cygweb

Mark & Robin and Kim & Jim joined us for dinner on Friday and we watched The Butterfly Effect together; we all enjoyed it. The DVD is a feature-packed dual-layer, dual-side (side 2 is the Directors' Cut) Infinifilm package. Ashton Kutcher shows an excellent dramatic side and the other lead actors (especially Amy Smart) flow with their changing roles with aplomb. Check it out.

On Saturday morning we went down to George's Woodcrafts to pick up some small tables we had ordered for our family room. They are excellent. He has a ton of handcrafted furniture on display; I recommend a visit if you're thinking about purchasing any fine furniture. Tell them I sent you.

The cable modem replacement yesterday was a success, although it looks like my old router (which is back online) is dropping the LAN connections occasionally. It's probably time to retire it and just use the new one, but I'll leave it online for a while longer to thoroughly test it before I would have to return the newer one. If you're an ICYG listener, please let me know if you experience any site downtime or stream interruptions.

I've got v1.0 of my take on DSOTR just about done. I chose a delay of 7.5 seconds, which makes the syncs work out pretty well. I'm including the music and original movie soundtracks on the disc, and may make another edition later that adds a hybrid soundtrack that's a mixing of the two.

I've been neglect in getting my digital pictures online. Maybe a little later this week.

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) —- results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google (or Technorati) for all blogs that participate in this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)
INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

1: I found this experiment at URL:
http://www.webjones.net/

2: I did not found it via a Newsreader Software (name of Newsreader Software)

3: I posted this experiment at URL: http://alexharden.org/blog/

4: I posted this on date (day, month, year): 03/08/04

5: I posted this at time (24 hour time): 13:37:00 (EDT, U.S.)

6: My posting location is (city, state, country): Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

7: My blog is hosted by: 1&1 Internet

8: My age is: 33

9: My gender is: Male

10: My occupation is: IT Operations Analyst

11: I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: SharpReader

12: I use the following software to post to my blog: Movable Type 3.01D

13: I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 19/07/02

14: My web browser is: Firefox

15: My operating system is: Windows XP Pro

Via ongoing: I find this site extremely neat. The new RSS feed Tim mentions works fine in SharpReader for me. I like the up-to-date image tag.

Via dive into mark b-links: This GMail Notifier extension for Mozilla/Firefox is cool.

Doom 3 is out and I was reading some of the comments on Slashdot. I came across these two that are making me laugh out loud:

My letter to my boss (Score:5, Funny)
by UnknowingFool (672806) on Tuesday August 03, @08:35PM (#9874215)
Dear boss,
With the release of Doom3 today, I am taking two weeks of vacation effective immediately. I will not be reachable by direct email, cell phone or smoke signals. Should you feel the need to contact me, please leave a message and I will respond when I stop playing the game because I started hallucinating.

It make take me a while to respond as I expect my fingers to have fallen off by that point. Also, I will most likely be unintelligeable so be prepared not to understand a word I say. After two weeks, please alert all my co-workers to my return. They will need to prepare for my two weeks of body odor as well as purchase very dark sunglasses. I expect I will be very pale by then, perhaps blindingly pale.

Sincerely,
Your local Space Marine.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.

Re:My letter to my boss (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, @10:40PM (#9875083)
Sorry you are going to miss the lan party here at work.

Have a good vacation.

Boss.

Can't hurt to dream. If you'd like to check out an offer for a Free 20GB iPod or 4GB iPod Mini, please use this link:

http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=7731122

Don and I chose the "Register on Ebay" fulfillment option when signing up.

Via Kicking Ass: Mr. Springsteen has spoken eloquently about the upcoming election.

I can still remember how appropriate it was to open America: A Tribute To Heroes with him singing "My City Of Ruin". Even though it wasn't written about 9/11, it struck a huge chord with me and many others.

A ticket to the Scranton, PA Rush concert on August 7th: $80

Dinner and drinks along the way at Damon's: $20

Rush 30th Anniversary Tourbook: $20

Sitting in the front row of stage right with this shirt on:

PRICELESS.

Thanks to Scott and Keith for gaining me two referrals towards the five I need to win an iPod. If you'd like a chance to win one as well, please check out this site:

http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=7731122

News from Don:

They've done away with the eBay offer. Right now, freeipodguide.com is recommending the AOL offer, since you can cancel it and be charged nothing once it is approved, or VideoProfessor, since it only costs $7.

I was always interested in the SliMP3, but it always seemed too expensive for my uses. However, the new Squeezebox by Slim Devices is very interesting. It's still a pretty penny, but its breadth of capabilities may be worth it. Being able to stick it (the wireless Ethernet version) anywhere in the house and stream uncompressed audio to it is quite compelling to me.

I'm going to check out the SlimServer software to see how flexible it is. It looks like it supports non-proprietary MP3 HTTP streaming.

From the HarrisburgHDTV Yahoo Group I had heard that WHTM-DT (ABC27 HD) was on the air, and that Comcast would pick them up by the end of this month. I got official confirmation today as our new Comcast channel guide arrived in the mail. Both WHTM-DT and WPMT-DT (Fox43 HD) will be carried by Comcast. And just in time for football season!

We were pleased that John Heffron won LCS! I voted on the Internet for the "best three of six" show and Tuesday's show; I was happy with the results since they agreed with my votes. ;) We'll definitely check out John's appearance on Leno tomorrow night.

I have these videos on tape but it's really nice to have them on DVD. I'm looking forward to hearing some of the stuff in surround and checking out the new band commentary. And thanks to some of the wonderful tools out there, I'm able to make pleasing mixes of the music to listen to in the car in a minimal amount of time.

I can offer a Gmail invite to the next two people that use my referral link to sign up on freeiPods.com and complete their offer:

http://www.freeipods.com/default.aspx?referer=7731122

FreeiPodGuide.com is a good guide to the offer. Thanks to Scotbuff for the pointer.

A good link on the Free iPod Guide is to this article that talks about the legitimacy and economics of the offer. I just hope I (and my referrals) haven't gotten in on this too late. I heard about this a week before Don mentioned it to me, but didn't look into it and jump in at the time.

We were over at Mark and Robin's today and we listened to the Porcupine Tree In Absentia DVD-Audio 5.1 Surround Edition. I sat for the listening until around the end of "Gravity Eyelids". The first thing I noticed about the recording was how clean it sounded. Then I was wowed by how overt the surround mix was; this was a good thing. I'm definitely wanting to get at least a computer-based surround setup going to enjoy it at my own place. The music was well-received by everyone present and the entire album (plus the three bonus tracks) was allowed to play through.

Congrats to PT and DTS on a great surround version of IA; it made for a great introduction to surround DVD-Audio.

On my home workstation "Earthshine" I'd been hearing some clicking coming from the 4-year-old 30GB hard drive that the OS was installed on. The XP installation was probably about 2 years old, and performance was becoming slow. Also, I found the main cause of a major frame-drop issue I had trying to capture our Hi8 tape archives to the computer for DVD archiving; the NVidia-supplied drivers for the GeForce2 card. Even when going back to the MS-supplied ones, things weren't superb. So I decided to re-use the 60GB drive that had just come out of the machine when I put a 160GB drive in as the new OS drive.

I had just finished up making and testing an integrated-SP2 Windows XP Pro CD at work, so I used that to build the new instance, with a 30GB C: volume on the 60GB disk. Leaving off the NVidia drivers, my video capture problem was solved. I was able to migrate our Firefox bookmarks/preferences and Thunderbird email folders to the new OS instance relatively easily since they appear to just looks for well-formed files and directories in the proper places. Other core office and multimedia apps were installed, and the system is running quite nicely now.

I know, it would have been more liberating to scrap Windows and run Linux; but that's what I think the remaining space on the 60GB drive is for. ;)

I'm so proud of my sister Candace; she gave birth to her first child today at around 4:45pm. Hailey Marie Bush is 7 pounds, 2 ounces, and is 19.5 inches long. Her parents say she has a full head of black hair and is cute as a button. She came one day before her predicted due date; her birthday happens to coincide with our maternal grandmother Mary's. Bless your soul, Grandmama. Pictures are forthcoming; I'll add them to this entry after I receive them.

Congratulations to Candace & Brian and Hailey's grandparents! We'll see you all on Labor Day weekend!

Via Slashdot: The Mozilla Foundation has released a beta of a new calendaring application in the vein of Firefox/Thunderbird called Sunbird. I'm going to download and check it out today.

Computers already produce too much hot air; why would someone want to it to stink as well?

Wired is running a story about Free iPods.com.

I now have five total referrals, but three have yet to complete the offer. My offer of a Gmail invite per completed referral & offer still stands. When I'm notified all my referrals have checked out, I'll do what Don did and post the referral URLs of everyone who successfully completed the offer using my referral code, which is:

http://www.freeipods.com/default.aspx?referer=7731122

Thanks for helping out, and good luck!

Here's my little niece... can't wait to see her in person!

Don was kind enough to point out that the new Tea Party album was released in Canada last Tuesday. Until I can get my hands on a copy of it (thanks in advance to Don, who's headed to Montreal soon) MP3s will have to do. After a few listens in the car and one on headphones, I have to say it's growing on me. Even though some of the songs are "stripped down" by TP standards, the fact remains that if I heard any of them on the radio, I'd know they were TP songs. That's helped mainly by Jeff Martin's vocal style, but it's true also of the melodies. For example, the fifth track, "Luxuria", is signature Tea Party, even without the vox.

Haven't really picked any favorites; even though the songs don't really flow together like past TP albums, I've been listening to it in sequence.

If you're an ICYG member, listen up for some of the new songs in the rotation. If you want in on ICYG, email me.

Things just got a lot more interesting in the SCO-IBM case. IBM has filed a motion for partial summary judgement which asserts (finally!) that SCO has violated the GPL/LGPL by redistributing Linux (which includes IBM's work) after both saying the GPL is "unenforceable" and selling and attempting to sell its Linux licenses. I think IBM's done a good job of staying out of the press regarding the case (unlike their adversary); many people (including myself) have noted SCO's hypocrisy regarding the GPL for some time. This brings the issue to the forefront of the case. I'll be watching the Groklaw headlines a little closer for a while. ;)

Mark Cuban's been blogging about basketball lately, but over the weekend he wrote an interesting entry regarding the current state and future of digital video. He cites experiences both as a digital video consumer and as the co-founder/owner of HDNet. It's refreshing to hear a broadcast exec who's not afraid to address the possibilities of legally and flexibly space-shifting commercial DV.

My first draft of the season is tonight, for my free Yahoo! league. I hope to do well there, but it serves a higher purpose -- I'll use it as a pseudo-mock draft in preparation for Thursday's BDFL draft.

I'll also be participating in Yahoo's Pro Pick 'Em and RotoGuru's Football Pickoff (where we'll probably start up a Survival league, like last year). I may also try my hand at Yahoo's Salary Cap game. I've never played salary-based FF.

I've meant to write an entry about the architecture of ICYG for a while. The "audiotech" and "webtech" buttons should give you an idea of the major components I'm using. Basically, I'm running a Foobar 2000 instance that has compression/limiting DSPs on, feeding the Oddcast DSP, which pipes the audio to an Icecast server instance running on the same server. Clients (currently ICYG club members only) connect to the Icecast server over HTTP to listen to the stream. I have Python scripts that create playlists based on certain parameters, and various FB2K components schedule playlist change events and log information about content that's been played. The ICYG website runs on a Zope instance on the same server; the "played content" log file is read and parsed dynamically upon page requests by WWW clients.

I've cobbled together ICYG, but it works pretty well. But I'd like it to be so much more:

• I'd like it if I could run FB2K in "headless" mode, as a service, and control it through an HTTP interface (perhaps enabled by this component. Control via Telnet is possible, but it's limited. I haven't yet tried brute forcing this with something like FireDaemon, though.
• I'd like it if Oddcast had support for multiple output formats and/or resolutions. I would love to be able to output ICYG's normal 64kbps Vorbis feed along with a higher-resolution Vorbis or MP3 feed for listening on another computer inside my house (or possibly a Squeezebox). Shoutcast does this; but there's no Shoutcast component for FB2K. And I like running Icecast as my server.
• I'd like it if I could buckle down and figure out a good, consistent way of recording and retrieving feedback about individual tracks that have been played on the station. I'm really not much of a database guy.

More "all-in-one" PC-based media server solutions are coming around, doing things similar to what I've implemented with ICYG; however, without features such as intelligent crossfading and extensive playlist management, they're not of much interest to me.

Anyone else have ideas or more feedback about ICYG?

In order of draft round:

1. RB Deuce McAllister NO
2. RB Jamal Lewis BAL (I know, I know, the trial... I have faith.)
3. QB Matt Hasselbeck SEA (I actually think this pick was a steal.)
4. TE Todd Heap BAL
5. WR Anquan Boldin ARI (This was a dumb pick, given that Boldin won't be in until a few weeks into the season. I forgot about the diagnosis of his injury until after the pick.)
6. WR Chris Chambers MIA
7. WR Issac Bruce STL (My second steal.)
8. RB Thomas Jones CHI
9. K Jason Elam DEN (A perennial fantasy favorite of mine from back in the Ingram Micro days... and he's still a good kicker.)
10. DT Jacksonville
11. WR Rod Smith DEN (This made up for the Boldin pick.)
12. QB Drew Bledsoe BUF (Had to pick at least one Bill. ;) )
13. TE Itula Mili SEA
14. DT Pittsburgh
15. K Aaron Elling MIN

Well, only one questionable pick. Complete draft results are here. I decided to skip the top tier WR's this year. I don't know if I'll make the same decision when drafting the Outlets, though.

Via HydrogenAudio: Here's a neat article about the properties and performance of DVD-Audio and SACD formats.

I'm working on coding some more around the current data model of ICYG. I added an albums page that works similarly to the existing artists page.

I'm thinking of creating private XML feed(s) for members that would include recently played songs (similar to the ICYG front page, but in a format like RSS/Atom), and perhaps detailed info about the currently playing song. If it's possible, I might also code a "coming up" feed that would list the next five or ten songs in the playlist. However, with my current implementation, that would be inaccurate around the time of a change in playlist (the daily 4AM load or a show start).

That's part of the fun of a project like this: thinking of things you'd like to implement and learning how to do so. Again, your ideas are welcome.

This is hilarious.

After seeing Scott's Steelers tinybutton and not being able to find a similar Bills one, I made one:

Feel free to reproduce and use. Or make a better one.

The annual Brutal Deluxe Football League draft was held last night. With 12 teams and 14 rounds (with two keepers per team), keeping the draft under a minute per pick was a good thing. I think I did pretty well; we seem to have a pretty evenly balanced league this year. Here are my picks, by round:

Keepers from last season:

• QB Donovan McNabb PHI
• RB Travis Henry BUF

1. RB Corey Dillon NE
2. WR Joe Horn NO
3. WR Steve Smith CAR
4. DT Eagles PHI
5. TE Marcus Pollard IND
6. QB Jake Delhomme CAR
7. K Aaron Elling MIN
8. WR Justin McCareins NYJ
9. RB Julius Jones DAL
10. DT Jaguars JAX
11. K Doug Brien NYJ
12. TE Jason Witten DAL
13. WR Josh Reed BUF
14. RB Tyrone Wheatley OAK

I gave the ICYG website a facelift over the weekend. Once I do some more back-end work, some of the data presentation should change - for the better.

The GIMP is now my friend!

I bet if I install Google's Gmail Notifier I can avoid getting this nasty login prompt:

Apparently, this breaks the fine Gmail Notifier I'm already using and liking.

The hazards of open betas and free lunches, I guess...

Update (31-Aug-2004 8:35am): It appears that they removed this change. The Gmail Notifier Mozilla Extension is working again.

Update (1-Sep-2004 1:47pm): I spoke too soon. The change is back.

Update (2-Sep-2004 6:15am): They changed it again; now the Gmail Notifier is working again.