Ranchero Software tech support eventually swooped in to the rescue, telling me that not only was my seemingly-expired copy of NetNewsWire merely exhibiting a bug, but that I was still entitled to an upgrade to version 3. Which is great! There aren't really any substantial improvements that I've found (other than actually working), but it gives me a useless-but-beautiful Growl notification when feeds are done refreshing, which I appreciate.

While I was adrift, RSS-wise, I tried signing up for the Vienna software development forum to see if I couldn't contribute my full text RSS algorithm to the project. Unfortunately, the registration form is broken — seems like they must not want patches all that badly.

I've been having a lucky streak when it comes to new music:

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

It turns out that Joe Strummer faked his death. Thank goodness.

Stars – In Our Bedroom After The War

Every Stars song sort of sounds like it's being sung while staring passionately into someone's eyes as a mustachioed villain flourishes his cape in the wings and plots to destroy the Moulin Rouge. This may or may not be a problem.

Travison Morrison – All Y'All

The emerging consensus seems to be "almost as good as the Plan!" I'll take a dramatically iconoclastic approach and say that parts of it are just as good as the Plan, while others are not.

The Cribs – Men's Needs, Women's Needs, Whatever

Where were you guys when I was driving to the beach?

The Polyphonic Spree – The Fragile Army

They have more than one song now, and you should give it a listen.

SPECIAL BONUS SINGLE TRACK ANALOGIZING:

Maritime – The Guns of Navarone

Robert Pollard, polished with granulated sugar to a gleaming smoothness.

ALSO: WOXY's 32kbps aacPlus stream really does sound amazingly good in comparison to their 64kbps MP3 stream. iTunes can't play it, but VLC can.

I gave Twitter a try back around SXSWi. I liked it, but it posed a couple of problems. First, I ended up getting so many SMSes that it made my phone significantly less useful. Second, the messages were typically from acquaintances on the west coast — nobody in DC used it.

But that's all changed. I finally installed Growl and Twitterific, which allow me to see my friends' updates in tasteful, unobtrusive windows in the upper right of my screen. "Ambient intimacy" is the phrase the Twitter people use, and it's just about right — I really do like knowing that al3x just had a sub-par bagel, or that Rich found an awesome new software tool. And Yglesias and Ezra have started using it with gusto, providing content relevant to my life in DC and encouraging me to respond in kind.

So I'm a Twitter born-again, I suppose, and have even gone so far as to install a badge in the sidebar, which is the web services equivalent of going steady. If any of this sounds intriguing, maybe you should give it a shot, too. Which is my long-winded way of saying: come entertain me, dammit.

How many people are familiar with the urban legend involving a family gone on vacation, a robbery, and a developed roll of film that reveals the burglar doing unpleasant things to the family's toothbrushes?

I thought this was part of our shared cultural heritage, but maybe I'm wrong.

It's only Wednesday, but it's already been kind of an intense week. You may have noticed me failing to respond quickly by email, help you migrate your hotmail contacts, or join you in watching movies in which David Bowie magically inconveniences teens. I apologize. There's a deadline looming, and consequently I'm wasting a lot less time on the internet and elsewhere than I'd like. But I can still dimly recall a time when my life wasn't solely devoted to building doomed UGC also-rans.

And part of that time was spent at Six Flags, as Emily and Michael already recounted. I really had no idea that a bona-fide amusement park was accessible by DC public transportation. The last time I went to the park it was still called "Wild World" and didn't have much in it except a single wooden coaster and a lot of bored birthday party attendees.

Things have improved since then. If the rollercoaster and hour-long medical drama industries are any indication, humans really enjoy the sensation of finding out that they're not going to die after all. In fact, the only sensation they seem to enjoy more is learning that somebody else is, or at least is about to have a very bad time (this is why there are more crime procedurals than hospital dramas). Under Dan Snyder's thoughtful/big-spending leadership, the park has recognized this first important truth and blossomed into a wonderland of not-quite-deadly steel contraptions.

Superman: Ride of Steel was probably the best coaster we went on, although the still-unridden Batman attraction seemed to break down with enough frequency that I think it must be particularly fun. The Tower of Doom was also pretty great: it just picks you up and drops you, cutting out the artifice and leaving riders strangely silent as they shuffle toward the exit.

The service left a little to be desired. It seemed like every employee had reported for orientation that morning — the atmosphere of the place can be summed up by the phrase, "Oh, that's what that button does!" This was mostly fine, though, as it meant that the employees were less beaten down by their awful summer jobs than one might expect. Tempers briefly flaired when it became apparent that each $25 cheese pizza ordered at the Papa John's counter was going to be meticulously made to order. Otherwise, all was well.

So I've got to give Six Flags a thumbs up. The lines were short, the beer was merely ballpark-priced and the waterpark had relatively few free-floating bandaids. Oh, and hey! I took some pictures:

Apologies for the terrible video quality, but I can't help posting a pet peeve of mine: the lack of standards for walk/don't walk signs at intersections. The countdown timers are great, but it's impossible to know at which point during the countdown the light will change to yellow.

This video is from the south edge of Logan Circle — an intersection I bike through every day. You can see that in one direction the light turns yellow when the countdown is at zero; in the other, the light turns yellow around "5" and is red at zero. This inconsistency seems dangerous.

Click To Play

Let's face it: if you're on a bike or in a car you'll occasionally find yourself trying to make a light. We can pretend that the stoplight should be the sole direction for vehicle operators, but that's a bit silly: the countdown timers are clearly an irresistible source of information that can be used to determine whether it's possible to get through an intersection safely. When they occasionally behave in unexpected ways, it's a genuine hazard.

I'm speaking from experience. Back in high school I was hit by a car while on my bike thanks to a combination of my own stupidity and a non-standard "don't walk" indicator. The overall dumbness of my teenage boy self was admittedly the driving factor. But that's hard to correct — it would've been a lot easier to properly program the signal so that the solid-red-hand had corresponded with the usual pause-at-yellow instead of green-means-go.

The "I Still Love You Bear Grylls" Mix

True to form, I've been really bad about making it out to the wilds of Tenleytown this summer. But I intend to make amends this evening. Anyone else planning on going?

Boi/ngBoi/ng took an ride on Richard Branson's new airline and had a great time. Suddenly I wish I had a reason to fly somewhere — I suppose living vicariously through Jeff will have to do.

But the other, more powerful sensation stirred by the BB post is this: holy hell but I'm glad Xe/ni Jar/din isn't on my IM contact list.

Perhaps I should add for the benefit of any normal humans reading: the "sl" in her last IM stands for "Second Life". Yes, it's that bad.

Justin has just released a new version of Pukka. If you use a Mac and maintain more than one del.icio.us feed — or just want to maintain your sole del.icio.us feed more easily (with, say, Spotlight integration) — you should go check it out.

Matt notes that applying copyright to fashion is a bad idea, and of course he's right. But look! That's not even the most reprehensible intellectual property news of the day: via Slashdot I see that Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross for using... the red cross symbol. But it sounds like the Red Cross has also been misbehaving, licensing the symbol to businesses in a way that's disallowed by an old agreement between the RC and J&J.

I realize that trademarks don't expire in the same way that patents and copyrights do, but surely there's a genericide argument to be made here — I had no idea the red cross belonged to Johnson & Johnson. I thought their mark was the intertwined Js that appear on their products, and that the cross was just generic decoration.

Who knows what the courts will decide. But it seems obvious to me that the symbol belongs in the public domain. Johnson & Johnson shouldn't be dragging charities into court over it, and charities shouldn't be selling licenses that they aren't entitled to grant.

Mr. Coffee (first name unknown)
1999-2007

We were reduced to brewing the morning coffee with Charles' French press. I know that some of my sophisticated big-city friends may be tempted to go on and on about the merits of French-pressed coffee — its thickness, sweetness and exquisite and/or non-existent oiliness — and from there argue that I should embrace French pressing as the one true way to make coffee. But as far as I'm concerned the single most important attribute that a cup of coffee can possess is not being the last one. And on that score, the French press fails. Besides, it sounds oddly sexual.

So, sad as this occasion is, it's also a chance for rebirth. I'm going to get a new coffeemaker, and I could use some suggestions. As you might imagine, my natural inclination is to get something complicated and impractical that costs a lot of money and breaks almost immediately. I've already asked some of my friends and loved ones to repeat to me that this is a bad idea, but I could use your support as well.

It would be nice to hear about specific alternate coffeemakers, too. Emily's trying to sell me on a Bunn coffeemaker — her family has one that she likes a lot. But to me, the brand recalls the time when my mom was a church secretary and I'd sometimes have to while away time in the building's basement, with the folding chairs and blank marriage certificates and brittle linoleum and alcoholics shuffling into a room down the hall and, yes, Bunn coffeemaker. That's not really the coffee lifestyle I want my purchase to evoke. The machines are also a little pricey for appliances that come with so much suburban despair attached.

No, as with all of my consumer purchases, I'd like my coffeemaker to come from the not-too-distant future (post-flying cars, pre-zombies), or, failing that, Asia. I'm thinking clean lines, stainless steel, and perhaps polyphonic ringtones and/or a blood pressure cuff.

I'd also sort of like to get one with a thermal carafe. People seem to like the Zojirushi EC-BD15, and I certainly like pronouncing it. But I'm given pause by the relatively lukewarm reviews for the EC-BD15BA which is, as far as I can tell, completely identical except for having a slightly larger illustration on Amazon.com.

So I'm not quite sure how to proceed. If anyone's used a Zojirushi, owned a Zojirushi, or had a loved one horribly disfigured by an explosion of steam and shrapnel coming from a Zojirushi, please let me know. And if you can make a case for a different brand or absolutely essential feature, lay it on me.

Apologies to everyone who's already heard this story. The weighty responsibilities of internet citizenship demand that I record it for future generations.

One of the best things about almost being a fake journalist is that it occasionally affords me invitations to fake press events. They're not all that fake, I guess — like all such events, they're trying to attract favorable coverage. But they're a little more shameless about it than they would be were they pitching writers with a sense of professional self-respect. This works out better for everyone involved.

Last Friday this translated into an invitation to Chevrolet's "Re/v It Up" event. They've been holding these things all over the country; DC was the last stop. Racing fans and their beleaguered mates travel from miles around to drive Chevy Cobalts (as seen at Hertz!) through a sea of orange traffic cones. Participants' scores are calculated relative to the time posted by a professional driver who runs the course several times a day. At the end the top scorers from each city are flown in and compete head-to-head for a new Corvette.

I'm not exactly sure why they invited me — I don't know or write about cars, but somehow I've ended up on Chevy's press list. It's either not a very big list or, more likely, one that few people respond to: the media turnout for the event totalled about 8 people — and that's including a few VIPs who were rolled into our group for its line-skipping abilities. The participant that came closest to representing an august general-interest publication was from Washington Hispanic.

I took the Metro out to Fedex field, which was a big mistake. The Morgan Boulevard Metro station, like all above-ground Metro stations, was located principally to justify the creation of a godawful tract housing development. It was only when workers were plugging in the turnstiles that someone finally looked up and noticed an enormous football stadium looming in the distance — one that tens of thousands of people would want to attend on a regular basis.

As a result it's kind of a hike to the stadium, and it was even further to get to the corner of the parking lot where Chevy had set up. The day was hot, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I got there. They gave me a badge, waved me through and immediately began distracting me with a stratospherically hot (and, one presumes, equally evil) PR rep. She gave me water, laughed at a couple of my dumb jokes and congratulated me on riding public transportation in a manner usually reserved for developmentally disabled adults.

Eventually an artificially genuine-seeming media liaison named Dan showed up and led us to the "Rules & Regulations" tent, where a bored failed racecar driver explained to us what not to do. First on the list of proscribed activities: thinking that Chevy isn't awesome! Variations on this point consumed about two-thirds of his presentation. The only actual rules I remember hearing:

1. No spinning tires at the start line — although a later instructor told us that we should probably spin them sort of a little, but not too much(!) because that'd make us go slower.
2. In what I presume is a nod to the Unifest unpleasantness, we were forbidden from hitting any cones, and threatened with a two-second penalty per cone should we violate this rule. Except on the practice track, of course, where we could cream as many cones and/or street festival attendees as we'd like.

Next were the instruction tents, where Dan the Media Guy introduced us to a grizzled driver who had "done it all", which in this case means he's driven various cars on tracks both circular and straight. "He lost the original Cannonball Run by twenty minutes! The original one, the real one!" Dan repeated this factoid several times, perhaps after being disappointed by the lack of revery it initially inspired. I didn't and still don't really know what it meant, except perhaps that I was standing near someone who had once met Burt Reynolds.

Introductions dispensed with, we began receiving instruction. Over the next 45 minutes or so we learned a new and completely bewildering take on physics — one shaped by experience on the track, and one that I'm sure works fine as a set of heuristics, but also one that bears very little resemblance to everything I've ever been taught about how the physical world operates.

You've got your contact patches and apex points, of course, and the hilarious and heavily-stressed technique of "ocular driving" — which, yes, means that while driving you should use your eyes. But these are just jargon laid atop a more fundamental philosophy. The racing experience is explained in terms of a sort of motorsport panpsychism. Everything is anthropomorphized, and your progress down the track is recast as a complicated negotiation between the animistic spirits of the asphalt, tires, engine and brakes. The driver's will seems to have very little to do with it (which, to be fair, is pretty accurate in my case).

I left the tent confused, but in the mood to drive recklessly. We headed to the practice course and did a few laps — it was a slightly deflated loop with tight turns and a slalom section. I didn't kill any cones or people. From there we headed to the competition course, where we donned hairnets and fantastically stupid-looking helmets (see above) and took two timed laps around the track, competing against one another.

So alright, I didn't win. But hear me out: of the three people from the media group finishing ahead of me, one was a correspondent from Motorweek, one was a professional racecar driver(!), and one was, uh, well, just better than me. But I'm pleased to report that I kicked the hell out of the 80 year-old guy from the Chinese-American Travel Association. All things considered, I'm pretty pleased with my performance. If you own a car and would like me to do terrible things to your brakes and tires, I stand ready.

I could've stuck around and tried the go-karts or drag-racing or ignite-the-open-vat-of-gasoline booth. Or talked to the "NOS Energy Girls", I suppose. But I was ready to head home. On the way back I took a wrong turn, saw a fox and ended up in an overgrown cul de sac filled with weeds and Dharma Initiative-ish billboards emblazoned with the word JERICHO, but other than that the trip back was fine. I ended the day sweaty, exhausted and in posession of some extremely tacky Chevy promotional gear.

All in all, it was an overwhelming success. Car racing is almost as fun as it is stupid.

And that's about it, apparently.

It's perpetually surprising to me that articles like this one can find their way into the Science section of what is by most accounts a Newspaper For Smart People. Even more astounding is that they got David Chalmers to contribute some quotes to it.

You should read the piece for yourself, but the gist of what John Tierney excitedly reports is that Dr. Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosophy professor, has decided that we may all be living in a computer simulation. He reasons that future civilizations will become advanced enough to run simulations of brains, and that they'll make widespread use of this technology for entertainment or to research their past. If they use it enough, the odds of a given mind from any point in history occurring outside of the system become quite low. If you consider the possibility of nested simulations the odds diminish even further.

The whole "ancestor simulation" premise sounds like it suffers from some confusion about the reversibility of deterministic processes. There's also a bit of an issue with thinking that a lack of information can be remedied with probabilistic hand-waving (this Crooked Timber post rails against the technique nicely). Bostrom's ideas, or at least Tierney's writeup, seem to ignore the considerably better-developed and more interesting speculation about the possibility of an Omega Point. And I have some anti-reductionist complaints that I doubt anyone reading this blog will be very receptive to.

But mostly this is bad because it's all so banal. Put a group of freshmen in a room with a copy of Principles of Philosophy, the first Matrix movie and a dime bag and you'll get pretty much the same thing (including the overly-cute World of Warcraft reference).

Amazingly, this is actually only the second-worst science article I've recently read. Check out the BBC's coverage of an amazing new "paper battery" — a carbon-nanotube-based technology from Rensselaer that made Slashdot's frontpage yesterday. The writeup is bold enough to include a "How a paper battery works" graphic without actually demonstrating any evidence that the admittedly paper-based technology could be used as a battery. The article mentions voltage, but nothing about capacity. Neither does the original press release upon which it's based, which ought to be a red flag to anyone who took AP Physics and/or has wondered why we use batteries despite the existence of capacitors.

This looks like an awful lot like a novel capacitor and nothing more. I seriously doubt it can store a fraction as much charge as even the cheapest chemical cell on sale at the nearest drugstore. Carbon nanotube ultracapacitors may become a useful technology someday, but we're nowhere near replacing the lithium batteries in your mobile electronics with them. But you'd never know from the article that this technology's energy-storage applications will likely be limited to digital watches... maybe.

I can only think of two reasons why science coverage is so awful, neither of which is particularly original, but both of which I can't resist repeating. First, there's obviously the question of expertise — journalists need to be generalists. Even when they consult an informed party for a quote, they may not trust that source's judgment about what makes (or fails to make) the story newsworthy — they just see "possible applications include curing cancer and humanity's lack of heat-vision" on the press release and decide to run with it.

Second, and more evident in the Tierney article, I suspect, is the industry's willingness to let science fans like Gregg Easterbrook pursue their hobby on their employer's dime (and newsprint) after proving themselves in some other journalistic area. I can't blame these writers for trying this — I'd do the same thing if I were in their position, and probably embarrass myself just as often. But the expertise problem must frequently stop their editors from exerting enough influence on the result.

UPDATE: Tim Lee also thinks Tierney's article is pretty lame.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has posted a letter in which the writer implies that Dr. Bostrom is ripping off a 90s sci-fi author who used a similar premise in one of his stories. That seems extremely unlikely to me, but I do think it's good further evidence of how obvious the idea is.

Thanks to the Governess for reminding me that today is Elvis Death Day. Don't forget the accompanying Washington tradition: the Don and Mike Elvis Death Day Show.

I know it's shameful to be a shock jock apologist. But these are DC's homegrown shock jocks — I grew up listening to them, way back when they manned the morning show on a pre-Christian WAVA. I'll probably always have a soft spot for them, regardless of how vile and unfunny they can occasionally be. Besides, whatever your opinion of their daily show, there's really no better place to hear just what a weird dude Elvis Aaron Presley was on an annual basis. 3pm at the link above.

UPDATE: The podcast of the show is now available on iTunes. It'll scroll into oblivion soon, so if you're interested in hearing about Elvis's weird sexual habits and astounding pharmaceutical intake, act now!

Ogged sent me this, because he is unkind:

UPDATE: Also, Cristen sent me this a little while ago. They rented a bear suit. *sigh*

John Allison, the author of the excellent webcomic Scary Go Round, is asking for fake letters for his new book. They need to be about ghosts and in the style of the New Yorker letters page. That sounds pretty good, right?

Comcast has placed new anti-Bittorrent restrictions in place, limiting download speeds and, crucially, preventing those with completed downloads from "seeding" — continuing to contribute to the Bittorrent swarm. Eliminating seeders cripples a swarm; if enough ISPs did it, the efficiency of the protocol would plummet. Many swarms would no longer be viable.

Encryption doesn't seem to help. The protocol's creator, Bram Cohen, warned that BT encryption was a bad and pointless idea, and is being proven right as ISPs like Rogers simply throttle all encrypted traffic. There's a workaround for the Comcast measures if you've got a Linux firewall, but of course most folks don't.

Admittedly, this doesn't rank among the greatest injustices in human history. Most of the affected activity involves copyright infringement. But not all. And this issue will become increasingly relevant and legitimized as bandwidth-intensive data services proliferate — movies will be downloaded by your Tivo, game consoles will download ever-larger game demos and add-ons. People will start to notice that ISPs can capriciously degrade service when their accounting departments demand it. And people won't like it.

I think the solution is metered bandwidth. The Slashdotters want it, too. Right now the price jump from consumer service to business service is too large — who's going to pay double the price simply for a contract with terms that Comcast actually has to obey? We need more granular pricing, and metered bandwidth is the obvious way to provide it.

I've got a quick post up at EchoDitto Labs detailing how to use the new Yahoo Pipes Web Services module with PHP. Not exactly rocket science, but might come in handy for anyone who doesn't want to ponder the Java example that Yahoo provides.

Many thanks to son1 for tipping me off to the existence of this module — it makes an already-powerful service even more versatile.

Following in the footsteps set last week by carnival-attendance pioneer Michael Silberman, this Saturday a small group of daring adventurers set out for the Montgomery County Fair. The results were well-documented.

There's video, too:

Click To Play

I ended up eating one fried dough product too many and returned home with a splitting headache. But it was worth it! Really, this was by far the best fair experience I can remember.

Brian's got a new site!

I had a dream, and a beautiful one at that: I wanted to stop opening my mail.

Mail is terrible. In my experience it's uniformly either irrelevant or bad news. Mostly it's the former, of course: American Express seems to feel they need to check in with me about four times a week, and various bafflingly unfamiliar organizations keep trying to push credit cards on me (at right: The American Quarter Horse Association's offer, received just a few hours before I wrote this).

The important stuff — which is, of course, indistinguishable from the junk — is always, always bad news. Mostly it's bills. Sometimes it's a coded warning that in several months I'll almost forget to buy a wedding present for someone. The best case scenario is that I've merely slid a little further into emotional debt to a faithfully corresponding family member. Good news arrives electronically. Duties are printed on paper, like military orders.

I tried to at least dispense with the bills. Bank of America made it seem like I could plausibly receive and pay bills online. When they added a feature that allowed me to automatically respond to incoming bills — no attention or volition required! — I enthusiastically handed my checkbook over to a robot. I spent the last 8 months or so throwing away every communication that looked even a little bit like it was from a credit card company. Sometimes I'd tear them up (identity thieves lurk everywhere!) but it was more satisfying to shove their evil, glossy bulk straight into the trash can. It was a wonderful time in my life. I felt free.

Sadly, I'm now putting my shackles back on. Several-too-many completely unexpected and alarmingly large credit card bills have proven to me that automatic bill payment is too erratic to trust. I'm sure that some day it'll be possible not to have to worry about debts on a near-daily basis. But I'm now convinced that it'll only happen after Star Trek-style collectivism finally kicks in and does away with currency altogether.

I might have to reconsider the Ocean: Matt tipped me off to the fact that some intrepid Helio users have figured out a way to load J2ME apps on the phone. The first big success is Opera Mini, an excellent web browser that can now supplant the Ocean's neutered default browser.

The advance is related to a wrapper that's been written for the platform. Lots of phones can run Java Midlets, and consequently lots of Midlets are available. But Helios can't use them. They employ a less-common Java technology called WIPI. That's the crux of the breakthrough: someone's come up with a way to wrap Midlets as WIPI apps. There are kinks to be worked out (the QWERTY keyboard on the Ocean doesn't work within Opera, for example), but this is clearly a big deal.

CLERK: Mo/rris House Bed & Breakfast, how can I help you?

ME: Yeah, hi. My parents got me a gift certificate to your hotel for my birthday and I'd like to make a reservation to use it.

CLERK: Certainly sir, I can help you with that.

ME: The only thing is, the certificate says it expires on August 31st, and I'd actually like to make the reservation for September 1st, the day after. Will that be a problem?

CLERK: Uhh... I'll have to check. Can I call you back?

Later...

CLERK: Hi, this is Mo/rris House. I talked to my supervisor and she said it'll be fine for you to use the certificate on September 1st.

ME: Great!

CLERK: Let me just check and... oh. Hmm. There's a problem. We only have one qualifying room left on that date.

ME: Great, that'll be fine.

CLERK: No, see, I can't give you that room. It's our last one.

ME: I don't understand. The certificate has been paid for... It's not like you're giving me the room for free.

CLERK: I'm trying to work with you sir, but if you look at the gift certificate it does say "subject to availability".

ME: Right, and you just told me that a room is available.

CLERK: Listen, I'm trying to work with you, sir. We're trying to be flexible about the date.

We go through this several more times. The hotel's policy does not begin to make more sense.

ME (exasperated): Okay. I understand the hotel already has the money for this gift certificate and doesn't want to honor it if it can possibly earn more money from someone else instead. Can I pay an up-charge or something and get the room?

CLERK: Uh... I'll have to check. Can I put you on hold?

Without hanging up, the clerk calls me on a different line.

CLERK: I got good news for you, sir! I can give you the room if you pay an extra $20.

So fine, I paid the $20. But really now: c'mon. My parents' thoughtful gift has already been paid for with perfectly good money. It's time for you to honor your end of the bargain. Stop being such jerks.

I'm Googleproofing this for the time being so that the Mo/rris House people don't do horrible things to our breakfast or play more reservation shenanigans. But this is pretty sleazy behavior. It's just one goddamn day. Is it really worth jerking your clients around for an extra $20?

• Comcast claims they aren't interfering with BitTorrent despite strong evidence to the contrary. The problem apparently isn't affecting all Comcast users, and TorrentFreak says that some BT client authors are integrating workarounds into their programs. So if you're a Comcast customer perhaps you don't need to panic after all.
• Frank Deford on pro wrestling's high mortality rate. It's nice to see a real sports journalist talk about wrestling and its occasionally tragic aspects without sneering. But Deford's stretching things when he tries to connect the deaths directly to steroid abuse in other sports. Yes, wrestlers' anabolically-enhanced bulk contributes to a lot of premature heart attacks. But that's just part of the story — there's also abuse of other substances among wrestlers, particularly opiates. The industry involves a lot of travel and an economic structure that encourages wrestlers to continue to work while injured. As a result a staggering number of wrestlers get addicted to painkillers at one point or another, and often other drugs as well. The lifestyle is basically that of a chemically supercharged carny. Steroid use certainly isn't healthy, but I don't think it completely explains why the wrestling industry produces so many dead men in hotel rooms.
• And on a cheerier notes, here's the requisite link to Salon's coverage of the MediaBistro poll... irregularities.

Computationally speaking, I mean:

Via Dan Rutter.

UPDATE: So's this, via MAKE::Blog.

Lots of people I know are doing great things on the internet, and I haven't been paying enough attention. So here! Some links that you ought to pay attention to, two of which are shamelessly lifted from DCeiver.

• Yogaball is sweeping the nation, and all that you can hope to do is familiarize yourself with its rules before a rising tide of family fun sweeps over the carpeted floors of your home and you just stare — and then it's like the time between now and that first spreading sheet of water never existed, and suddenly you're crying/gasping for breath in a small pocket of air near the ceiling, an indifferent flashlight bobbing next to you, and you can hear yourself and the splashing water but otherwise it's silent. THAT'S how fun Yogaball is. Prepare yourself, and consider purchasing flood and/or lawn sport insurance (if available/extant).
• Have you ever wondered what Sommer's favorite food is? Of course you have. Well, stop torturing yourself about it. This and other revelations can be found in her interview with Washingtonian, which she handled with grace and wit.
• This is what Western civilization has been working toward all these years. When I look at that meat cake I suddenly understand how Christopher Hitchens has been feeling these past six years.

A somewhat dense but really good article from IEEE Spectrum (found via Slashdot). It comes complete with a somewhat-irritating but still very informative Flash demonstration of the topic it discusses: how recorded music has become louder and more fatiguing as a result of an arms race between music producers that trades upon our pathetically easily-fooled nervous systems. It's like the omnipresence of corn syrup in processed foods: everyone says they don't like it, but it's hard to argue with figures showing that sweetness = sales.

The article covers a lot of ground, touching on numerous issues related to how audio storage technology works (I had no idea that engineers could alter vinyl's dynamic range during mastering — sort of like adjusting the bitrate on an MP3). Definitely worth a read. And if you have any irritating audiophile friends, you may want to send them the link. If they don't understand the piece, politely tell them to shut up for a bit about how awful digital audio technology is.

To the one or two people who actually use the comment RSS feed: rejoice! I finally fixed it so that entry titles and links work properly within it.

Man that's cheap. I suppose you do need to buy a special screwdriver, too. Still!

UPDATE: Having read a bit more on the subject, it seems very likely that this is a clone of the WiiKey rather than the original chip. That wouldn't normally be a problem unless you were really counting on getting a holographic sticker with your order. But the clones don't come with firmware preinstalled — you have to download it from the WiiKey website, burn it to a disc and run it in your modded Wii, thereby loading the code on the chip. Unfortunately, Nintendo released a firmware update to the Wii a few weeks ago that made the disc format in which the firmware is encoded nonfunctional. This appears to be a temporary problem — folks have already figured out how to remaster Wii discs so that they can boot. But the WiiKey people haven't yet repackaged their firmware in a format that will work on updated Wiis.

So if you have an official WiiKey chip you already have firmware loaded and are fine. If you buy a clone you'll end up waiting for WiiKey to release a bootable upgrade disc. It's not a big deal, really, but I wouldn't want you to end up marooned. The genuine chip costs about $20 and can be acquired from the vendors listed on the WiiKey website.

Here's a sort-of-interesting problem I've been working on recently, and which might help prevent an internet stranger or two from pulling their hair out. When you're moving from one blog to another, how do you set things up so that folks stumbling across your old site are sent to the new one? This came up while Emily and I were working on Brian's new site. His existing Typepad site had URLs like this:

http://beutler.typepad.com/home/2007/08/rove-the-erudit.html

I knew that I wanted to clean up the formatting of these a little bit — for one thing, the .html would have to go, as I intended to use some PHP in the pages (on a web server with a standard configuration, only files ending in .php or .php5 are processed for PHP). And that "/home/" seemed extraneous, too.

I did try to make the two similar, though, to simplify things. By default Movable Type creates its URLs from the entry's title, transforming it into a unique identifier called the basename. I altered MT's default basename length so that it was 15 characters, matching the length of Typepad's basenames. I set up the new mapping in MT's Settings/Publishing area, and ended up with new URLs that looked like this:

http://www.brianbeutler.com/2007/08/rove_the_erudit/index.php

The index.php on the end can be left off — if you ask a Linux web server for a directory, it'll look for "index.php" or "index.html" or "index.htm" and send it back if it finds it. This lets you have slightly tidier-looking URLs. So our new URL is actually:

http://www.brianbeutler.com/2007/08/rove_the_erudit/

With the format settled upon I was able to write some code that sits on every page of Brian's Typepad site. When a user arrives the page looks at its URL, applies a set of transformations to rewrite it into the new format, and sends the user to the result. Normally you'd want to do this in a server-side script or .htaccess file, but as far as I can tell Typepad doesn't let its users have that level of control. So I had to put it in some Javascript that I added to Brian's Typepad template:

<script type="text/javascript">
location.href = location.href.replace(/beutler\.typepad\.com/,'www.brianbeutler.com').replace(/\/home\//,'/').replace(/\.html$/,'/').replace(/\-/g,'_');
</script>

This looks complicated, but it really just does a few things to the URL (whatever the URL may be):

1. Replace "beutler.typepad.com" with "www.brianbeutler.com"
2. Replace "/home/" with "/"
3. Replace the ".html" at the end of the URL with "/"
4. Change all hyphens in the URL to underscores

It then sends the browser to the new URL.

Done! All I had to do now is deliver the website, lean back and adopt an attitude of extreme self-satisfaction.

Except... no. I wasn't done. Everything was actually much, much worse than I thought.

I realized I might as well post this script, too. Say you're moving from one host to another, and the source exports to the MT/Typepad format (a big long text file) and the new host can read that format (Wordpress can, and of course MT/Typepad can).

You're facing a problem: your entries' text is probably littered with images and links pointing at your old domain. Those links are presumably going to become dead sometime after the transition; you'd like to rewrite them to point at the new domain. You'd also like to download any images, PDFs or other digital assets that they point to, then upload them to the new server.

Well, here's a script that you can run against the exported MT/Typepad file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $url, $rewritten_url;
while(my $l = <>)
{
   while($l =~ m/(href|src)=['"](http:\/\/beutler\.typepad\.com\/.*?)['"]/i)
   {
      $url = $2;
      $rewritten_url = $url;
      $rewritten_url =~ s/http:\///igx;
      if($url =~ m/\.(html?|php)/i)
      {
         $rewritten_url =~ s/^\/beutler\.typepad\.com\/home//igx;
         $rewritten_url =~ s/\.(html?|php)$/\//i;
      }
      else
      {
         my $prefix = $rewritten_url;
         $prefix =~ s/^\///;
         $prefix =~ s/\/[^\/]+$//;
         `wget -q --directory-prefix=$prefix $url`;
      }

      $l =~ s/$url/$rewritten_url/gx;
   }

   print $l;
}

If you saved this file as rewrite_entries.pl, you'd run it like so:

cat MT_EXPORT_FILE.txt | ./rewrite_entries.pl > MT_EXPORT_FILE_REWRITTEN.txt

You'd end up with a new text file (which is the one you should import) and a subdirectory full of images and PDFs that you'll want to FTP up to your new server. There's some Brian-specific stuff in the above script, but it shouldn't take very much work to adapt it to a different site.

I almost forgot: a little birdy tells me that you can find a full-text version of the recently-bowdlerized Freakonomics RSS feed at the following URL.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomics-full

At the moment, the authors are asking a very good question: why are we eating so much more shrimp than we used to? Shrimp just isn't very good relative to other seafood. But it's everywhere.

Being the sort of blog that it is, I'm sure that the answer will be "because aquaculture and/or other factors have made the margins on shrimp much better". I think the other half of the answer, likely to remain unblogged elsewhere, is that Americans are squeamish about seafood that tastes like seafood, and you can't order chicken every time you go to Applebee's.

I agree with everything Megan says here — well, except for the Asperger's bit, which I'm reflexively averse to. Jason, who's freshly back from PAX, studies questions like this one in the course of his research. I'd be curious to know what he's got to say about it.

For the few who might be interested, I've put the code to the unfoggedbot up over at EchoDitto Labs. I've made various improvements since the initial version — it now daemonizes, for example. If you've got any questions, feel free to get in touch with me.

And with that done, I hereby promise to lay off the source code releases for a while.