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July 24, 2004
I’ve blogged before (and now can’t find it) about the phrases we tell people to help them find us through Google. For example, I might say, “Just google weinberger and joho and I’ll be the first entry.” Likewise, chris and gonzo puts Rageboy at the top, and worst and president brings up, well, take a guess.
This morning I woke up with the word “googlenym” on my lips…
I want to try to answer better a question I got asked by Larry Magid who’s putting together a 30 second piece for CBS Radio: What don’t the media understand about blogging?
To the print and broadcast media, bloggers usually look like little, vanity-press versions of the mass media. That’s because the media focus on the A-List. After all, the A-Listers are the ones who have succeeded in the mass media’s terms…
July 23, 2004
Dave Winer’s built a Convention blog site that aggregates blogs from people attending the Convention (not just the credentialed ones). Looks great. Thanks, Dave.
I’m having trouble finding information, and information I can understand, about the relative performance of the Radeon Mobility (LY) that is in my current Thinkpad X22 and the Intel Extreme Graphics 2 in the Thinkpad X40. All IBM tells me is that the Intel card uses system memory rather than onboard memory, which sounds like it has access to larger amounts of slower memory. (The X22’s CPU is an Intel III M running at 800, and the X40’s is a Pentium M at 1.2.)
All I want to know is: Will PowerPoint animations run faster of slower on the X40? Any one of you know anything about that?
I just came across a Forbes article by Michael S. Malone, dated 11.27.00, called “God, Stephen Wolfram and Everything Else.” It’s a good, non-technical introduction to Wolfram. Nicely done.
Critics of Wolfram won’t find much to like in it, and I still think Ray Kurzweil’s piece is the best analysis/intro I’ve read, but Malone puts Wolfram into a useful perspective.
I didn’t have time to read all the Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, but it seems to capture a side of life a little too accurately. And compulsively.
(Thanks to Mike O for the link.)
July 22, 2004
Here’s an image from my new Canon S60, shot on automatic, by someone with no eye and less talent.
Morningglory in the afternoon
I altered it only by cropping it. I refrained — for demonstration purposes only — from tinkering with the color and contrast with my photo-shoppish software, but in general I’m with Tim Bray on the question of photographic “integrity.”
I’ve spent most of my leisure hours over the past couple of days writing a VB script (I have no shame) that does the following with a single button press once you’ve dragged a photo(s) into it:
Runs imagemagick and produces a copy sized appropriately for my blog and a thumbnail version
Displays the image, and lets me enter a caption and an Alt tag
FTPs the copies to my web site
Downloads and displays the copies to confirm that the FTP worked
Moves the copies into the designated directory on my hard drive
Writes the relevant linking lines of html and copies them to the clipboard so I can paste them into my blog
Don’t get me wrong: What I wrote is a horrible, kludgy bit of disasterware that will fail to work in a rich variety of everyday situations. But doesn’t every blogger who is hosting her own blogging software go through roughly the same thing? So, why isn’t there freeware that does this for us automatically? (Here’s where you get to tell me that it exists, it’s great, and everyone uses it already.)
[Later: It sounds like Britt’s been thinking along related lines…way ahead of me, as usual.]
Another complaint about the software that came with the Canon.
I’ve already uninstalled the photo management stuff because it was just too cumbersome. But I kept the ArcSoft Camera Suite because its photo editing tool seemed ok. But, it turns out that when it saves an edited photo, it doesn’t save some of the data that ImageMagick needs to work with the photo. (Is it stripping out EXIF stuff?) I learned this by spending about 2 hours trying to figure out why certain photos just weren’t being accepted by the program I describe above.
I haven’t seen the “freedom of speech pen” in person, but from the news reports, it looks repellant. I understand the security concerns about the Convention — frankly, I’m literally losing sleep over the prospect of a large scale (= nuke it in suitcase) attack on Boston — but there has to be a better way of honoring the duty to dissent than to put citizens behind double fences topped by razor wire. Isn’t this country all about saying that freedom is worth the risk?
I started getting the following error message in XP:
JIT Debugging component registration is incorrect.
Please repair the installation of the most recent version of Visual Studio ..Net or Remote Debugging components.
Alternatively, execute the following command as an Administrator to manually repair the JIT Debugging component registration:
“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS7Debug\vs7jit.exe” /RegServer
The program it wants me to run is not on my machine. So, after a little googling, here’s a partial fix (or: http://tinyurl.com/95zt). This reinstalls the .NET framework, which you need, apparently, if you’re working with VB 6.
This worked well enough that now the error messages I get when I run into Java on the Web are debilitating but not lethal.
Good news with my daughter’s XP desktop: After many hours of work, I think I have it almost entirely free of spyware.
After running all the standard spyware removal programs, I finally installed a spare copy of Norton Firewall I’d found buried in a stack of disks. Duh. Then, I believe I extirpated the last of the malware spawners. The spyware removers were unable to remove it because it was a running process. It would run itself even if I booted into safe mode. So, I foolishly waded into the Task Manager’s process list and weed-whacked until I found the relevant process. (Yes, this can corrupt your system. I assume you make backups more frequently than you make caca.) It was a RUNDLL thing. Killed it and deleted the file in Windows\System32 the spyware removers had discovered. Now, for the first time in months, the spyware removers report no malware.
For now.
(I hadn’t installed a firewall before because my daughter is not an under-the-hood sort of user, and, in my experience, firewalls force us to make decisions based on too little information expressed in too much jargon.)
July 21, 2004
Dan has a lovely piece about blogging and observing the Convention.
I find I have no coherent expectations about it or what I’ll write about. I bounce from thinking that I’ll react to the Big Speeches to reporting small anecdotes to reading the clips of Mailer’s 1960s political coverage and thinking “Take away the talent and incredible insight, and what’s he got that I don’t got?” I can’t even anticipate how cynical or filled with spirit I’ll be; I am, after all, perfectly capable of crying at a good political speech. (It’s hope that turns on the ol’ waterworks. Gotta stay away from hope.)
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