Parade magazine today reports on the top ten names for baby boys and girls this year:

Ok, but I seem to meet more and more kids with one-off names. Isn’t the long tail of names getting longer every year?

[Tags: long_tail ]

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Hypothesis: Entertainments in which the actors are visibly having a good time with one another, and are winking at the audience, don’t age well.

Evidence: Rat Pack movies. Burt Reynolds movies. Jimmy Fallon sketches.

Evidence to the contrary: ___________?

[Tags: entertainment movies ]

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Oh, I am so about to make a fool of myself in public…

I now have a D-Link DNS-323 plugged into my home network. It’s a network storage device that I want to use as a centralized backup for my family’s various computers because some of us don’t always plug our Macs into our USB external hard drive to let the Mac Time Machine work its backup magic. Unfortunately, the hack I found on the Net to get Time Machine to recognize the DNS-323 doesn’t work for me: Time Machine lets me say I want the backup to be housed on the DNS-323, but the software craps out when it actually tries to back up to it. If there’s an easy way around that, I’d love to hear about it.

In the interim, I’ve been playing with rsync, a command-line utility included in Leopard that does backups. I’ve had no luck with rsyncX, which is a Mac specific version, but rsync is working. It took some doing to get it running on the DNS-323, including installing fun plug (the DNS-323 is a linux box) and writing a config file that specifies which machines rsync recognizes. My Linux hacker nephew Greg did that part of it for me. (Thanks, Greg.)

There’s a script that enables rsync to mimic Time Machine. It’s been working pretty well — my hourly backups go far slower than they should, so I’m undoubtedly doing something wrong — but I had a heck of a time telling it which directories I want it to back up. You gain control over the backup set by specifying a file of inclusions and exclusions. You do this in the rsync command line by saying “–exclude-from filename” where you replace “filename” with the name of the file that has the list.

After a bunch of Internet research and way too much trial and error, I now have a list that does what I want, although I’m sure it’s laughably kludgy, and possibly fatally wrong. Nevertheless, here’s how I think it works…

The file can list both includes and excludes. You indicate which is which by prefacing each item with a + or a -. The list assumes that the root directory is whichever one you specified in the rsync command line. So, if your command line said that you want to back up “/Users/me/”, then you would tell it to exclude “/Users/me/junk” by putting the following line in your exclude-from file:

– junk/

Likewise, to include /Users/me/importantstuff/ you’d put in the line:

+ importantstuff/

But, at least in my experiments, that line will not include any subdirectories of importantstuff. After failing to understand the instructions I found on the Net, and after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found that it works if I also include the line:

+ importantstuff/**

The double stars tell it to backup all the subdirectories and all their subdirectories, ad infinitum. I’ve found I have to put in both the line without the stars and then the line with the stars. You’d think the line with the stars would be enough, but in my tries and my errors, it wasn’t.

The list of inclusions and exclusions is sensitive to the order of the list. If you have particular subdirectories you want to exclude (e.g., importantstuff/junk/), put them first:

– importantstuff/junk/**

If you want rsync to backup only designated directories, list your excludes first, then your includes, and end with

– *

which tells it to exclude anything you didn’t already tell it to include. I have the feeling that that may be an ugly hack with unintended consequences. Remember, I don’t know what I’m doing.

So, my exclude-from file looks roughly like this:

– *Azureus*/
– *Azureus*/**
– Documents/TiVo*
– Documents/Aptana*
+ Sites/
+ Sites/**
+ Pictures/
+ Pictures/**
+ Music/
+ Music/**
+ Documents
+ Documents/**
– *

Two important notes: 1. The -n parameter on the command line will run rsync in “what if” mode, showing you what it would do without actually doing it. 2. As I’ve likely made some embarrassing and awful mistakes, please read the comments in hopes that some knowledgeable and kind soul will correct me. [Tags: rsync exclude-from dangerously_wrong ]

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When I blogged about Flyp on Tuesday, I didn’t know it was about to run an article about Charlie Nesson’s poker university, a place where students learn about life by playing poker online. The article is short and showy, but it’ll give you the idea… (Charlie is the founder of the Berkman Center. [Tags: poker charlie_nesson ]

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Footnote has posted the 1860 Census with its usual array of tools and goodies, some of which require a free membership. But the basic browsing and viewing is open to all. Footnote does a nice job with this stuff, including annotation tools and other social amenities.

For those who are keeping score, there were about a dozen David Weinbergers listed in the census that year, including one whom the FBI investigated I think for draft dodging. [Tags: foonote census 1860 ]

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I’ve taken the title of Sharon Richardson’s post at JoiningDots because it’s so apt. She writes:

What’s weird from an information and context perspective is how remote this disaster feels, compared to other events such as the Tsunami, Hurrican Katrina and Sept 11th. (A similar effect happend with the earthquake in Pakistan.) Is that because Burma is such a closed society, meaning there are very few first-hand on-the-spot-as-it-happens pictures and videos? Research has proven that people connect more when shown a specific story rather than massive (no matter how scary) statistics. The tsunami also occured in a region with strict controls. Perhaps having a tourist spot complete with Westerners and their camcorders helped.

Maybe a more evolved consciousness would be unaffected by the particular stories and the particular videos, for rationally we know that the disaster is a disaster whether or not there happens to be film at 11. Or maybe our atavistic reaction to personal stories is a necessary part of our being moral creatures … so long as we still make the donation even when, in the absence of stories, only pure reason moves us .

[Tags: burma morality ]

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Moveon.org is recommending that we donate to the International Burmese Monks Organization, which already has a network of local people in place. Moveon.org thinks that money donated to the monks via Avaaz.org is more likely to do good quickly there. Here’s a link.

We usually like to give to groups we’ve looked into pretty closely. But those groups — e.g., Oxfam — are frustrated that they are unable to help directly and quickly. So, for now we’re placing our philanthropic bet on Avaaz.

[Tags: burma ]

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The Harvard Law faculty has voted unanimously for an Open Access policy based on the one that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a few months ago. Yay!

John Palfrey, Harvard Law’s new vice dean for library and information resources (and, of course, the soon-to-be-former exec dir of the Berkman Center) gets to implement this happy policy.

[Tags: open_access harvard libraries john_palfrey ]

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That’s the apt title of a post by ZA3038 that provides an interesting overview of the Open Archives Initiative, about which I know, um, let’s see, carry the one…embarrassingly nothing:

At its core, the OAI promotes interoperability between different systems by supplying a rigorous set of standards that facilitate the sharing of digital information.

The post says “the original and continued focus of the OAI is on…research and journal articles.” Why hasn’t it caught on? ZA3038 suggests a few reasons. It seems like a reasonable consideration of an interesting metadata-based aggregation service.

[Tags: open_archives_initiative oai metadata open_access ]

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Flyp, an online mag, is in beta but it’s already gorgeous.

[Tags: flyp ]

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