hello, typepad

"Earthtones: Music from the Latin Diaspora"

This is good.

Saddam's Oregon Connection

"It's assumed that it came from a car stolen in the U.S. and shipped somehow to Iraq," an Army source informed Chatterbox by e-mail. "But no one knows this, it's just speculation."

WMDs? No. 2Z-351? Yes! Timothy Noah from Slate has unravelling the mystery of the Oregon license plate (tagline: "Pacific Wonderland") that was found in Saddam's palace. Thanks to Jason for the links.

I <3 NY and XML nerds

--- Sam Ruby wrote:

1: I <3 NY
2: I &lt;3 NY
3: I <3 NY
4: I <strong>&lt;3</strong> NY

1: mode="xml" type="text/plain"
2: mode="escaped" type="text/plain"
3: mode="xml" type="text/html"
4: mode="escaped" type="text/html"

Your option 2 seems incorrect. I translate mode="xml" to be the equivalent of calling Inner Xml on the XmlNode object that contains the above content and mode="escaped" the equivalent of calling InnerText on said object. Using that reasoning your option 2 renders as "I <3 NY" which is probably not what the user expected.

Who says XML nerds can't have fun?

MP on Atom

Mark Pilgrim demystifies Atom's authentication over at XML.com.

I wish I didn't need to write this article. My life would be much simpler if Atom could just use existing HTTP authentication, as-is. But it can't; I'm going to tell you why and then I'm going to tell you what we're doing instead.

This the #1 advantage of Atom over Meta-weblog, XML-RPC.

A little bit on Race

Al Sharpton's appearance on Saturday Night Live must be one of the most over-analyzed programs ever, but Jen from The Gothamist still managed to find a fresh perspective:

It was depressing because as many of the skits became black–focused, it showed how we really don't see the black performers consistently (same goes for the Halle Berry hosted episode); many of the white players only appeared in a rather amusing sketch about the other Democratic candidates watching Al on SNL.

I don't watch enough to know, but that sounds right. When I do watch, I'm looking out for the one Black cast member to show up in the credits. Considering how many Black SNL stars go on to success, I'm surprised SNL's talent scouts don't go further out of their way to find more non-white(*) talent.

Ah, also, the fallout from Rasheed Wallace's interview with the Oregonian has offered us a useful opportunity to refute some common race-colored commentary we see in the Sports press and the rest of press. Here's Brian Meehan:

What TypePad wants

Someone has been indexing many (all?) TypePad sites. Here's his listing of hello. It's got a few bugs, but it's still useful and fun You can also search across his entire index (New York (82 posts), Snow (271), Bjork (0??), Sex (155), Fugazi (0??), Election (56)).

I want Atom, RSS 1.0 feeds of this!

Schadenfreude: Google shoes 1,270 matches for Bjork site:typepad.com.

Kucinich Feeds

Dennis Kucinich Weblog and RSS 1.0 Feeds. He gets the RSS right, I like him. UPDATE: They're not really 'right,' because there's no content, only links. This is totally annoying.

Loving New York

Anil recently wrote about why he loves New York City. Did you know Anil is such a romantic? He writes a mean weblog, but he's a big softy.

Calling out Dean's Tech People

The more I think about The Dean campaign's dismissal of Clark's new technology (below) the angrier I get. The Dean campaign sells itself as being the epitome of Democracy, amplifying the voices of the silent majority and turning that voice into frank talk on the issues. But if that's the case, shouldn't the Dean campaign not only be looking at Clark and Cam's new web site, but they should all be talking about building a web site to integrate all the feeds - Clark's Grassroots Page, DeanSpace and the Clark Community Network.

Dave Winer's been writing a lot about this, as has Lord Lessig.

It's still about beating Bush, right?

Sheed

But there is no ambivalence, no question about how he feels, in the strong language he uses to criticize the NBA and how it treats black players. In a league where all but one team owner and a vast majority of the decision-makers are white, a league where an estimated 80 percent of the players are black, race is always an issue just below the surface but one rarely discussed.

Rasheed Wallace has been my favorite player since the time I lived in Portland. I'm shocked but pleased to see an even-handed interview with him in the Oregonian. There's a thread over at Sportsfilter, where I talk a little more about my experience with Rasheed in Portland.

News Standards

We've been developing a lot of software and scripts to syndicate our content at work, Howard Dean has a team of people doing it (or more likely Dean has a team that has a team that has a team doing it), and today USA Today wrote about the things Cam Barret is doing for Wesley Clark's handlers.

I attended the News Standards Summit (part of the XML Conference) on Monday, and despite the cultural differences between the RDF/ATOM/RSS2/ICE/NEWSML/NITP camps, I noticed that everyone is working on more or less the same problem, which is making it simpler to read and write with a larger audience.

So this quote grabbed me:

But Internet politics is still finding its legs, and one blogging celebrity may not impress everyone. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who founded DraftClark.com and now heads Dean's tech team, said he's never heard of Barrett, although he acknowledges that Clark's blog network joins Dean's "miles ahead of the other candidate's."

Ridiculous! At this moment syndicating news may be a competitive advantage, but next year it won't be. Do you think of having an email address as a competitive advantage? Of course not. These tecnologies have subtle differences, but the end result is that many more people are creative in creative ways (like Anil said). In the next five years, all of these standards and software are going to change in leaps and bounds. Atom is not quite done, but I expect that soon it will be the most popular format supported by the advanced application. I also expect that in the two years after that, something else will replace it. We still cut and paste text into a textarea window, just like we did over at pitas and blogger.

Social software doesn't solve problems, it just helps us think about them (examples: who's at short, Scrabble inconsistencies, war, Death.)

JerseyGirl

There's been a lot of talk about Curt Schilling signing with the Red Sox after the fans over at Sons of Sam Horn convinced him they were the best fans in all of baseball. This has caused a flurry of attention towards baseball-focused web sites. With all due respect to the Boston Dirt Dogs, SportsFilter's own JerseyGirl has consistently provided the best Red Sox/A-rod coverage on the In-TAR-net.

Did you mean Beatroot?

No, I meant Ben Trott, damnit! Although we did enjoy Beatroot. Anyway, btrott has released XML::Atom .03, for your hacking/upgrading/syndicating pleasure.

New Photo Albums

Typepad's photo album support is superior to the other weblog services, but that doesn't mean it's perfect; it has been difficult to edit or upload more than one photo at a time. No longer! Using Typepad's new bulk upload feature, I created galleries of our week in London, and our pictorial how-to for good pasta sauce. These folders had been sitting on my iPod for months, waiting for a home.

My Mom was teaching in England this Summer, and she was able to get free rooms for the family. Highlights of the trip involved eating and the Chelsea Physic Garden. Notice hello, pasta begins and ends with the garden - the fresh ingredients are the key!

"It Relaxes the Muscles"

I'm fiending with anticipation for the upcoming Hot Chocolate 15K, which was my favorite run last year. But Adriana is already worried about whether or not there will be alcohol at the 25th Annual New Year's Run in Central Park. "If I'm going to catch hypothermia and be cold, I might as well be numb." I guess that makes sense.

Let it Snow

Did you see NYC's first snow of the winter this morning? It was crazy.

World's First Gigapixel Image

This picture of Bryce Point in Utah is possibly the closest image has ever come to reality. From the author's description:

Here's another way to think about it. Given that the resolving power of the human eye (under ideal conditions at the center of the retina) is about 1 arcminute (1/60th of one degree), this image captures considerably more detail than I (or any other normal sighted human) was able to see with my eye when standing on the overlook at Bryce Point. Assuming one pixel per arcminute, an image with dimensions of 3780 x 2485 would suffice to capture the amount of detail that the naked eye could resolve. This image has more than 100 times this detail. Looking at the full sized digital image, one is able to see things that might have been difficult or impossible to spot, even when using binoculars.

He's looking for suggestions on printing...

Thanks, AOL

The instant message you received was sent to notify you that your screen name is currently signed into the AOL Instant Messaging Network more than once. This can occur if you log onto AIM and AOL on the same PC. This message is sent to help you manage your instant messaging sessions across PC-based and wireless clients.

I've wanted AIM to work this way for years.

The Real Moneyball

"The War Between the Street and the Floor" is an article about the reinvention of Goldman Sachs through technology and talent re-evaluation. It reads like the finance version of everyone's favorite bizdevporn MoneyBall:

A cadre of technology-obsessed executives who have presided over Goldman's booming bond business have assumed a tight grip on the company. Led by Lloyd C. Blankfein, a former commodities trader who heads the fixed-income, currency and commodities division, the bond traders have taken advantage of electronic trading platforms to make their business a major profit center.

...

OVER the past year, Mr. Blankfein and his colleagues have taken a knife to Goldman's comparatively bloated equities division, which, like the N.Y.S.E., relies on people - in this case, research analysts and an equity sales force - to eke out profits from a commission stream that continues to shrivel.

Goldman is embracing technology to gain advantages over their competitiors, and cutting out the high-price "power hitter" analysts who are no longer able to generate the profits they used to.

MobileWhack

MobileWhack is the 3650 hacks site I've wanted to do myself, but haven't had the time for. One less item on the todo list (thanks Rael!) Two highlights - unlocking your Nokia and MobileRSS.net. I have some perl code that allows you to duplicate the MobileRSS service pretty trivially, which I'll publish soon.

Link and Think 2003

Today hello.typepad is participating in Link and Think 2003, along with librarian.net, hchamp.com, YMDi.org and hundreds more.