Author Archives: Danny Silverman

Amazon’s new MP3 store rocks!

It’s “in beta” but they’re offering high-quality 256kbps VBR MP3s, album artwork, and *no DRM*. They have a ton of music, most of it priced at $0.89 per track and $8.99 per album. They have a simple little downloader app that automatically adds the music to iTunes (or Windows Media Player). Since it is DRM free you can put it on any portable device or computer you’d like and even share songs with friends and family. Except for selection, Amazon’s new MP3 store is superior in every way to the iTunes Store.

Orson Scott Card offers a Christmas gift to his millions of fans with this short novel set during Ender’s first years at the Battle School where it is forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

The children come from many nations, many religions; while they are being trained for war, religious conflict between them is not on the curriculum. But Dink Meeker, one of the older students, doesn’t see it that way. He thinks that giving gifts isn’t exactly a religious observation, and on Sinterklaas Day he tucks a present into another student’s shoe.

This small act of rebellion sets off a battle royal between the students and the staff, but some surprising alliances form when Ender comes up against a new student, Zeck Morgan. The War over Santa Claus will force everyone to make a choice.

— Jacket copy for A War of Gifts: An Ender Story by Orson Scott Card. Oh my.

Change is coming

I’ve been growing dissatisfied with the design of this blog for a while now, but was never able to come up with a new design that is both visually pleasing, more functional, and, most importantly, easy to implement.

A few weeks ago I came up with a design I’m really happy with. I designed it with the powerful and customizable K2 theme in mind, and am actually sorta surprised that I’ve been so successful in overlaying my design and functionality on top of that very powerful but visually restricted theme.

The new design is going to bring some important improvements: a wider page, larger, more readable text, and, my favorite, a much better way of posting and displaying links, quotations, pictures, and the like. I think that putting all the different types of content I like to post on an equal visual footing is going to be really useful. Unfortunately it means I need to go back through my voluminous archives and reformat a ton of posts to match the new way of doing things. Which is going to take some time.

Still, with any luck, I hope to have the new design up and running in the next week or so, even if some of the older entries aren’t going to display properly (at first). Stay tuned, its an exciting time. đŸ™‚

★★☆☆☆
Review

Kid Nation

Portrayed as a “Lord of the Flies” type scenario with minimal adult intervention, _Kid Nation_ turns out to be fairly standard reality show fare. The movie set town that the kids inhabit had electricity and running water, but it was shut off for the production (except when it was not, for the purposes of various “challenges”). The kids lived alone, except for the large and ever-present crew of cameramen and producers. They had to build their own society, except that the structures of the society were imposed above, including a pre-selected town council, the edict that the children must be divided into four teams (and wear colorful bandanas to match), and the economics of the town that created social classes, including a ridiculous “upper class” that had no required work and earned the most money. All supplies were provided, including candy and games.

I don’t doubt the kids had to work hard. I don’t doubt that they were challenged by being away from their homes and families and friends for over a month. We know that mistakes and injuries did occur on set, including an unfortunate incident with bleach. But if the aim was to show that “real kids” can create a “real” and functioning society, all that was tossed out the window on day one, when the “Town Council” was brought in by helicopter while the rest of the kids traveled by yellow school bus.

I was hoping to see a show where adults were mostly hidden, cameras were mostly embedded (a la _Big Brother_), and kids were given guidance when they asked for it but no rules. What sort of government would they set up? How would they ration and divide the food? Would they have to farm? Slaughter livestock? Repair damaged buildings and transportation? Would the make candles? How about sanitation? Who would do the washing? If an adult guide (or two) could be accessible to suggest the proper course, that would be great. But instead we have producers feeding kids lines, scenes being re-shot, and all the usual trappings of a scripted and controlled television show.

That’s fine, but its not what we were told we were getting. It was certainly too much to ask or expect that _Kid Nation_ would be any different than the usual “reality” of television. I don’t know why I thought any differently.

Geeking Out

My new toy (2)

VMWare Server Too bad the inaugural virtual machine is going to be running SCO. Oh well. It’s great that these days you can buy one moderately priced, very powerful machine and use it to run all the services you need for a medium-sized business in a secure and stable way, and then later expand to add capabilities like high availability. This isn’t news to people up to speed on virtualization technologies, but I’m still easing into the awesomeness.

At Berkman we’ve been using VMWare ESX for some time for Windows things, but are now deploying Xen for our production Linux servers. If Maintex didn’t require a legacy SCO system, we could have saved a few thousand bucks, but oh well. VMWare is pretty darn slick regardless.

CNet looks at the leak of tons of confidential information from Media Defender, a company that thwarts and gathers evidence against alleged online copyright infringers. A few thousand of their emails, most of their important source code, and even recorded audio of phone conversations have all been stolen and posted online, in part due to shoddy security practices. The information reveals a company that is willing to push up against and sometimes cross ethical lines in order to pursue file sharers. John Palfrey (my boss twice removed) is spot-on with his comments on the ethics of the thing. As is Hilary Rosen, former head of the MPAA, who suggests that perhaps Media Defender needs to spend a bit more time defending themselves.

Geeking Out

How do you preserve video files?

For the time being I’m talking about movies, mostly on DVD, although at some point I need to digitize old Bar Mitzvah and wedding videos and school plays. But right now my problem is trying to turn my DVD collection into an on-demand video library, and I can’t figure out a good way to do it — H.264 is the best video quality currently available, but the amount of time it takes to compress is insane. The baseline profile works with my Apple TV but the high profile would be a better bet for the future. If I rip in full quality my iPhone can’t play it back, because it is limited to 640×480 and can’t figure out anamorphic. And what should be done about the DVD extras? Why can’t current software handle supplemental audio tracks? And of course Apple TVs and iPhones can’t play them back even if they could be included.

The only solution I can come up with is ripping full DVDs and figuring out how to compress (or re-compress) later. But they take up a huge amount of space and *still* can’t be played back on any of my devices. Stupid.

For someone standing on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on a moonless night, the brightest feature of the sky is not the Milky Way but the glow of Las Vegas, a hundred and seventy-five miles away. To see skies truly comparable to those which Galileo knew, you would have to travel to such places as the Australian outback and the mountains of Peru. And civilization’s assault on the stars has consequences far beyond its impact on astronomers. Excessive, poorly designed outdoor lighting wastes electricity, imperils human health and safety, disturbs natural habitats, and, increasingly, deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder.

— "The Dark Side" by David Owen in the New Yorker

Apples dipped in honey

In Jewish tradition, the apple is seen, not as a symbol of downfall, pain, and death, but of sweetness and love. Today is Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, a day in which we reflect on why we are on this earth and how we live our lives. We dip the apple in honey to look forward to a sweet new year — a year that is satisfying and precious. In doing so, we participate in a custom dating back to at least the 7th century.

We hear the blow of the shofar on this day, and it cries to us to awaken from our moral slumber and look towards God, to reflect on the year gone by and our various failings, to look forward to the year ahead and our potential for greatness. Rosh Hashanah is about new beginnings, new opportunities to make a better world. It is also about beginning a period of reflection and spiritual cleansing leading up to the day-long fast of Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.

And why am I, an admitted atheist, so imperfectly explaining these traditions?

It is because Tuesday when I was down alone in a hot basement moving around equipment, all I could think about were the stories told at Michael and Sydney’s funeral a few weeks ago. And this morning, when I awoke with a start a few minutes before my alarm sounded and lay in bed getting my bearings, what went through my head were snippets of memory of my grandparents, Louise and Stan Dorn, the former of whom died a little ways back, the latter of whom took his own life just this week.

Continue reading “Apples dipped in honey”

The AT&T Experience

In brief: I bought the iPhone. I had some major problems with porting my number from Sprint that was about 5% my fault (not knowing the right account info) and 95% AT&T’s fault (giving me bad info and screwing up the process, burning in my SIM card with the wrong number, etc.). I got incredibly frustrated and was ready to just call the whole thing off (and take the $40 iPhone restocking fee), but Sebastian suggested I call and complain to a manager. I called AT&T Customer Service, spoke to a “Customer Advocate,” and briefly explained my problem to him. He disagreed on a few points, but I explained how the information was conveyed to me was not the same as what he was telling me. He asked me what I wanted, I said my activation fee waived and a free month of service, and like that my problem was solved and my wishes made real. Not bad. For now, my anger with AT&T is smoldering. If the port goes through successfully and without too much hassle, it will be doused, and if I don’t have further problems, I might even be able to recommend AT&T to others! But we’ll take this one step at a time…

A bit o’ the old iPhone lust

I’ve started counting every time in conversation or going about my life I say or think, “gee, it sure would be great to have an iPhone right now.” At dinner, when I wanted to look something up on Wikipedia. In the car, when I wanted to see movie showtimes. Two days ago when I was away from my computer but wondering if someone had emailed me yet. Waiting in line, wishing I had a fun game to occupy me. All those times it would be nice to have had my iPod, except that I don’t carry it everywhere I go.

Apple is a very secretive company, and that is their right. But it’s generally straightforward to predict what new functionality is coming to Macs (faster processors, more storage, neater displays, software updates, etc.) and it isn’t a deal breaker if something doesn’t make the cut. With their new phone product its not quite so easy — will the next model support stereo bluetooth for headphones? Will it have a GPS chip for mapping? Sure it will probably have more capacity, but will it have 3G? These things are actually fairly important, especially since it is not yet clear how hard (or expensive) it will be to upgrade to a new iPhone. For instance, if I give up my Palm Treo, I also give up its built in GPS, which is something I’ve grown to rely on while in the car. I give up its EV-DO high-speed internet, which isn’t a big deal, except for those few times when its really useful to have (long train rides, for example). I give up the ability to wirelessly sync over bluetooth, and to transfer files, which I do from time to time.

All of this stuff is fine, it would just be nice to have some idea, like with most other cell phone manufacturers, what features are here, what features are coming, and what the timeline is. Apple doesn’t seem willing to deliver that sort of thing. If they just said “we plan to allow more Bluetooth functionality in a software update,” that would almost be enough. If they said “we don’t plan to offer 3g for at least a year,” that would be enough. But they won’t. So like so many people, I sit here in limbo, trying to decide if the trade-offs are worth it, just waiting to be burned when a few months from now the things I would have been happy to wait for suddenly appear, and I’m stuck with a product that I’m not entirely satisfied with.

I was pretty ready, last night, to go out and get myself an iPhone, contract and all. Then I remembered about the lack of GPS, and that gave me pause. A $400 iPod is one thing. An $800 per year contract is a second. But then I’ve got to go out and buy an TomTom ONE as well? Sheesh.

_Vanity Fair_ looks back at 2000 election coverage of Al Gore. “[A]s the 2000 election heated up, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other top news outlets kept going after him, with misquotes (“I invented the Internet”), distortions (that he lied about being the inspiration for Love Story), and strangely off-the-mark needling[.]”

Brian Fleming says The 2008 campaign will be no different. “Maddeningly idiotic reporters […] will lazily type out a narrative they think they are “discovering” in the campaign but are actually being manipulated into presenting. Their tiny minds will be so persuaded by the narrative they are typing that they will alter quotes and invent pleasing ‘facts’ to help support it. There’s no question that they did this in the 2000 campaign. In the Vanity Fair story, even the perpetrators have no defense for their bizarre behavior.”

★★★★☆
Review

Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban

This review contains spoilers for _Harry Potter_ books and films 1-3.

!>/files/2007/09/11-buckbeat-inside.jpg! I have this habit of waiting until things are done before staring on them. TV shows, for instance. Or phenomenally popular book series. I watched the first and second _Harry Potter_ films in near-realtime while reading the books and found the experience remarkably pleasant, mostly because those films hew so close to the source material. Pleasant, but not very notable.

The other day I finished book 3 (you know, the slightly longer one on the way to the massive tomb that is Potter 4). It was a better book than the first two in many ways; we spent less time with the Dursleys and more time with interesting characters who are growing into teenagers, who finally have some real conflict, who learn that its okay to turn to and rely on adults from time to time, and who go on an adventure that doesn’t have quite so clean a conclusion as the quest for the philosopher’s stone and the encounter with the serpent and the sorting hat.

_Azkaban_ the movie is brilliant because it is a film that has finally been allowed to take some liberties with the story, while never straying too far from the spirit. Much of that should probably be attributed to Alfonso CuarĂ³n, the Mexican director of, notably, _Y Tu Mama Tambien_ before _Azkeban_ and _Children of Men_ following it.

Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Prison of Azkaban”

They’re going to begin testing “credit cards” “embedded” into cell phones in Australia. I think this is a great idea — if you can use an RFID chip or something similar to perform transactions from a device with a screen and keyboard, you’re in a great spot. You can verify the merchant and the amount and authorize the transaction, perhaps even type in a PIN code or use a biometric scanner, all from a device that you own and can trust. As long as the communication is properly signed and encrypted, this could dramatically reduce credit card fraud. Of course in reality they’re probably just slapping a chip onto the phone and making it act like a normal credit card, but hey, one can dream.