaming internet radio, youtube soundtracks, even mail notification beeps. And I'd like for the various computers in the house to be able to use it (not simultaneously, though).

There are various solutions to the problem of playing MP3s over a network, but I want something a little more universal and cheap. Ideally, it'd be an icon that sits in the system tray. Click on it and it turns green (or something) and all your sound starts magically coming out of a server connected to a set of nice, big speakers.

This page shows the outlines of a solution. It involves piping raw audio samples across a network to something that catches them and shoves them at the soundcard. There's no buffering, but that should be okay — I want realtime audio, so that everything stays as closely sync'ed as possible. If the wifi gets spotty and some samples get dropped from time to time, that's fine. I've managed to get a proof of concept variation on the article working:

On the server:
listen for incoming data on port 1234 and pipe it to the rawplay application
nc -l 1234 | rawplay

On the client:
convert an mp3 into raw audio samples
mpg123 -s somemp3.mp3 > somemp3.raw
print the raw data across the network to the rawplay instance on the server
cat somemp3.raw | nc <server's ip> 1234

This setup works decently — it sounds slightly weird, like the sampling rate is a tiny bit off and as if it has a weirdly flat frequency response. But I'm going to blame that on mpg123 for now. Unfortunately, this trick doesn't account for grabbing live audio off of your system — that's the hard part. But I think this example code, combined with SoundFlower and some OS X Sockets 101 (yet to be learned), should take care of that.

Justin gave a demo of OS X software development on Thursday that made everything look encouragingly awesome and easy. Ideally I'll be able to wrap everything up in a slick GUI package, then resurrect my .NET skills and build a Windows version. Construct a proper server (a few dozen lines of Python should do), throw in FLAC support to avoid wasting bandwidth, and I'd have a pretty neat app.

That's the plan, anyway. I'm sort of hoping someone will pipe up in comments and say "that's already been done, you can download it here".

So, as everybody knows, Mike Grass, friend to me and Catherine and cofounder of DCist, has launched his newest professional endeavor, a blog for the Washington Post's Express newspaper. The site looks great, and I have no doubt that it will be a wild success — Mike was born to be an editor. It seems highly likely to me that I'll be pestering him for a cushy IT job someday.

But there's already a tic of the new site that's erupted in controversy: the bolding. Between this and DCist's now-partially-abandoned editorial "we", Mike's establishing a pattern of copy-editing controversy.

Well, personally I can't get enough of it. And if you can't either, I can help sate your bottomless lust for bold. Presenting the Expressamifier, a Javascript bookmarklet to bring FreeRide's distinctive look to virtually any webpage! Just click on and drag this link up to your browser's quicklinks bar (where Firefox sticks "Getting Started" and "Live Headlines" by default):

Expressamify

Then browse to any site and press it. Our sophisticated algorithms will selectively highlight text to maximize, uh, boldousity. Yeah.

And, as a special bonus, you can try running it on the Express website itself for a unique surprise. The resulting reaction is not unlike matter and antimatter colliding.

SPECIAL BONUS NOT TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ADDENDUM: Okay, so the bookmarklet will try to remove the bold from FreeRide. But it turns out that there's so goddamn much of it that you have to run it several times to remove it all. No joke.

ALSO: This bookmarklet is pretty inefficient, and could easily crash your browser. Don't use it if you have unsaved work in some other tab.

AND: It seems to produce an error in IE, and doesn't work at all in Safari. But shouldn't you be using Firefox anyway? This clearly isn't the sort of thing I'm going to waste time debugging. Probably.

FINALLY: Because it's late and I apparently can't adopt a consistent sarcastic voice, I should point out that the stuff above about Mike is meant in earnest. The stuff about liking the bolding... yeah, not so much.

I expanded on my little science project, and now you can call 202-318-0196 and use an automatically-updated menu system to navigate & listen to the ten most recent podcasts from work. And hear my voice! Excitement, interne