Well, I'm back. I brought with me a tan, a briefly-broken camera, five new pounds of body fat and a profound sense of bewilderment at having missed my college reunion.

Not that I would have gone — it would have been nice to see old friends, but I wouldn't have wanted to leave my vacation early. But I'm a little miffed that I didn't heard a peep about it from UVA. I guess they don't bother keeping track of you if you don't join the alumni association — something that I refused to do, despite many lame entreaties. "Free Burrito Dinner!" they'd proclaim, "You just have to join the alumni association!"

A delicious burrito did sound pretty good at the time. But since the deal basically amounted to $250/burrito, I declined. Admittedly, I wouldn't have had to make any payments for several years (it's the burrito interest that kills you). But the sense that someone was trying to trick me in an insultingly stupid way led me to foreswear the alumni association permanently. Hence: no reunion mailings.

I'm much happier to have spend that time at the beach, anyway. And there are pictures! My own collection is a little truncated, both due to apathy and to sand getting into my camera partway through the trip, making it unable to focus on anything. A little zooming in and out seems to have dislodged the wayward grain, though, and everything's okay again. Here are the ones I managed to snap before that happened:

You can find everyone else's photos here.

Via uC Hobby I see that Modern Device is offering cheap Arduinos, a microcontroller platform that makes building tiny embedded computers easy and affordable.

Previously the only place I knew for acquiring Arduinos was Spark Fun. And although I like Spark Fun a lot, the $40ish price tag for an Arduino had me eying the possibility of learning how to directly program and use the AVR microcontrollers that make up the Arduino's heart, without using the other features that the Arduino platform makes available. $40 is a considerably bigger outlay for a pointless home automation project than an AVR (which only costs a few dollars) and some components I already have lying around.

But Modern Device seems to have realized some savings by pulling the USB-to-serial chip off the Arduino board and counting on it being in the programming cable. There's something to be said for having it on-board the chip — if you want your Arduino project to talk to a PC, you'll want the USB-to-serial interface to always be present. But if you're building an embedded device that stands on its own, there's no need for that functionality except when you're loading your program.

Of course, all of this is possible because the Arduino is an open source platform. Here's hoping they keep gaining marketshare and driving down prices. Competitors like Parallax may offer chips with more capabilities, but they're proprietary and more expensive. And given the low cost of full-blown PCs these days, the returns on adding functionality to a general-purpose hobbyist microcontroller begin to diminish very rapidly. There's just not much point in building speech synthesis into a relatively hard-to-use uC when a complete, tiny embedded PC can be had for a little over $100.

Catherine needs some help getting her Kristen Bell voicemail off her phone and onto the internet. As it happens, I have some experience in this area. It's pretty simple to do, but it still seems worthwhile to write it up in order to better preserve future generations' novel and/or hilarious voicemails.

So:

1. Download Skype and buy some SkypeOut credit so that you can make calls to non-Skype phone numbers — in this case, your voicemail system.
2. Use some software to record Skype's output. On the PC, Audacity should work, although you may need to fiddle with your Windows sound settings to make sure it's recording from the right sound source. On the Mac you'll want to use Audio Hijack, the free trial of which should work great for this purpose (provided that your VM is less than ten minutes long).
   
   Audio Hijack is pretty simple to use: first, make sure Skype is closed. Then launch AH. Click the new button, name the entry "Skype" (or whatever else you'd like to call it) and point it toward the copy of Skype in your Applications folder. Close the dialog, highlight the new "Skype" entry, click Hijack. A copy of Skype will launch — but this version will pipe all of its sound through Audio Hijack. You can start and stop recording of this sound with the "Record" button that sits to the right of the "Hijack" button.
3. Dial your own phone number and let it go to voicemail. While your voicemail greeting plays, hit the star button on Skype's virtual keypad (this is how it works for T-Mobile — if your carrier's voicemail system works differently, get in touch with them to see how to check messages from phones other than your mobile). Then enter your PIN. You should now be in your voicemail menu, able to navigate using Skype's virtual keypad. Start recording in Audio Hijack or Audacity (don't do it while you're still entering touchtone commands, lest some weirdo steal your voicemail info). Get the voicemail to play and end the call. Stop recording in Audacity or Audio Hijack.
4. Edit the file that was just recorded (Audacity is a good choice for this on the Mac, too — whether you're on Mac or PC, make sure to install this software so you can save from Audacity to MP3 format). If you're using Audacity, the audio will already be in the editor, ready for pruning and saving. Audio Hijack places its recordings in a subdirectory of your Music folder by default. Once you've got the file properly edited, save to MP3, post to the internet and revel in its awesomeness.
5. Oh, and to make it really easy for people to listen to this or any other MP3 on your website, create a hyperlink to the MP3, then include this line of code somewhere in the entry (or in your page's template):
   
   

   <script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/js/playtagger"></script>

That's it! I may have failed at making it sound easy, but trust me: once you figure it out the first time, it's all pretty intuitive.

Via Unfogged via Jim Henley comes an extremely interesting feature in New York Magazine about how NYC businesses make their money. You can see the markup on fish at Nobu, how dollar stores stay in business and how to get into the fast-paced and exciting crystal meth industry.

But this is the most arresting of the slides. You know, I've been reading Derek Lowe's excellent blog for a while now — he's a chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, and provides fascinating looks at how the industry works on a regular basis. Unsurprisingly, he's more sympathetic to the drug companies than the average American. And he does a good job of convincing readers that these corporations aren't the merciless profit engines that we all imagine them to be. He's got me at least partially convinced — I stand ready with Lowe-penned rebuttals to arguments about universities doing all the drug discovery work, and a sense of pity for those poor executives who are stuck with astoundingly large bills for clinical trials. What else can they do, though, but stalwartly defend the public's health?

But the NY Magazine graphic undercuts all that. Everyone knows that drug companies spend huge amounts of money on marketing. I hadn't realized that the amount dwarfs the cost of trials, though.

And, having just read Sunday's article about doctors continuing to receive payments for research, speaking and trials even after public disgraces, I'm left even less sympathetic. Lowe blogged about it and also didn't come away happy. I agree with him that it's unlikely that drug companies are selecting for incompetent doctors. But the fact that they're paying even the bad ones implies that a large proportion of that "marketing and sales" budget goes to shoveling money at every doctor in sight. Presumably this is done to generally shift prescribing habits toward particular companies' medications — or at least to avoid falling out of favor when some other company's busty new sales rep comes by with promotional scrip pads and promises of golf junkets.

After all, that immense promotional budget couldn't all go toward commercials of newly-continent men toasting each other with water, could it? The evening news/Wheel of Fortune block simply doesn't have that much ad inventory.

I wonder whether this is the sort of thing that universal health care is supposed to solve. Maybe my wiser friends can clue me in. I can imagine a plan with a formulary making these sorts of payouts pointless. But it seems like it'd have to be a pretty strict formulary — probably stricter than would be medically wise.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure why I'm blogging this. My best guess is that Ezra emits some sort of electromagnetic field that makes people interested in healthcare. I'm sure it'll wear off soon.

Via stereogum:

Arcade Fire stole my basketball.

Dude, Arcade Fire did not steal your basketball.

This is all pretty great. Plus the Governess is making a return to her preferred artistic medium. 2007: summer of the microblog?

Remember that ridiculously sunny, poppy band I linked to a while ago? The Lovekevins? Sure you do. Well, they're going to be playing at Natalya and Melissa's Scandi-pop DJ night at DC9 on July 10. Sounds like fun.

More immediately: Charles is playing at Chief Ike's on Thursday. I guess that Aaron, Spencer and Bayes will be there too. You should still come, though.

And finally, EVEN MORE immediately, I think Emily and I will be heading down to the Old Dominion Brewhouse tonight to consume towers of beer*, watch the NHL finals in glorious HD and, in my case, write the morning roundup. I called the place and have been told that they may have internet but not wifi, and it only works sometimes. It was a confusing exchange, but I remain optimistic. If you've got an inclination to eat some fried snacks and drink Molson, drop on by.

* for those unfamiliar with D.C.'s premiere brewery-themed conventioneer destination, this is the literal distribution mechanism the place uses

Ezra wonders why one religion can be considered more worthy of belief than another, using Christianity and the Flying Spaghetti Monster as examples:

The flying spaghetti monster and what-have-you are clearly not belief systems with the demonstrated resiliency or applicability of Christianity, but my crude understanding of the way faith works in all this doesn't provide much illumination as to why [Christianity and other mainstream religions] are more worthy of faith, as opposed to a sort of for-the-good-of-society adherence.

But the answer is pretty simple, isn't it? The Flying Spaghetti Monster is designed to be an enormous "fuck you" to people of faith. It's pretty funny, but an idea grounded in that sort of aggressively negative impulse is obviously unworthy of genuine respect.

Other religions were designed for more genuine reasons, and those reasons matter to people. The extent to which a belief system appears to be genuinely concerned in helping its followers — that's important. I think this can be hard for devout atheists to see, because they tend to believe that all organized religions amount to systems of enslavement and oppression (whether or not they were intentionally designed to be) — religions' practical badness may vary, but they're all theoretically distasteful in the same way. I think that's a perfectly coherent way of looking at things, but it does assume that the observer is less naive than a large chunk of the earth's population. That's not necessarily an untenable position to be in — but while you're there, you should do your best to not be an ass about it. That means no ironic religions, Darwin fish or zealous anti-evangelism evangelism.

Reducing all religions to one undifferentiated mass of irrationality is a bit hubristic. I think it's not unreasonable to say that if a tradition has meant a lot to a lot of people and isn't a completely transparent scam (e.g. Scientology), then it deserves to be accorded more deference than religious thought-experiments like the FSM. It's just a matter of showing respect for your fellow human beings, some of whom probably even deserve it. A tiny sliver of benefit-of-the-doubt isn't too much to ask.

My software output has dropped off over the last few months. There are a couple of reasons for that: I've had a few private projects to work on for friends, I've been traveling a lot, the winter blues hit me — all kinds of minor things. But a bigger factor is that I've been a little bored with it. The technologies I use most are losing their sheen: PHP isn't glamorous; neither is Perl. I've made some half-hearted stabs at learning Ruby, but I'm a pretty application-oriented guy when it comes to technology (believe it or not) — if a technology doesn't let me do something new and cool, I'm not incredibly interested. Ruby's beautiful, but I'm not ready to spend time on Rails. And as a standalone scripting language, its packages are inferior to Perl. You can do less cool stuff with it (although when you do something you tend to do it in a satisfyingly elegant manner).

The buzzed-about technology platforms have been uninspiring, too. Second Life's brief luster has faded — it looks and performs like crap, there's nothing to do in it but make trouble, and development has to occur in-world, which is frustrating. Twitter's fun and refreshingly simple, but I think other devs have squeezed just about everything out of it that there is to be squozen. I find Facebook to be kind of dumb, and developing for it sounds like no fun at all — a crippled subset of PHP? No thanks.

So I'm stuck waiting for the next big, fun software platform. In the meantime, I've been trying to teach myself about microcontrollers. There's a lot to learn, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass — screwing around with software generally only requires downloading a tarball and firing up a text editor. Working with electronics is harder: debugging is tedious and difficult, and soldering irons take a while to warm up. And although it's a pretty cheap hobby, it's still more expensive than software. I've been doing a lot more reading than wiring.

Still, the potential for making technology interact with the physical world is irresistible, and I've gradually been piecing together the necessary knowledge from the inscrutable materials scattered across the web.

All of which is my way of introducing Spark Fun's tutorials on the subject, which breezily cover the vast majority of things I've taught myself about uCs over the last few months. It sure would've been nice to have this a few months back. If you're interested in the subject, or even just curious what uCs are and can do, give it a read.

I've got a post up over at DCist sharing the news that Google may be recording their Street View data for D.C. over the weekend. Someone left the following comments on it (both with the same info):

well, i can give you a definite YES on your question. i'm one of the people standing there in that blurry image of the car. a former NGS employee is now working with immersive media, and she stopped by to give us a tour of their VW bug. they're working on many, many cities (in addition to the few that have been rolled out on google's website).

and

man, they're going to kill me, but here's another tip. they're going to do most of their coverage of downtown over the weekend, when there are less people on the street, so if you want to get a message in, head downtown and sit around all day saturday, or try to hunt the beetle down. just don't pick your nose. :)

If you want to get something permanently committed to Google's version of D.C., now's your chance.

Via Slashdot: Ars Technica takes a trip to the Creationist Museum. There's a nice Flickr set of the trip here.

I don't know... Between the relatively high production values and the tantalizing promise of Triceratops rides, I think they make a pretty good case.

It's been a pretty enjoyable, laid-back weekend. An early night on Friday, a leisurely Saturday afternoon and an extremely fun night out in SW and on H Street — we haven't even gotten to the Sopranos finale yet, but I'm prepared to declare the weekend a success.

It got off to kind of a rough start on Friday, though, as the universe seemed determine to tell me I'm over the hill. Sommer and I went to a party for Ramya, who in addition to being smart and wonderful is a few years younger than us. Our fellow guests were keen to congratulate us on dragging our geriatric selves out to a gathering of young people. Said one: "Man, I'm pretty young and this party makes me feel old. You must feel really old." Said another: "You're leaving? Yeah, I understand. This party is pretty young."

For the record, we ducked out early because we'd both had such AWESOME YOUNG-PERSON-TYPE TIMES the preceding weeknights and, uh, wanted to go home and go to sleep. And I'm fine with that! Still, it didn't help that when Charles and I checked out at the same Trader Joe's cashier he got carded but I didn't.

For the record, I remain relatively young and vital, and am prepared to take unwise risks and have opinions about MTV. As long as I can be in bed by 11 while doing it.

There's an interesting thread over on Slashdot in response to Time Warner's decision to begin selectively throttling some high-bandwidth applications like Bittorrent.

This comment is particularly good. The author's right: traffic shaping is going to be necessary for consumer ISPs. At the same time, innovation will be best served if consumers have the option of unfettered access. There generally aren't enough competitors in the consumer arena in a given market to ensure that customers flitting between ISPs will whittle the field down to the optimal offering. And the jump from consumer-priced access to business-priced access isn't feasible — business service is just too expensive, for a variety of reasons. It's a market failure, in other words.

The slashdot nerds favor the same solution I do: metered data transfers. The common response to this is that customers hate metered access. I still don't buy that — millions of people do just fine with metered cell phone access. Pay for a monthly cushion of access, then pay a metered rate for overages. It's simple! And, I think, inevitable.

Sadly, I suspect that this will probably mostly serve as a way for ISPs to gouge geeks with new fees, rather than a revenue-neutral way for them to adopt restructured, more efficient billing practices. Oh well. It's still preferable to having my Bittorrent and encrypted traffic slow to a crawl and not be able to do anything about it.

Animated cartoon minx and insurance salesperson Erin goes to the Guggenheim (it appears).

There's also this:

And, during related googling around I stumbled across this Donkey Kong reading of the Cremaster series. I guess it's been around since 2003 (it earned a post on BoingBoing back then), but this is the first time I've seen it.

Like everyone else I just finished watching the Sopranos finale. Judging by the reaction among the folks I was watching with, opinions vary on exactly what the ending meant. I feel pretty strongly that Tony got popped. The cut to black occurred in the instant when Tony died.

Otherwise, what's the explanation for the final scene? A slice of Tony's life before life goes on? Nah. That makes no sense. The camera following Meadow was there to put us in the moment and make us start thinking about each shot as an immediate document of what was occurring at that instant. Otherwise it would've been wasted time in an obviously important sequence. And why would the camera have followed the guy in the gray jacket? Just to distract us during the culmination of the series?

No, Tony's gotta be dead. In Kriston's comments I mentioned that I thought Tony getting killed by a random, unknown killer was a possibility, and that it wouldn't be satisfying. But I was wrong — it was a good ending. It served nicely to underscore what I consider to be one of the series' central ideas: that violence is available to every living creature at every moment, despite all our fancy institutions, customs and frontal lobes. Those things just make its application a little more complicated.

The episode felt rushed as I watched it, but in retrospect cramming so much in makes sense. We had to be lulled into thinking everything was fine, proceeding as normal — that Tony might get prosecuted, or not, but generally continue to go about the business of a depressed Jersey mobster as defined by the past six seasons. I was even lulled into expecting a happy ending! But they pulled the rug out instead. I had expected something different, but I'm not sure what — or whether it could've been any better.

UPDATE: There's a pretty good discussion of the ending over in Matt's comments. There are a bunch of folks interpreting the ending as intentionally ambiguous — a statement about Tony being condemned to live in perpetual suspense — but I don't really buy them. The camera laid things out in a pretty straightforward manner, I think. And my memory may be shaky, but I recall Tony being pretty relaxed in the final scene.

ALLIES: Ezra's commenters seem to mostly agree with the Tony-got-whacked hypothesis, and have some interesting theories about the episode title. More proof that the progressive blogosphere needs the fresh, objective eyes of a new generation and not the jaded establishment cabal represented by Yglesias and his ilk.

WHILE I'M AT IT: John From Cincinnati was really abysmal. I was predisposed to dislike it sheerly on the basis of how hard it is to spell — the content of the show didn't do much to invalidate that prejudice. It came off as an SNL parody of a typical HBO drama: a troubled family in a quirky subculture; mannered, unrealistic characters who speak exclusively in non sequiturs, expository dialogue or profound-sounding riddles; a dash of magical realism; and, of course, the requisite heroin addict. I do like watching people surf, but Charles already owns Blue Crush on DVD. I'll probably still watch the next few episodes though, if only because changing channels is hard (and mostly fruitless on Sunday nights).

Two things I enjoyed reading over the weekend:

• Ryan's thoughtful post on summer crime and economic development
• The City Paper's Letters From an Arsonist story, pointed out to me by Nicco — it's a really excellent article

It's been a somewhat traumatic day at the office, but the main reason I didn't post anything this afternoon is that I decided to wrap up my Asterisk tutorial over at EchoDitto Labs. If you like the idea of screwing around with VoIP technology but have been intimidated by Asterisk's learning curve, it might help you find a way to gain a foothold. Head on over and check it out.

Every gets a ton of Nigerian 419 scams in their inbox, but I've got a new favorite. Apparently I've got a nefarious uncle who's trying to claim my new fortune for himself by maintaining that I recently died in a car accident. The dastard! Fortunately, my friends at the IMF are uneasy with his story — and, of course, deeply concerned that the sum in question gets to the person who truly deserves it. So they're trying to get in touch with me:

We want to hear from you before we can make the transfer to confirm if you are dead or not.

Comment RSS permalinks now actually work. Hurrah! Now you won't have to go hunting for how to find disc0unt clonazepam or hot young teens.

I'll turn this into a completed website yet, goddammit. Next up: a comment preview template, tentatively scheduled for completion in 2011.

Yesterday Kevin Drum quoted a ridiculous excerpt from the Weekly Standard in which Irwin Stelzer frets about CEOs' solidly middle-class-ish income when compared to the titans of Wall Street.

Hilarious as that sentiment is, it may actually be part of a trend. We've had the May issue of Forbes kicking around the office (don't ask me why), and they have a feature on compensation that begins like this:

TOP GUNS
Think chief executives get fat paychecks? People who manage piles of money do much better.

If you fret about the outsize paychecks of America's chief executives, take a look at the kingpins who run private equity and hedge funds. Reaping the rewards of percentage fees, the 20 top Wall Street fund managers earned an average $658 million in 2006 versus $145 million for the 20 highest-paid chief executives. It's almost enough to think the chiefs ought to ask for a raise.

James Simons, who owns an estimates 40% of Renaissance Technologies, sits atop our list with earnings of $1.5 billion. That's $850 million more than the top-earning chief executive, Apple's Steve Jobs.

It concludes like so:

Ever since the days of Cornelius Vanderbilt Wall Street has been a good place to build net worth. There are 16 billionaires on our list of top Wall Street earners but just 4 among the 20 best-paid chief executives.

Those poor fucking guys! And with the rising cost of fuel, do you have any idea how expensive it's becoming to fly the kids to soccer practice on your private jet? That flat tax can't get here soon enough.

Okay, so hedge fund managers are obviously overcompensated. But who cares? The victims of their outsize paychecks are primarily other elites, who simply get a worse return on their investment than they otherwise might. They can take their business elsewhere if they're bothered by this arrangement. But when a company's resources are unjustifiably directed toward the top, many of the people who are negatively affected are typically powerless to do anything about it. That's the problem. CEO whining about how Billy's mom lets him stay up late (on his own private island) is unlikely to convince anyone.

All of which reminds me: I still need to see 28 Weeks Later.

Ever since reading about the body-modification folks who've implanted magnets in their fingers I've been kind of fixated on the idea. Being able to sense magnetic fields seems like it'd be awfully cool. But even if the unavailability of anesthesia for the operation wasn't enough to scare me off, the apparently-guaranteed infection that follows would be.

As my meager knowledge of electronics has grown, the idea of building a tool has begun to seem more feasible, and promises to merely result in finger burns instead of outright amputations. I've been screwing around with a 555 timer and pricing Hall Effect sensors in preparation for building a gadget that'll whistle to me when it feels a field.

But look! Someone already built the exact same thing and put it on Instructables. It's a good thing, too, since I a) didn't realize that Hall sensors put out varying voltage instead of resistance and b) wouldn't know how to change a 555's timing on that basis. In fact, due to my unwillingness to untangle resistors and figure out their color codes, my 555 circuit keeps threatening to melt down. I'd still like to put this together, but I may substitute a vibrating motor that I scrounged from a walkie-talkie instead of making it sound-based — turning it into a tactile feedback mechanism seems like it'd do more to satisfy my fingermagnet lust.

At any rate, it's cool to see that the idea's workable, even if it's slightly disappointing to be beaten to the internet writeup of what I thought was an original(ish) idea.

The curious can find a little pedantry from a decidedly underqualified electronics expert after the jump.

Although it boasted the state of the art in product placement, collagen injection and tiresome Stan Lee cameos, I'm still going to have to give the new Fantastic Four movie a thumbs down. Emily says that it's silly to carp about the movie failing in ways that any reasonable person would expect it to fail. So while I was taken aback to find the writing well below even the "doomed TNT original sitcom" level of quality and closer to "decent fanfic", maybe it's not fair to complain about the ways this expected-to-be-bad movie resembled... a bad movie. I paid for a bad movie, and that's what I got.

But disrespect for the Marvel canon? That just won't stand. The guy playing Dr. Doom seems like he would be better cast as a brooding new doctor on Grey's Anatomy than as the fearsome and merciless ruler of Latveria. And where the hell was Galactus? Yeah, that was a voracious-looking space cloud. But it boggles my mind that a creative process that settled on "my bad" and (immediately before the deployment of a cyclone-based attack) "let's all go for a spin!" as mots justes somehow decided to forego an awesome CG version of the comic book Galactus, presumably over worries that it might come off as cheesy.

UPDATE: A proof that a giant dude with enormous metal sideburns can be made to look totally rad, I offer up this screencap from the Marvel Ultimate Alliance videogame, which I found on this webpage. Given that this is just from a videogame cutscene and that the FF movie seemed to have a pretty big SFX budget, I'm confident that the creators could have come up with something cool.

John From Cincinnati: still terrible, but now somewhat easier to spell. It's remarkable how little interaction the characters engage in. The show is mostly composed of aimless soliloquies. Admittedly, there will sometimes be some yelling about how one person is a disappointing son/mother/father/husband/wife, and the other is a disappointing opposite-of-that. But these fights quickly devolve into the characters speaking past one another, and then it's back to spouting disconnected profundities as if I was paying $10 a month to watch ponderous student films with strangely high production values.

Still, tonight was an improvement over week one, primarily because last week I missed the intro and so was pleasantly surprised to hear my favorite post-Clash Joe Strummer song being used for the opening music. Good job, HBO. Way to play songs I like when I'm not riding my bike back from U Street. Keep making those kinds of creative tweaks and you just might have another hit on your hands.

Despite this forward progress, John From Cincinnati remains a bad TV show. But I'm quickly developing a sense of apathetic tolerance toward it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object (in my Sunday TV schedule). The human body, and in particular its desire not to get up from the couch, is an amazing thing.

Flight of the Conchords: highly promising! Back in college I loved Tenacious D, but have been increasingly embarrassed about it ever since their album came out — it turned out that what I thought was a pretty funny joke wasn't actually the joke being told by the people doing the telling. These days I'm older, more sedate and, let's face it, quite a bit wussier. I'm glad to see that parodic folk-pop has finally caught up with my slowed-down outlook. Flight of the Conchords : Tenacious D :: VH1 : MTV. Except that makes it sound like I don't like the show and/or that I enjoy like VH1. I assure you that neither is the case.

Tim Lee takes issue with an article by Nicholas Carr in which Carr explores the limits of the open source development methodology. Carr says the OSS isn't very good at innovating. Tim disagrees:

There are lots of examples of ground-breaking free software. Apache wasn’t the first web server, but it preceded most of the proprietary servers now on the market, and it’s been the market leader almost from its introduction. Perl, Python, PHP, BitTorrent, and SendMail are a few examples off the top of my head of free software programs that aren’t clones of proprietary protocols. And on the flip side, a lot of Microsoft software is derivative. For example, Excel, Word, Windows, IIS, and SQL Server were all late-comers to markets that had been pioneered by other companies.

The reality is that really groundbreaking software ideas — word processors, spreadsheets, the web — are extremely rare, and they’re usually the work of a single smart individual. Whether that individual chooses to commercialize his idea or license it as free software is up to the whim of that individual. The vast majority of software development, on the other hand, involves making incremental improvements to existing software products and concepts. As far as I can see, that’s equally true whether you’re talking about free software or proprietary software.

I think Tim's right: it's silly to complain about the lack of paradigm-shifting projects on SourceForge. Ideas like the nonlinear video editor, the word processor or the spreadsheet simply don't come along all that often, and many of them originated before the internet had made open source software possible and widely-known. And, in fact, I think you'd be surprised how many experimental interfaces you could find in the open source world if you cared to look. It's just that most of them are pretty lousy. Boring as it may be, I believe that there is a relatively narrow range of visual metaphors that are appropriate for manipulating data on a 2D display with a pointing device and a bunch of buttons.

With that said, I do think Tim's overstating his case just a bit. There aren't enough originality-related datapoints within the world of classical applications — instead, let's look at games. The evidence here is less than encouraging. There are plenty of open-source games, but few have gained traction in a serious way. And they're frequently derivative: the most successful open-source games tend to be clones of existing commercial games like Tetris or Civilization, or applications that build on or otherwise support playing commercial games more cheaply or easily.

But I don't think this lack of originality is due to any inherent flaw in open-source contributors or the organizational model they employ. I think it's simply a question of capital — open source projects typically haven't got any. The vast majority of applications benefit from network effects that arise when their userbase becomes large enough: suddenly it's easier to find someone to play against online, or the documentation is better, or you can exchange files in the same format that your friend uses. It's relatively easy for open-source projects to achieve the necessary level of market interest when dealing with highly technical users and applications, as Tim's examples demonstrate — there are accepted techniques (e.g. the RFC process, making frequent commits to the project) and media outlets (e.g. listservs, usenet) that can confer legitimacy and generate interest without an investment.

That isn't true for products aimed at consumers, however — these frequently require investment in concerted promotion efforts in order to reach the network tipping point (or else must meet an unfulfilled need in a way that generates earned media like Wikipedia has). Witness the Ogg Vorbis audio format, which is widely agreed to be technically superior to MP3, offers advantages that are applicable to the average consumer, and has been almost completely ignored.

This brings up another issue: collaboration with the private sector is often much more difficult for open source projects. If Ogg had been able to attract support among portable audio player manufacturers its history might be very different. Similarly, it's easy to imagine that if the Blender project could talk to Nvidia about what advances their next generation graphics cards will offer, it might be able to better-compete with professional products like Maya and 3DS Max (I should note that I'm not particularly familiar with 3D modeling software, so perhaps I'm wrong about this).

But that's frequently not possible, and consequently the open-source projects that succeed are the ones that can form a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with products that have institutional backing. It's a lot easier to get folks to use your word processor if it can speak to Microsoft Word; it's a lot easier to get people to play your FPS if it's an add-on to a game that already has a large installed base; it's a lot easier to launch an IM client if it talks to an existing network.

That's the issue, I think. Carr makes out open source software's derivative nature to be a question of organization, but that's flatly wrong. The conventions may be different, but many projects have well-developed protocols surrounding the use of development IRC channels or mailing lists. Anyone who thinks the Mozilla or Apache (or Drupal!) projects could have achieved what they have without a high degree of coordination among volunteers is crazy. These organizations have roadmaps, design documents and established internal policies. It's just PR money and private-sector legitimacy that they lack. Fortunately the public's increasing technical literacy means that the need for the former is declining; the undeniable commercial relevance of open source means that projects are increasingly being accorded the latter.

cross-posted at EchoDitto Labs

Ezra used his mastery of the healthcare-related arts to wrangle Emily & me a pair of tickets to Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. Ezra's going to be seeing it later in the week, I believe, but his his shadow already loomed over the theater: I'm pretty sure I heard someone in the row behind us say his name (although I may have just misheard him asking, "Does this seat recline?").

The movie was pretty good, but having read enough blogospheric health care wonkery to make me officious-while-not-all-that-well-informed, I also couldn't resist picking out aspects of the film's argument that seemed unsatisfying. Among them: it was hard to know what to make of the anecdotes about care being denied; the trip to Cuba seemed likely to be so staged as to be meaningless; there were no real distinctions made between the different idyllic-seeming foreign healthcare systems; discussions of price were limited to foreign stuff being really cheap and our stuff being really expensive; and despite flirtations with the idea, the movie never really talked about preventive care's effect on cost. Overall, it was a little hard to feel confident about drawing any conclusion other than "America should probably be embarrassed". Maybe Ezra's Health of Nations article left me expecting too much from a movie that bothered to travel to Canada, the UK and France. Instead of highlighting the variations between these countries' systems, we just got a lot of repetition about how nice free health care is.

But the movie was still effective, and very entertaining — Michael Moore's a funny guy, and he knows how to pluck a heartstring. I think most people will leave the theater angry about our healthcare system and envious of the French, and that's probably about as much as one can reasonably expect. I'll be curious to hear what Ian (who was also in attendance) and Ezra think.

Julian links to Chuck Klosterman's list of perfectly-rated bands (that is, bands that are neither under- nor overrated). I'm pretty sure I've seen this before, but had forgotten about it. It's a good list, with one exception:

New Radicals: There are only five facts publicly known about this entity. The first is that 1998’s “You Get What You Give” is an almost flawless Todd Rundgren–like masterwork that makes any right-thinking American want to run through a Wal-Mart semi-naked. The second is that nobody can remember the singer’s name. The third is that the singer often wore a profoundly idiotic hat. The fourth is that if this anonymous, poorly hatted singer had made a follow-up album, it would have somehow made his first record seem worse. The fifth is that his album didn’t quite deserve to go gold, and it didn’t.

This is wrong, except for the bit about the hat. "You Get What You Give" is abysmal. It's one of those inexplicably ubiquitous songs that force listeners to conclude that the singer must be the son or daughter or lover of a powerful record industry executive. The chorus and the verses blur together, it falls back on percussive vocal delivery to hide how boring the melody is, and the lyrics are intensely banal in the sort of way that only a pop-music sentiment that's a) two decades old and b) written by Paul McCartney can be. It sounds like Jamiroquai singing tunelessly to himself in the shower and forgetting most of the words. It's really, really bad.

Also, the stupidity of that hat really can't be overstated.

Interesting idea. Found via Slashdot.

Eating foie gras may increase your risk of Alzheimer’s. Still, this could be for the best if the first neurons to go are the ones that allow us to feel empathy for geese.

I have to be a little delicate about this: I just got back from a preview of an upcoming environmental documentary by a famous former Growing Pains star/iceberg collision non-survivor. I got to skip out on work to do so — I guess there's a chance we may have some sort of involvement with the project's promotion. I really hope we don't. Nevertheless, discretion is the watchword, lest googling reveal the privately-held opinion of this particular worker bee.

The screening occurred at the MPAA's DC headquarters, which I hadn't realized is mere blocks away. It was kind of awesome being in the belly of the beast. Amusingly enough, the theater boasted what I'm pretty sure was an anti-piracy device: a speaker-looking thing just above the screen with a matrix of of dull red points of light spread across its face. I'm pretty sure those were infrared LEDs, and although I suppose there's a slim chance that they were part of an assistive-audio system, it seems a lot more likely that they were providing non-visible illumination. A camera on the lookout for the bright glare of digital cameras' infra-opaque IR filters would be able to spot a phonecam or mini DV rig easily. So good job on protecting your intellectual property, MPAA! Now just work on getting the projection in focus...

As for the movie — well, I'll start off by saying that I really liked An Inconvenient Truth. It was convincing, affecting and cogently presented. It's clear that LD liked it, too — a lot. But his movie is much, much worse. In fact, if anything it seems likely to provide an excuse for people not to take An Inconvenient Truth seriously.

The film consists of a bunch of talking heads who have been sat down and apparently asked what their eco-grievances are. They ramble in varying directions. Comfortable-looking Californians with "executive director" in their titles tell us that other people need to work and consume and generally want less. Neo-hippies tell us that the solutions to our ecological problems really come down to love, man (this was the first point at which the audience laughed). Somber crackpots explain that the real tragedy won't be the necessary elimination of billions from the earth's population, but rather the non-human species we take with us. Self-assured sophists educate us about how defense spending is an insignificant portion of America's GDP and how no study has ever shown any living system not to be in decline. In between all of this, genuine experts offer genuinely interesting thoughts, which are edited together into incoherence: air pollution's effect on childhood asthma prefaces concern about overfishing; deforestation segues into using fungi for heavy metal mitigation. Accompanying it all: a parade of stock footage, much of it at best tangentially related to the subject currently being discussed (we do get a quick, grainy shot of LD in a sweatlodge, though, which is pretty hilarious).

More than anything, the problem is the writing. LD can't write effective rhetoric for his monologues — he's like Al Gore, except actually boring. And the film is horribly disorganized. It's nothing that a freshman writing seminar or two couldn't fix (although it might require a particularly merciless TA). But as it currently stands, watching the film is like listening to an ecologically-focused 90-minute monologue by A.J. Soprano circa the end of season six.

Q: Is there a statute of limitations on emotional trauma? Is there ever a point at which your resulting petty behavior begins to be regarded as unacceptable by your peers?

A: No, of course not!

They're all over the goddamn place. I'd like to flatter myself by thinking that this is due to the collection of healthy fruits and vegetables that I keep near my desk, making it the workstation in the office that could most easily be confused for a picnic. In truth, it probably has more to do with the heaps of disordered crap and abundant coffee stains that adorn it (FACT: ants are apparently attracted to Charlottesville property tax forms for cars you no longer own).

Lee family wisdom holds that the proper way to deal with ants is to sprinkle boric acid all over the damn place. It's apparently quite deadly to ants, but was invented long ago, well before anyone had come up with the idea that chemicals might be bad for humans. So it's perfectly safe to liberally douse, say, newborn infants with it in order to afford some anti-ant protection.

Unfortunately boric acid — like laudanum, sulfuric acid and egg cremes — appears to be one of those awesome substances that drug stores used to sell back in the day, but have since ceased to carry in order to free up more shelf space for Swisher Sweets and NASCAR-themed bags of Cracker Jack. So I'm stuck with more contemporary ant remediation options, which suck pretty badly. In the past I've tried the little black plastic gadgets with gobs of poisoned peanut butter in them. They seem to work, but only after months of patient watchfulness — I think it amounts to ant asbestos, only manifesting its deadliness ant-years after the initial exposure, and well after they've already produced offspring. I suspect that it's actually a breakdown in ant society caused by skyrocketing healthcare costs that makes the stuff work at all. Alternately, it may just be that winter rolls around and they decide that the whole exchange has been so embarrassing that they'd prefer to bother a more dignified target come springtime.

The situation is further compounded by our office's general eco-friendliness. We do a bunch of work for a prominent purveyor of environmentally-focused household products. I have no idea what their anti-ant products are — tiny, alluring decoys shaped like lady ants and made out of hemp, perhaps? A book printed in soy ink on recycled paper entitled "Living with Ants"? — but I'm terrified that if I raise a stink I might be forced to use them.

It's not so bad. They only bite a little.

RESOLVED: Toto's "Africa" would make for a great Arcade Fire cover.

I'll withhold my irrefutable proof of this assertion until you've had a little time to digest it.

(Relatedly, have we all now officially dropped the "The" in front of (T)AF's name? I rewrote this post's first sentence because I'm no longer sure.)

TOTALLY COINCIDENTALLY: Looks like Julian is talking about covers, too, if you'd like to discuss the issue non-hypothetically.

This New York Times article, about a restaurateur who's suing her former sous chef for opening a competing restaurant that copies her own in many respects, is more than a little astonishing. First, because it ends on this brazen note:

Ms. Charles has come to think that if this case forces Ed’s Lobster Bar to change until it no longer resembles Pearl Oyster Bar, it could be the most influential thing she has ever done.

"I thought if I could have success with this lawsuit, that could be an important contribution," she said. "If some guy in California is having problems, he could go to his lawyer and look at this case and say, 'Maybe we can do something about it.' "

That's right — you'll be doing a huge favor to humanity by bringing IP litigation to the world of foodservice in order to protect your business's margins. Thanks a ton, really. But a word of advice: they say it hurts your chances if you campaign for the Nobel outright.

Second, there's the article itself, which completely ignores the well-settled legal questions involved. The closest the article comes to saying "recipes absolutely, unequivocally cannot be copyrighted" (as it ought to) is quoting another restaurant owner who laments, "You can’t protect recipes, you can’t protect what a place looks like, it’s impossible." That makes it sound like the system is stacked against him protecting his rights — instead of the system explicitly saying he can't assert IP rights over other people's cooking, which is the actual situation. And for what it's worth, the article implies that trademark law can protect what a place looks like — I'm pretty sure that's right, the McDonald's clone in Coming To America notwithstanding.

All of this ignores the public domain innovations that Ms. Charles benefits from, royalty-free: the cocktails her bartenders serve, the system of reservation-making she presumably employs, and, most amazingly, the Caesar Salad recipe that she says her mother got from another restaurant, but which she's now suing her sous chef for using. Diffuse borrowing seems to be okay; borrowing too much from one place isn't, I guess. But where do you draw the line?

The story mentions that nondisclosure agreements are coming to more and more kitchens, but fails to point out why this is: as screwed-up as our IP system is, it actually dealt with these questions before the food industry was sufficiently powerful to corrupt the process. That's why lawyers are now trying to shove all of this stuff into contract law, where you can get away with