I wanna push da button!

Okay, so this article is New York specific, but I’d be willing to bet that just about any city works the same way. But y’know…I’m probably going to keep pushing the button.

For years, at thousands of New York City intersections, well-worn push buttons have offered harried walkers a rare promise of control over their pedestrian lives.

[…]

Millions of dutiful city residents and tourists have pushed them over the years, thinking it would help speed them in their journeys. Many trusting souls might have believed they actually worked. Others, more cynical, might have suspected they were broken but pushed anyway, out of habit, or in the off chance they might bring a walk sign more quickly.

As it turns out, the cynics were right.

(via Anil)

iTunes: “Cominagetcha” by Propellerheads from the album Decksandrumsandrockandroll (1998, 7:02).

XBox2, G5…and Virtual PC?

Nick just dropped me a quick note to let me know that I’m showing up on Slashdot again. It seems that word just hit the ‘net that Microsoft has released the SDK for the upcoming XBox2, and said SDK is being distributed running on Apple PowerMac G5 dual-processor machines running a customized NT kernel. This prompted Mr. Muskrat’s comment

Michael Hanscom almost blew the XBox2 story wide open back in October.

Remember when Microsoft fired that guy because he mentioned that they bought G5s. Too bad he didn’t know anything about why they bought them.

I did wonder a bit about the G5/Xbox2 link back in November, when news first broke that the Xbox2 would likely be running on the G5 chip. At the time, I was idly wondering about the possibility of an Xbox emulator for the Mac (similar to Connectix’ old Virtual Gamestation software that allowed Mac users to run Playstation games on their home computer).

Now, though, the news that the seeded G5’s are running a custom NT kernel has me wondering along different lines.

In February of ’03, Microsoft bought Virtual PC, the PC-emulation software for Macs that allows them to run Windows software inside an emulated PC. They’ve continued to support and update Virtual PC for the Mac, along with releasing Virtual PC for the PC, allowing Windows machines to run multiple virtual machines on one physical box — handy for software testing purposes. Unfortunately, Virtual PC depends on a feature of earlier PowerPC processors that is not present in the G5, so there hasn’t been a version of Virtual PC released yet that will run on Apple’s flagship G5 desktop machines.

Last month, Microsoft announced that a new G5-compatible version of Virtual PC would be released along with Office 2004. Considering that the Xbox2 SDK is apparently running a customized NT kernel that runs on G5 systems, could some of those same customizations be worked into Virtual PC 7, making for a major speed increase, as more of the low-level code would be running natively on the Mac rather than having to pass through an emulator? I don’t really know enough about the innards of how software like this works, so I could be entirely off-base here — the differences between the emulation required for Virtual PC and the customizations needed to get the NT kernel running on the PowerPC processor may have absolutely nothing in common — but it was enough to get me wondering.

Even more interesting, though, would be if someone could leak some form of benchmarks, even rough ones, showing what kind of performance this customized NT kernel was getting on the SDK machines. I’m assuming it must be at least somewhat respectable, as the machines are being used for creating software for the Xbox2 — but how respectable?

And going even more wildly out of the bounds of reality…for years now, there have been rumors of Apple porting the Mac OS to be able to run on Intel-based PCs (realistically, that’s not likely to ever be released publicly, but the technology is there). However, what about going the other direction? What if Microsoft were to take these customizations to their kernel and and eventually supplant Virtual PC with an actual build of Longhorn for the G5, either as a “red box” that would allow you to run Windows applications concurrently with Mac OS X applications (we can already run Mac OS X apps, “Classic” Mac OS apps, Unix command-line apps, and Unix X-11 apps all at the same time as it is), or as a dual-boot option (Which OS would you like to run today)?

Likely? I seriously doubt it. But fun to play with.

And I’d still love to find out just how zippy those G5s are running NT. Wouldn’t it be a fun little tweak if they were running as fast as (or faster, even) than high-end PCs?

Nickels, Sims: Quit yappin’ and start doin’!

When I wrote out the list of cities supporting equal marriage rights last week, it was a little disappointing to not have Seattle in that list, too. Living in the area of Seattle I do (lower First Hill, within easy walking distance of Broadway/Capitol Hill), walking by the clubs I pass on the weekends on the way to the Vogue (R Place, Neighbors, the Wild Rose), and having been out at the Gay Pride festivities for the past few years, it always seemed to me that Seattle would be a natural for supporting this kind of movement.

And apparently, it could be…if only the local politicians would grow a spine, stop dilly-dallying, and actually do something.

When it comes to gay marriage, the difference between Seattle and San Francisco is the unwillingness of politicians here to push the issue. Although they would like you to believe otherwise, there is nothing stopping Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims from teaming up to make a San Francisco-style stand in favor of same-sex marriage rights.

[…]

Now is the perfect time for such a suit. Here’s why: Opponents of gay marriage would freak out, fearing a Washington ruling similar to the recent decision in Massachusetts ordering same-sex marriages to begin May 17. And their freakout would be well founded. The equal-protection and equal-rights language in Washington’s constitution is so strong, observers believe the state’s highest court would rule in favor of same-sex marriage. To head that scenario off at the pass, gay-marriage opponents would try to go above the heads of the Washington State Supreme Court justices by trying to amend the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage. But the amendment process begins in the state legislature, and the legislature is about to close up shop for the year, so the soonest anti-marriage forces could introduce their amendment would likely be 2005–which would give the courts enough time to rule on the Seattle/King County case, and gay-rights supporters enough time to rally the one-third of state senators or state reps that is needed to kill a proposed amendment.

[…]

Both Nickels and Sims do seem rather oblivious to the tipping point the gay civil rights movement in this country has reached. Political leaders in other urban centers with large numbers of gay people get it, and they are pushing hard in the right direction. (Witness Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, speaking last week in support of gay marriage: “Marriage has been undermined by divorce, so don’t tell me about marriage. Don’t blame the gay and lesbian, transgender, and transsexual community. [They are] your doctors, your lawyers, your journalists. They are politicians. They have adopted children. To me, we have to understand that this is part and parcel of our families and extended families.”) When you consider that Seattle’s King County has a higher concentration of cohabitating gay and lesbian couples than Chicago’s Cook County, the fact that Nickels and Sims aren’t making a more forceful push for the marriage rights of gays and lesbians here becomes, quite simply, embarrassing.

It’s a shame that our elected representatives aren’t taking the initiative and using this opportunity to actually promote equal rights for everyone rather than just paying lip service to it.

iTunes: “Somebody Has to Pay” by van der Meer, Susie from the album Run Lola Run (1998, 3:25).

Violence is ( bad | good ) !

Interesting ruminations from Alan today…

Group One blames violence in video games and movies for the behavior of today’s youth.

Group Two buys out entire theaters for church groups, youth groups and families to see Mel Gibson’s “The Passion”.

Any bets on just how separate those two groups really are?

I’m guessing that while there are definitely people solidly in one camp or another, there are probably quite a few people in both groups (and I’ll be damned if I can remember the name of that kind of diagram — you know, the two overlapping circles…) that see absolutely no conflict between the two positions. How they would manage that, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

iTunes: “Mission Accomplished” by DJ Wüdi from the album Difficult Listening Hour (2001, 27:41).

An insider’s view of MS Word 6.0

Microsoft Word for the Mac versions 4 and 5 were my introductions to Word, and in the opinion of myself and many other people, were the pinnacle of Microsoft’s Mac programming.

I had a single 1.4Mb floppy disc on my first Mac (a Mac Classic) that had the MS Word program and every paper I wrote for school that year, and it ran quite happily in the 1Mb of RAM that my lil’ Classic had in it. Word 5, while not that small, was the perfect combination of features and usability, adding useful functions without becoming too much of a memory, space, or speed hog.

Then came Word 6.

Huge. Bloated. A memory hog. Dog-slow. And a truly hideous interface that only a Windows user could love (or even feel at home in).

Things have improved since then, thankfully — Word (and Office) for Mac OS X is actually useable, though I tend not to bother unless I have a really pressing need (such as getting into old archived documents laying around on my system), as the majority of my writing these days is either coding my site in BBEdit or posting via Ecto.

Still, it was quite interesting to find this look at the creation of MS Word 6 from Rick Schaut, one of the people on the team for Word 6.

Shipping a crappy product is a lot like beating your head against the wall.  It really does feel good when you ship a great product as a follow-up, and it really does motivate you to spend some time trying to figure out how not to ship a crappy product again.

Mac Word 6.0 was a crappy product.  And, we spent some time trying to figure out how not to do that again.  In the process, we learned a few things, not the least of which was the meaning of the term “Mac-like.”

(via Scoble)

iTunes: “Homey Don’t Play Dat” by Bonnie ‘n’ Clyde from the album Terminator X and the Valley of the Jeep Beats (1991, 4:12).

The Passion

The more I read about Mel Gibson’s “The Passion“, the less interested I am in seeing two hours of one man being brutally tortured to death.

However, I did love Satapher’s take on the controversy in a MeFi thread…

Wasn’t it the destiny of Jesus to die for the sins of the world? so that we might be saved?

Shouldnt this movie spark pro-semitism!? Someody had to kill the bastard — somebody had to save your soul! THANK GOD THE JEWS KILLED JESUS AND SAVED OUR SOULS.

GOD DAMN.

Okay, maybe it’s a bit wrong. But it’s really funny.

To me.

iTunes: “Wreath of Barbs (Neuroticfish 2)” by :Wumpscut: from the album Wreath of Barbs (Disc 1 – Classic Remixes) (2002, 5:11).

Irony, copyright, and site design

First, read what this gentleman has to say about the appropriation of content from other weblogs:

I was reading Dawnkeyotie’s blog and she links to the story of Tequila Mockingbird and how some young punk wannbe blogger has been stealing her material.

Now I’ll admit to being influenced by other sites, like my About This Site page borrows rather heavily from the About page at Ani Moller’s site, but stealing word for word… Just not cool.

Etiquette is the name of the game… If you want to use text, at least give proper credit, or a trackback if possible.

If you want to steal my life, go ahead, I dare you… I Double Dog Dare You™ Mofo! I may not display a copyright notice, but it’s in the source of every page on this site.

Now, with that firmly in mind, head on over and check out his site design.

Look familiar? It looks awfully familiar to me. Funny, there’s no credit given, and he’s replaced the copyright notice in my code with one of his own, implying that the design work is his.

According to his about page, the last major redesign to his site went live on Monday, Feb. 2nd of 2004. Checking his archives, here’s what we find for the redesign announcement

You like?

I though I’d lost this new look, but luckily a few files were still on my server so for the last 12 hours I went through everything with the virtual equivalent of a fine tooth comb and cleaned it all up and finally finished what I started some 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s much nicer, but then anything is much nicer than the old b2 default template, so it makes this place my own at last.

Before you ask, yes, it looks a bit unaligned in Internet Explorer, but it looks great in Mozilla Firebird and seeing as that’s the browser I use mostly, get used to it. If I can find a way to realign in IE I will, but until then it’s just cosmetic differences.

Yes — he definitely made this place his own — as long as “his own” is rather loosely defined as “blatantly stolen from someone else”.

Sigh.

The really ridiculous thing about this, though, is that I actually do like the way my design translates to a two-column layout. Considering I occasionally toy with the idea of going back to a two-column design rather than this single-column design, if I used the same base overall look, I’d end up looking nearly exactly how he does now. Would I then have to turn around and give him credit for inspiring some of the design?

Again — oh, the irony.

(Many thanks to Firas for the tip-off.)

Update: All’s well that ends well.

I’ve got a fan!

In January of 2003, I put up a post pointing out Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Top ten web design mistakes’. Though his advice is generally aimed more at commercial sites than personal sites, many of the concepts will cary over from one to the other, so I used the list to evaluate my own site and see how I was doing.

That March, a visitor by the name of ‘Deakster‘ [Deakster’s site may come up with a ‘403 forbidden’ error if you attempt clicking on his link, as I think he may be denying any visitors referred by my website.] came by the page and left a mildly snide comment about Nielsen and his company. Not in itself a big deal, but when I visited the URL left by Deakster, I found that his own site was coded in such a way as to require Internet Explorer, and would not load for me using Safari on my Mac or Mozilla on my PC. I mentioned this in a reply comment, that was that, and I didn’t think any more of it.

Last week, almost a year since he left his original comment, Deakster came back. This time, apparently incensed by my reply to his first comment, he took it upon himself to critique myself and one of my sites (specifically, what little is left at djwudi.com) in two comments left back-to-back.

Needless to say, I was a little amused by this (not just that he attempted to take me to task, and that he did so quite poorly, but mostly that he came back nearly a full year after his last and only previous comment to my site), and responded in turn. Again, Deakster wasn’t thrilled, started to leave more comments, but soon requested that I remove all of his comments from the page, declaring that he “no longer wanted to be associated with the site.”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t actually at my computer when his request first came through, so twenty minutes later he made the same request again.

It wasn’t long after that that I did get the message, however, and while I didn’t remove the comment placeholders from the page (I saw no reason to remove my comments, and as they were replies to his, I didn’t like the idea of out-and-out deleting his comments and ‘orphaning’ mine). I did, however, remove the text of his comments, indicating that I had done so at his request.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

I now have 75 bogus trackback pings on that post, courtesy of my new friend, with messages such as “Michael is a first class prick and should keep his mouth shut,” “Take on a haxor an end up with an app that autopost shit to yer crap site,” “Your blog aint sexy and neither is your bald spot,” “Why are yanks such fools — cause they are all like Michael,” and his final ultimatum, “Had enough Michael — i will leave it if you delete everything I want deleting and I mean everything.”

Why, I do believe I’m being harassed, ladies and gentlemen.

All of Deakster’s comments over the past few days and every one of the bogus TrackBack pings has come from IP address 81.152.149.121. Unfortunately, while I could ban that IP address from commenting, I don’t believe that there is currently a way to ban TrackBack pings by IP.

So what now?

Obviously, I certainly could “delete-everything-i-want-deleting-and-i-mean-everything” all of Deakster’s comments (and TrackBack pings) easily enough, but something tells me that he’ll likely not be satisfied until I also expunge my reply (which contains quotes from his comments) also, which I’m in no great hurry to do (hey, I had fun responding to his attacks…). Besides, giving in to script kiddies (a category I wouldn’t have put Deakster in until I got the TrackBack ping flood) isn’t my idea of a good time. ;)

Biosphere

There’s an interesting article from the Philadelphia Inquirer looking at the early-90’s Biosphere experiment. I remember being fascinated by this at the time it was going on, but thought I remembered that it eventually fell apart. Apparently I was wrong — the experiment did last the full two years planned, though not without problems…

Living inside the glass enclosure known as Biosphere 2 for two years wasn’t easy. If its eight pioneering residents wanted pizza, they had to grow their own wheat and milk a goat for cheese. They contended with thinning air, insufficient food, constant work and, worst of all, each other.

Things like this might be more and more important as we look more seriously at exploring the universe outside of our little planet. It’s neat to see people looking back on this again, and nice to be able to get a little more information on how things actually went during those two years.

(via The Mediaburn Radio Weblog)

Grey Tuesday followup

Downhill Battle has posted a followup to yesterday’s ‘Grey Tuesday’ event:

GREY TUESDAY EXCEEDED everyone’s expectations. When we put the word out about this protest, we had no idea how many sites would join in (over 400 did). When EMI’s lawyers sent threatening letters on Monday afternoon to people who were planning to host the album, we had no idea how many would risk getting sued to make this important political stand (over 170 did). We didn’t know we’d get messages of solidarity from prominent political and intellectual forces like the EFF and Lawrence Lessig, but we did (and thanks). All of us who took part in this protest have done a lot to spur a rethinking of copyright law in terms of what’s good for musicians and what’s good for our music culture. And we’ve made it more apparent than ever how the major record labels have twisted the original purpose of copyright law (“to promote the progress of science and the useful arts”) in order to suppress music that doesn’t flow from their system.

They have links at the bottom of their post to some of the stories about Grey Tuesday that showed up in the media, including one fron the New York Times.

iTunes: “Electricity” by Apoptygma Berzerk (5:08).