Monday, February 21, 2005
HUNTER: Hunter Thompson killed himself. This makes me very sad. I have a hard time imagining what would drive somebody to ever kill themselves but in this case I have an even more difficult time with it. I wouldn't be surprised if drugs are involved but you never know.
When I first read 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' it totally blew me away. It still has my favorite opening line of any book: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." I always hear that in Johnny Depp's impersonation of the man from the movie and it sets the stage for the book perfectly. I bought a copy of the book from the famous City Lights bookstore on my first trip to San Francisco and it came with a couple of other essays he'd written. Reading them I couldn't help but think 'Why is nobody else doing journalism like this?' He was a crazy motherfucker and I'll miss hearing and reading him.
That reminds me that I never ended up buying the special edition 'Fear and Loathing' DVD. I think I'll rectify that today.
Update: Here's what Warren Ellis had to say about the man and his death. I tend to agree about suicides.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
BOOKS: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
This is another of those books that I bought at the height of its popularity and then left on my shelf until after the talk had all died down. So unfortunately I missed some of the asureadly insightful commentary about the book in the literary blogosphere. No matter, google is my friend. At any rate, this is a book I'm damn glad I read.
When I first started reading, the first chapter honestly bored me to tears. Then I read the inside cover and was reminded about the unique structure Mitchell wove his story into, which was the reason I wanted to read it originally. Cloud Atlas is composed of 6 stories and 11 parts. The stories first go forward in time to a post-apocolyptic Hawaii and then go backward in time again to the original story. It's sort of a bulls-eye, if that makes it easier to think of. The first story is the outer ring and the middle is the center, then it goes back out. Once I go onto the second story and realized the structure, I was hooked. Each story has a connection to the one before it and some have connections to the others as well. It works very well.
The other delight of the book is the dialogue and characterization. Each character speaks in a very unique voice. You could easily open a random page and know which character was speaking within a few sentences. As a science-fiction fan, my favorite parts of the book were the ones set in the future. The future Korea, turned into a clone powered "corpocracy" was dazzling and the mishmash language of the almost-end-of-humanity Hawaii was incredibly inventive. All in all, I would very much recommend this book. Don't let the science-fiction aspects scare you if you're not a fan of the genre. It's much, much more than that and even those parts are emminently readable.
And now for some spoilers. If you haven't read the book, don't read any further. I agree with some of the reviews I've read of the book that the "downward slope" of the book, the second half where it moves backward toward the beginning, was a bit of a letdown. I was hoping/expecting more of a connection between the characters. In the end it felt like more of an exersize in connecting 6 dissparate short stories than one narrative whole. Hints were dropped at a reincarnation connection but that didn't go anywhere. When the hitman Smoke asked Louisa Rey she if she always felt this way before death, I was sure that wouldn't be left untouched but in the end, I didn't get any connection. Maybe I missed something but I don't think so. This didn't dilute the power of the book but with a stronger thread I think it could have something great, rather than just a really good book.
Friday, February 11, 2005
TECH: Yesterday I was thinking and posting about sites with an API like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Google. If you don't know, an API is an interface to data. Flickr's API lets you post pictures using your own tools without having to go through their site, for example. APIs let you develop what Tim O'Reilly calls the third type of application, data applications. Data apps are applications that take advantage of data. Amazon isn't the biggest book store because they have the best software applications, they're the biggest because they used the data in important ways. It's much more useful to go to Amazon.com to look at a book than Barnesandnoble.com because you'll find 10 times as many reviews and pointers to other books and other useful things they've done with their data that B&N hasn't done. The reason you see Amazon search boxes and tools all over the place is that Amazon has a really good API.
Getting back to the point, I was thinking about APIs and I realized that I don't know anything about an ebay API. I didn't think there was one, in fact. It turns out there is one but it's stupid. Well, maybe it's not stupid but ebay is because you have to pay to use it. It costs $100 (at least) to get to use their API. This is a monumental mistep. By trying to "recoup costs" (their phrase) on the use of their infrastructure by the API they've completely cut themselves off from any network effects that sites like Flickr take advantage of. If you let people into your system, they'll do cool stuff that gets you more attention and more revenue. I want to write a plugin for MythTV that displays a message on screen if an auction you're watching is ending soon. I think that's a pretty cool idea and would probably make me more likely to use ebay but I can't do it because it's not worth $100. Maybe if I did tons of ebay business I would think about it. But probably not. But what I can do is write a Flickr plugin because they let me into their data. If an auction site comes along and lets people hook into their data, they'll expand the range of applications people can use their site for and immediately gain a lot of mindshare.
But I like ebay so I hope they realize that things like abusers are a small problem in comparison to the benefits of letting bloggers put 'Here are the 10 newest auctions related to my content' boxes on their sites. Or letting somebody write a 'Hey, your auction is ending in 10 minutes' test message generator. Or an 'Ebay Zeitgeist' app that shows Flickr pictures related to the 100 newest auctions with 'cat' in the title. Etc., etc., etc. A geek can dream.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
LINKS: I've added a link to my del.icio.us page on the left. del.icio.us is a weird concept. It's basically a public bookmark system. You bookmark links on their site and then tag the link with whatever words you think are pertinant. Then when someone searches for a tag such as 'firefox' they get all the links various people have tagged with firefox. It can lead to some interesting finds. I suggest exploring it for awhile, you'll find something interesting. I plan on using it much as Warren Ellis does, as a sort of outboard brain to remember stuff I want to look at later one a different machine. I'll have a post about that concept later, it's the end of the PC era.
I can't yet see a secondary app for the data though. Most of the new stuff I think is interesting in the new "Web 2.0", as people are calling it, is apps that connect other apps. I wrote a proof-of-concept script a few weeks ago where I use bloglines to give me RSS feeds then I snag the pagerank data from google to sort them by popularity. That turns out to be less than super-useful because Google's pagerank is only 1-10 so you end up getting a bunch of 7s and only a few pages go above or below the median. But the concept is sound. I used data from two sites to make a whole new app. I can see a ton of useful things to do with the data Flickr provides (when camera put gps coordinates in the picture metadata the usefulness will go up exponentially) and I'll probably code one or two up soon to see if they pan out. I'll have to think on del.icio.us though, at the moment it just seems too random to do anything new with.
Since I use perl and perl is awesome, there's almost always a very easy to use module on CPAN to access the APIs for these sites. That means I code up something quickly to see if it will work without having to spend days writing my own API stuff.
Monday, February 07, 2005
MUSIC: There's been a discussion among various podcast radio shows recently about whether to play RIAA music or not. If you don't know, the RIAA is the PR and lobbying group that works on behalf of the large music labels. They've also appointed themselves as the guardians of the old way of
The crux of the discussion amongst podcasters is whether or not RIAA labels "need" the push and support that podcasts can give. I think that's missing the point. There's plenty of small artists that could use all the support they can get. I'd argue that big label artists might need more support because of the draconian contracts they get into. Only 1 out of 100 artists on the big labels make anything resembling a large paycheck at the end of the day. They might spend their big first check on a house to show off on MTV Cribs but they're in debt up to their tonsils to the label for years afterward. No, the point to me is that these podcasts shouldn't play RIAA music because the RIAA has been in the business of screwing listeners and artists for years and even if an artist isn't directly complicit in that screwage, they're enabling the process. Most of the cost of a CD at BestBuy goes to the label and they appear to love to use that money to pay lawyers to sue people. Supporting artists on RIAA labels is supporting the RIAA. Sorry to any small RIAA labels or bands that might need the exposure but you're collaborating with the enemy as far as I'm concerned.
It's a longshot but maybe if enough podcasts get big enough and refuse to play RIAA music, it'll start to be a benefit to non-evil labels that they aren't RIAA affiliated. The artists need to realize that they have a choice in labels and if an important venue is shut off to them if they choose a RIAA label, maybe they'll choose somebody else.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
STUPID: http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/nationworld/articles/1229527.html
Anyone who lives in Durango, CO is strongly encouraged to knock on this idiot lady's door in the middle of the night and then run away.
Friday, February 04, 2005
TV: An article in the NY Times the other day about MythTV got me thinking about a phrase I'm sure I heard before but never paid attention to: "TV pirates". One of the authors of the article used it as a way to attack people for downloading TV shows, something I've done quite a bit. I do it because I never thought of it as piracy. TV shows are broadcast for free over the airwaves, somebody records it, strips out the commercials and uploads it a site for download. I've used it, for example, to download an episode of Lost I missed when it scrolled off my Tivo while I was away. I can understand the TV people not wanting someone to strip out the commercials but as far as I can understand it, there shouldn't be any such thing as TV piracy since it's free in the first place. And I already don't watch commercials thanks to the fast-forward button (which isn't illegal) so what exactly is the illegal part of downloading shows off the net?
Now, downloading shows from HBO or Showtime, that's a different thing because you're paying for them and they don't have commercials. But regular over-the-air TV? I know that the lawyers for the TV people would like it to be illegal to do anything but sit in your chair at their appointed time and absorb their commercials but lawyers and corporations want everything they don't control made illegal so they don't count.
So what exactly is a "TV pirate?"