September 2005 Archive
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September 2005 Posts
Wow, in 30 days I'll be 30 - on October 30th. I certainly don't feel that old.
The big party is October 29th. If you didn't get the evite let me know.
Speaking of birthdays - tomorrow is my brother Jared's birthday. He'll be 19. He's a freshman at my alma mater, University of Maryland. He's got a DABU blog too, but not much on it yet.
Earlier tonight Scoble issued a Developer Challenge: I'll switch blogs to the first blogging service that supports OPML.
Hmmm.... that's not too hard. I created the OPML support tonight. It only took a few hours.
And... it worked on the first try!
- Posts and photo albums grouped by tag: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/tags.xml
- Posts and photo alums group by year: http://www.DylanGreene.com/opml/archive.xml
All DABU sites now have automatic OPML support.
The coolest part is that you can drill down from the list of posts and photos albums down to individual comments and photo captions using OPML tools like OPML Editor from Dave Winer (see the screen shot).
I don't know if Scoble will decide to use DABU, but I'm glad to have spent the couple hours to keep ahead of the ever-changing standards curve.
DABU is the free blogging service I created that I use for this site, and almost 100 other people are using for their sites. http://www.DABU.com
OPML is an outline format in XML. It is similar to RSS in that supporting it today will impress a small number of geeks but support for it in the future is going to be practically mandatory if you care about your users.
Here's Russel Beattie's portable gaming collection....
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I'm glad I'm not into portable gaming... my pockets aren't deep enough.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, isn't until next week (October 4th), but I saw this flash animation today and it made me laugh so I figured I'd share.
Flash: Tekiah! from ShamBot 6000
The weekend of September 11th, 2005, my dad and I drove up to New York City for a memorable weekend of sight seeing and biking.
The bike ride was the NYC Century Bike Tour, presented by Transportation Alternatives, an advocate for safety in bike riding. There were four tours available: 100 miles, 75 miles, 55 miles, and 35 miles. The tours all started in Central Park.
We did the 55 mile tour, which took us through New York City, over the Brooklyn Bridge, around Brooklyn, past Cony Island, up through Queens, over the Triborough Bridge, and back to Central Park.
This was my first time in most of these parts of New York. Riding over the Brooklyn Bridge was absolutely spectacular, especially with perfect weather and thousands of other bike riders on the bridge around us. My favorite part of the ride was through and around traffic in the city, passing familiar landmarks like the Lincoln Center, and cautiously zooming through traffic lights in packs of 15 or so riders.
My dad has a rule about going to New York - he can't leave without seeing a show. We saw two excellent shows - The Pillowman, staring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldbum, and The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
We stayed in Jersey City and took the train in each day, which dropped us off at the makeshift World Trade Center station. On September 11th, it was powerful and emotional to be at the footsteps of the remains of the rubble as hundreds of people had gathered to lay flowers, cry, and pray for their missing loved ones.
Have you ever wondered if your political views match your political affliation?
Wonder no more with this simple anonymous test.
My results are what I expected:
| You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Moderate (50% permissive) You are best described as a:
|
Chris and I went to the Maryland Renassance Festival in Crownsvile, Maryland. It was my first time and Chris' first time in many years, and was a lot of fun.
RennFest is every weekend until the end of October.
More about the festival: http://www.rennfest.com/
The XBOX 360 is coming this holiday season, possibly a full year before the PS3 and next Nintendo.
From Major Nelson:
XBOX 360 Release Dates:
North America: Tuesday, November 22.
Europe: Friday, December 2
Japan: Saturday, December 10
If you haven't pre-ordered already then you're probably out of luck unless you don't mind waiting line line at a Best Buy or Target the night before as pre-orders have basically sold out for months.
Or you can try to win one - every 10 minutes until launch day Pepsi and Microsoft are giving away an XBOX 360 - over 9000 chances to win. Amazingly, I won one in the first week of the contest. In addition to saving $400, they're promising to send them out to winners before it's out in stores. According to Major Nelson, the version they are giving away includes the hard drive and wireless controller.
Some new XBOX 360 videos:
- Video: the new hardware
- Video: Ghost Recon: AW
- Video: Call of Duty 2
- Video: Gears of War
- Video: Dead Rising
- Video: Montage of games for Japanese market
Lots of changes for the next version of Office. One of the big ones is removal of the menu bar in favor of something called a ribbon.
Of course these new images might not reflect the final design.
More screens:
Like any big change, this is going to take some getting used to, but it's obvious a lot of usability research has gone into the new design. It's yet to be seen if Microsoft is going to reflect these UI changes across the rest of their product line.
From George Ou at ZDNet:
From March 2005 to September 2005 10 vulnerabilities were published for Microsoft Internet Explorer, 40 for Mozilla Firefox.
In April-September timespan there were 6 exploits for MSIE, 11 for Firefox.
Sidenote... I was an intern on the IE security team back in college. The security tab UI is still the same as what I designed back then for IE5.
From CNN Money:
President signs executive order allowing contractors to pay below prevailing wage in affected areas.
This seems like a recipe for further disaster as skilled workers now have less incentive to seek work in the affected areas.
In 2001 President Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh to head of FEMA.
Allbaugh's first hire was college roommate Michael Brown, who's previous job was the commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association. Brown was forced to resign after "numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions." (Source)
In 2003 Allbaugh leaves FEMA and starts a consulting firm for companies interested in reconstruction contracts in Iraq.
Even with a background that doesn't seem to qualify him for the job, President Bush appoints Brown to the new head of FEMA in 2003.
Today Allbaugh is the lobbyist for Halliburton responsible for getting disaster relief contracts in Louisiana.
Update at 5:40pm:
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that he has recalled Brown, the embattled director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, from his post as head of federal relief efforts on the ground in the Gulf Coast area and has replaced him with a senior Coast Guard officer.
Source: Washington Post
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" - President Bush last week.
From WashingtonPost.com
There have been other moments of tension. At a fire near the French Quarter, Williams noted in a posting on NBC's Web site, a police officer from out of town "raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media . . . obvious members of the media . . . armed only with notepads." He also noted that the National Guard is barring journalists from the city's convention center and Superdome, the very facilities that evacuees were barred from leaving last week.
From LostRemote.com:
Reporters Without Borders says it knows of at least two cases of police confiscating or destroying cameras of journalists working in the New Orleans area. "When [police] realized [Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk] had photographed them hitting looters, they hurled him to the ground, grabbed his two cameras and removed memory cards containing around 350 pictures," says Reporter Without Borders.
I like all kinds of music but I have a terrible memory for artist, song, and album names, so I often listen to free streaming radio stations like Digitally Imported.
Pandora takes this a step further - you give it one song name, artist name, or album name, and it instantlly starts streaming music that it thinks you would also enjoy.
It's Flash-based, so there's nothing to install. It says it's free for the first 10 hours but I think I've used for a lot more than 10 hours already.
The Pandora Flash-based player
The "analysis" of the music is often as interesting as the choices it picks.
Slick Rick: Club rap influences, east coast rap roots, southern rap influences, syncopated beats and swingin' beats.
I've watched a lot of Katrina coverage on FOX News, CNN, and MSNBC this past week. It's been strange that reporters rescue workers talking about bodies floating everywhere but the video and photo coverage doesn't support that.
Apparently FEMA has banned photos of the dead.
Seeing floating dead bodies is not the sort of thing I would like to see, but the loss of life is far more important casualty of this storm than the ruined buildings.
We've seen this same phenomena with the Iraq war coverage.
Nobody wants to see the bodies, but by ignoring them I feel that we are dumbing down the coverage of the real causalities of these darker days in our history.
From LostRemote:
The White House press corps, which is often criticized for being toothless, has found a new set of choppers. Read the transcript from today's briefing - Scott McClellan's first since the disaster. The press corps simply isn't accepting the administration's position that this is not the time to "play the blame game," with one reporter accusing McClellan of saying nothing more than talking points. Snarkiest question: "Is "Brownie" still doing a "heck of a job," according to the President?"
Personally I'd feel much safer if they figured out the people to blame, and fixed the problems now, rather than wait several years and put the findings in an another document that proves what we susspected but is too late to help.
A timeline of Katrina events with links to press releases and articles.
Obviously Bush, Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice cannot be held accountable for the lack of government response because they had far more important things going on.
I haven't posted much lately because I've been doing a lot of working, reading, writing, and a little bit of traveling. I'm going to try to get back to regular posts once again.