Zack de la Rocha and DJ Shadow just released an anti-war song entitled “March of Death” from marchofdeath.com. This is the second war protest song from a major artist; the first was “In a World Gone Mad” by the Beastie Boys. The MP3 can be downloaded directly from the web site. The lyrics are also posted online.
It’s good to see DJ Shadow representing Mill Valley’s politics in his recordings.
The most hyped album of the year was released into stores yesterday. I managed to obtain an advance promo of the CD prior to the release date so I’ve been listening to the disc for about a week. Overall I think the CD is good but it is nowhere as good as Hybrid Theory. Linkin Park is clearly catering to the radio stations and MTV with this release, as seen in the lengths of the songs. No song is longer 3:33 and the thirteen tracks on the CD only account for a CD that has a total running time of 36:35. You can fit Meteora and Hybrid Theory on one 80 minute CD but Meteora is even shorter than Hybrid Theory.
In my opinion the strongest songs on the CD are “Somewhere I Belong,” “Lying from You,” and “Figure.09.” Except to see these on TRL sometime soon. It wouldn’t surprise me if “Don’t Stay” is the next single to be released but I don’t think it’s exceptional. It is a very radio friendly CD but I think it’s safe to say that Linkin Park is not suffering from sophomore slump on Meteora.
The album has received a lot of media attention for the amount of security placed on circulation prior to release. Rolling Stone reported in “Linkin Park Beat Bootleggers” that the twenty-four hour security kept the disc from being released early. That is partly true since the disc wasn’t released on the Internet months before release. However, Meteora did appear on the Internet about a week before the retail release, so technically Linkin Park didn’t beat the bootleggers as claimed by Rolling Stone.
According to Adobe, top of the line Dell PCs are better at performing operations in Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects than top of the line Macs. The Dell 3.06GHz system beat the Mac 1.25GHz dual processor system in all four tests: Video composite, flying logo, illustrative text, and virtual set. The article is already moving up the Daypop charts and I’m sure sparks are going to fly in the design community over this.
I didn’t read Mark Pilgrim’s weblog, Dive Into Mark, for a couple of days and I ended up missing the funniest story on his site in the past year. In “Confessions of a platypus creator” he admitted that Raging Platypus was his creation. Raging Platypus soared to the top of the Daypop Top 40 and that was because a bunch of Mark’s friends went trolling for links.
He then admitted on his site last week that he is Raging Platypus. I had absolutely no idea but I have to hand it to him for coining the term “bovitch.” Good work Mark! I too despise the Raging Cow fakeblog.
Wired News reported today that the virus originating from Hong Kong which has killed 50 people worldwide already may be related to coronavirus, the source of the common cold. This can be considered a good thing overall because it may be easier to develop treatment for the virus since the coronavirus is well studied.
However, in my opinion, this is also very unsettling because this is clearly a case in point where mutation of a virus in wide circulation can have catastrophic effects. Chicken soup is no longer as potent as it used to be. The virus has shut down a number of events in Hong Kong including a rugby tournament. Citizens have been seen walking in the streets with masks over their mouths and noses in an attempt to avoid catching the virus. In related news, 3M admitted that the masks sold to Hong Kong residents don’t even provide protection!
The strain is already here in America and currently affecting people close to where I live. The Marin Independent Journal also reported today that the SARS ailment is now here in Marin. It is being commonly referred to now as “super-pneumonia.”
Let’s hope we can find a solution for this outbreak soon because it is spreading very rapidly. In Singapore there are already 860 quarantine cases.
I noticed in my referrer logs for this week that twenty-five percent of my web traffic went to a bot called “LARBIN-EXPERIMENTAL efp@gmx.net Mozilla/4.0.” It indexed my web site in 1 second intervals which is very fast compared to Google, which peaks at 3 second intervals when its cluster of 10,000 servers doesn’t schedule the indexing well. The IP information for this potential Spambot is 66.230.140.66 (argon.oxeo.com) in case you want to block it. I highly suggest it and I’m going to report it to my hosting provider.
Men and Ben Trott of Six Apart posted a non-technical guide to Trackback, a feature of Movable Type for quite a while that enables web sites to interoperate. The guide is very easy to follow and even has a movie showing how you can trackback to other weblogs on your own journal using bookmarklets. If you are using Movable Type, Bloxsom, Nucleus, B2, or Radio, definitely check the guide out because it might clarify some issues you’re having.
Also, the guide explains “Content Aggregation,” the original reason for implementation of Trackback. By pinging another site with your weblog entry, you can remotely post onto it. Pretty cool stuff. My only concern with that is access permissions since anybody with the URL can post to the site, but I’m sure in future releases of Trackback this will be corrected.
The news media hyped up this year’s Oscars to be “downplayed” by the actors, with virtually no red carpet coverage, no over-the-top outfits, and lots of black. For the most part the Oscars did turn out to be less outrageous than usual but I have to say that I think I liked this year’s show more than when it is ultra-glam.
Steve Martin hosted and he did an excellent job. His jokes were funny throughout the night with my personal favorite directed toward the head of the Academy. Steve mentioned that this year cleavage is in, and then introduced the Academy president onto the stage. He had a number of good ones but my other favorite was when he listed some of the people in the audience who had slept with him and then later branded Jack Nicholson as a homosexual. Jack then licked his eyebrow.
The low point of the night definitely went to Michael Moore, who started out with a great acceptance speech and then blew it. He had a great beginning, where he mentioned how we live in a ficticious world and how documentary is a great art form. He had all of the other nominees up on the stage with him. Then he started ranting about Bush and members in the audience started booing him because Oscar speeches are supposed to be apolitical. Here’s the transcript:
Acceptance Speech
“Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I’d like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they’re here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much.”
Michael Moore
I thought I was going to get most of the Oscar picks correct, but as usual the Academy managed to throw me a loop. Here’s a list of what I got right and what I got wrong. See how it compares with your own:
The official list of winners is online at oscar.com.
When I came home Friday for Spring Break, I picked up the April 2003 issue of Discover magazine and found an excellent feature on João Magueijo, who is currently pursuing research on VSL (varying speed of light). VSL challenges one of the foundations of Physics, namely that light travels at a constant speed of 299,792,458 m/s. According to João, during the formation of the universe light travelled faster than the current speed; it travelled almost infinitely fast.
At the same time, gravity and temperature travelled at a higher speed but the universe settled down and light “froze” at its current speed. João’s feature is entitled “At the Speed of Light: What if Einstein was wrong?,” and I highly recommend reading through it. Since I’m not a physicist, I have no idea whether or not this theory makes any sense but it is interesting to glance over.
ZDNet reported on March 21 that the next version of Microsoft Office will embed macros interspersed in XML files rather than just at the top like traditional DOC files. This is very bad for virus scanners because they scan just the part with the macro code and move onto the next file. If Microsoft keeps this current system in place, virus scanning of Office documents will take much longer because virus programs will have to scan through the entire document rather than just through the macro section.
Then again, people have to be actively virus scanning in the first place for this to be a problem and many computer users don’t bother installing anti-virus defense. Chances are Microsoft is going to fix this problem but it’s nice to know that the industry is quick to point out problems like these before Office comes out of beta.
Although America’s war on Iraq has been conducted using advanced military technology such as a new line of Patriot missiles and GPS satellite uplink to command posts in Kuwait, the government is still fighting the war the traditional way, by trying to overwhelm the enemy in numbers. Bush’s “shock and awe” plan was launched at the end of this week to overwhelm Iraq with more bombs dropped than in the entire Gulf war. It is estimated that 3,000 bombs were deployed.
However, I think the military campaign so far has gone well for the military in terms of missile precision. An Iraqi insider tipped off the administration as to the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein supposedly, and the missile launched at the bunker site made solid contact. In the Gulf war, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s nice to know that our defense spending is at least buying missiles that land in the intended target and not just in the intended country.
On a side note, my prayers are with the soldiers and their families. May the war be fast and that the Iraqi democracy is established as soon as possible. I hate to see the war going on and I think it should have been prevented, but now my hope is that it will be concluded as early as possible.
It rained heavily yesterday here in Westwood but I didn’t let the rain get me down. Instead, I took advantage of the downpour by sledding some hills. My friend Adam came up with the idea and it was definitely one of the best of the year.
Finally a decent article explaining the feasibility of Hydrogen in the automotive industry gets published in a mainstream tech magazine. Wired’s cover story from 11.04 is rational, innovative, and downright great.
Peter Schwartz and Doug Randal report that if the United States spends the equivalent of sending a man to the moon (1969) on redeveloping the domestic fuel economy, we can break away from ties to Big Oil in ten years. The global implications of this move are huge. The oil dictatorships in the Middle East will take a big hit and Israel will likely become the strongest power in the East because they have the most modern economy.
Here in America, the reduction of fossil fuels will come at a price but it is worth paying. Environmental pollution will decrease and the big oil companies, such as Shell or Exxon, won’t even go out of business. Rather, they will adapt to become the forbearers of the Hydrogen economy.
President Bush, if there is one notable thing to do during your presidency, it is to push the Hydrogen agenda forward.
My friend Adam and I randomly got into a conversation about Tycho Brahe yesterday during lunch. Tycho Brahe was a prominent physicist during the 16th century. The conversation stemmed from a need to go to the bathroom during a final. Supposedly Tycho Brahe died during a dinner in Prague 1601 from not going to the bathroom (bladder rupture).
However, some recent studies from 1996 suggest that Tycho Brahe died from mercury poisoning instead of bladder rupture. An analysis on his beard showed that he had unusually high levels of mercury in the hair. Jacobsen and Petersen cover the new studies in an article titled “How Tycho Brahe Died,” which is a very interesting read.
You might have noticed that when you install Mozilla it doesn’t come with a Java plug-in preinstalled. If you go to a web site with Java, a box will appear with a plug-in symbol. If you click on the box you’ll be redirected to netscape.com where you can download the Java Runtime Environment. I advise that you don’t install from the Netscape site but instead directly from Sun.
Sun’s Java site has an up to date index of Java 2 Standard Edition binaries. Click on the latest version of J2SE and then the JRE for your corresponding operating system. Just run the installer and presto! Java will be enabled in Mozilla.
I found that if you install from Netscape, the Java Runtime Environment will load slower in Windows XP. The latest distribution on Sun’s site, currently 1.4.1_02, loads about fifty percent faster.
I’ve been hesitant toward upgrading to Windows Media Player 9 because you can’t remove it from Windows XP. However, I was at the Science Learning Center on Friday and the computer lab there has already upgraded. I tried it out there and decided that the upgrade was worthwhile.
Windows Media Player 9 is a huge improvement over version 8. It’s faster, more streamlined and offers better content management. Microsoft has added copy protection into the new product because of pressure from the RIAA but I think it’s a good thing. With the introduction of copy protection, artists will still get their royalties and music can finally migrate toward digital distribution.
However, I have one problem with Media Player 9 and that is the continued lack of Lyrics3 v2 support. Lyrics3 is a tag specification you can use to label your MP3s. Lyrics3 is better than the current standard, id3v2 because it saves the information at the end of the file instead of the beginning. When you update the song information, it doesn’t have to rebuild the entire file. Consequently, when you update tags, you don’t spin your hard drive as much and you won’t wear it out as soon.
If only Microsoft added Lyrics3 v2 support then maybe I would move away from Winamp3. I’m a huge Winamp fan too but Media Player 9 definitely outshines the new release of Winamp.
Sean from Microsoft corrected me on his weblog Addicted to Digital Media that copy protection is essentially optional in Windows Media Player 9. You have to pick a copy protection scheme when ripping a file. Yes, that is correct but I am more concerned with its eventual integration with hardware DRM, which Microsoft plans to incorporate into Longhorn, set to be released in 2005. This will allow restrictions on licensed digital media that you download, say from the Apple Music store. It will be able to set limits on whether or not you can burn the file, etc.
The remix of the World Wide Web Consortium is up and ready for public viewing. Here are my favorite entries:
Then again I don’t hate the current look of the W3C since it is very easy to navigate through the pages. We’ll see if the W3 decides to adopt one of the new designs.
Wired News reported this morning that twenty-two year old identical twins Michael and Alex Bronstein from Israel have developed a new 3D face scan system that can distinguish twins such as themselves. It is a computer system that uses algorithms to measure distances between sample points on the face.
The system works so well that their professor, Ron Kimmel of the Technion Institute in Haifa, gave them a perfect score on the project.
It is a possibility that this new system could be used in the war against terrorism. According to the twins, “The system could be employed at airports or border crossings where a 3-D security camera could scan passengers’ faces and compare them with a database of three-dimensional pictures of suspected criminals or terrorists.”
However, it was also reported that cosmetic surgery could trick the system but it would have to be a very good job.
I’ve been a loyal customer of Dell for six years. Dell has always made quality computers but now they are getting so saturated by order requests that their tech support has gone downhill as well as their products. I’ve had a couple of problems with my Dimension 8100, particularly fan noise from the back of the computer and the case is so faulty that there are hooks that won’t catch correctly when you put the case back together.
I’ve been looking around at laptops just to see what’s available and I have to say that for the Windows platform, Gateway outshines Dell. The Gateway 450 Series is an excellent laptop that costs $1300. Gateway is also shipping a new Tablet PC but it’s only 1.0GHz. Why would I bother buying that when I already have a 1.7GHz Dell? I’ve looked at some of the Dell laptops and the designs are just ugly. Gateway’s products are much cleaner and simply nicer looking.
Then of course there is Apple. I definitely love the new PowerBook. The design is excellent and the metallic covering on the laptop is perfect for travelling or when you accidentially bang it around. The UCLA store has the new PowerBooks on display and I love them. If only I could afford the high price and the 21″ cinema display LCD monitor to go along with it.
Until then, I’ll continue saving up by using my Dimension 8100.
I noticed in my logs that a number of people were linking directly to images on my site, thus draining my allotted bandwidth dry. This has happened before with Steinbaugh Digital Media so I decided to modify my .htaccess file. Thanks to the guide from thesitewizard.com entitled “Preventing Image Bandwidth Theft With .htaccess,” Webspiffy won’t go offline due to bandwidth consumption anytime soon. That is unless I get slashdotted. Not like that is going to happen.
The modifications prevent other webmasters from using images on my web server in their HTML code. You can still download pictures off of webspiffy just fine but you can no longer link to them on the Internet to insert them inside your pages. If you’ve noticed this happening to your web site before, this is how you can fight back.