University of Michigan Cellular and Molecular Biology graduate student.

July 2007.2

Netflix to lower cost of most popular plan [∞]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Online DVD rental pioneer Netflix Inc. is lowering the price of its two most popular subscription plans by a $1 per month, relinquishing millions of dollars in revenue in an attempt to regain the upper hand in a cutthroat battle with rival Blockbuster Inc.

With the reductions announced Sunday, Netflix will charge $16.99 per month for a plan that allows subscribers to keep up to three DVDs at a time with no limit on how frequently the discs can be mailed back in return for another movie. The price for a similar plan that lets customers keep one DVD at a time will fall to $8.99 per month.

I recently downgraded to the 2 movie at a time plan since Netflix selectively dropped its price. With this new move, I decided to switch back to the default, now at $16.99.

Facebook is the new home page of choice [∞]

Facebook is becoming the home page for many of us. Why? Because our friends are a lot more interesting than anything over on Yahoo News or TechMeme or other places.

Agreed. And I think Facebook is a better home page than MySpace because of the news feed, which lets you check your friends’ activity quickly at a glance. That said, it would be great to see Facebook move away from session cookies so that you stay logged in when you relaunch your browser.

Dateline is catching a new kind of predator [∞]

Michael Lubrano: You’re Chris Hansen?

Chris Hansen: I am.

One who actually appears happy to meet me…

Jeremy Keister: It’s nice to meet you.

Chris Hansen: Thank you. (laughter)

Tonight on Dateline: To Catch a Predator, Jeremy Keister, a regular viewer of the show was captured by the Perverted Justice sting operation. He identified Chris Hansen the minute he stepped into the room to conduct his interview. The man started laughing and joked with Chris throughout the segment. His demeanor made me wonder if he knew he was going to get caught when he arrived at the house and if he did so just to get on television. If this is the case, it could be the start of a disturbing new trend — non-pedophiles pretending to be pedophiles simply to get their fifteen minutes of fame on television.

A similar phenomenon developed with American Idol — people with no singing ability auditioned and intentionally flubbed their performances because they knew viewers were out there eager to see footage of the new William Hung. However, the emerging Datelirne scenario is radically different from American Idol because its attention whores receive a felony criminal charge as a result of their actions. It makes me wonder if the Dateline editors considered not airing the young man’s case to prevent future recurrences or if they did air it as a warning to those considering such a stunt.

Digg in between a rock and a hard place [∞]

Michi has some great insight on the troubles Digg will face as it continues to rise in popularity:

Digg no longer serves a niche. When I first found Digg a year ago, it was amazing: you could always find new hidden treasures of the Internet on the front page. But nowadays, it has swerved dramatically “mainstream”, constantly covering the same anti-Iraq or pro-iPhone stories or spammed with links to funny pictures.

[...]

What does Digg cover well? If you answer with “everything,” you just fell into the trap that Kevin Rose did. It covers nothing well. It doesn’t cover celebrity news as closely as tabloids. It doesn’t cover business development as closely any industry publication. It doesn’t cover Apple news as closely as Apple rumor blogs. It doesn’t cover politics as closely as the thousands of newspapers across the country.

The point is, Digg has scaling problems in the social sense. If it grows, it only covers more topics in less depth since front page space is always limited. As more users join, the collective opinion continues to “average out,” allowing more quality to slip through the cracks, especially on niche topics.

I agree that Digg was a great web site about a year ago, but is now becoming polluted with spam and inaccurate, sensationalist stories. Another major issue is that many sites go offline shortly after they reach the front page. Duggmirror is often unable to save a cached copy of the story, rendering the front page headline worthless to the reader.

The leaked Harry Potter photos are traceable [∞]

The photos contain EXIF metadata from a Canon digital camera with the serial number 560151117. This will be great evidence in court if the camera is recovered. Perhaps the perpetrator was stupid enough to register the camera with Canon before committing the crime.

Disable Facebook applications

Facebook recently launched their application API interface, and many of my friends have added apps to their profiles. It’s a great idea in theory but the majority of applications currently available on the site are useless and unsightly. I haven’t found a single useful application except for the official ones provided by the Facebook development team. So, I decided that I’m going to block third party applications and all the other goofy stuff on the site. I managed to accomplish this with a custom userContent.css file:

/* facebook application clean up
----------------------------------------------- */
a:link[href*="apps.facebook.com"],
a:link[href*="slide.com"],
a:link[href*="poke.php?id="],
#box_2386512837,
div.ad_capsule,
div.app_install_story,
div.extra_media,
div.platform,
div[id*="box_app_"] {
    display: none !important;
}

July 28, 2008

The upcoming redesign moves application cruft to a separate page, so the blocking code posted above is no longer really necessary. However, Facebook now uses social ads all over the site, which can be easily blocked with this code:

/* facebook ad clean up
----------------------------------------------- */
div.adcolumn, div.social_ad, div.sponsor {
    display: none !important;
}
Dismissal follows criticism over handling of student’s death [∞]

The Ann Arbor News ran this report on Monday:

Eastern Michigan University President John Fallon confirmed Sunday evening that he was fired by the Board of Regents in a unanimous vote, ending weeks of speculation across the embattled campus.

Although Fallon said the termination letter – delivered by courier Sunday night to the president’s house – did not state a reason, his dismissal was surely triggered by a national scandal into the university’s handling of information following a student’s death on campus.

The Los Angeles Times is currently reporting the dismissals on the front page of its web site.

Pagans have a cow over Homer [∞]

PAGANS have pledged to perform “rain magic” to wash away cartoon character Homer Simpson who was painted next to their famous fertility symbol – the Cerne Abbas giant.

The 17th century chalk outline of the naked, sexually aroused, club-wielding giant is believed by many to be a symbol of ancient spirituality.

Many couples also believe the 180ft giant, which is carved in the hillside above Cerne Abbas, Dorset, is an aid to fertility.

A giant 180ft Homer Simpson brandishing a doughnut was painted next to the well-endowed figure today in a publicity stunt to promote The Simpsons Movie released later this month.

Beckham LA Galaxy debut in doubt [∞]

David Beckham’s debut for Los Angeles Galaxy against Chelsea on Saturday is in doubt after he played a limited part in his first training session.

Galaxy head coach Frank Yallop said the situation was being monitored, but added: “Right now, he’s day to day.

“He’s not done too much the last two days. His ankle is quite swollen but we hope it recovers quickly and he can have some part in Saturday’s game.”

Harry Potter publisher gets subpoena to identify pirate [∞]

Scholastic Corp., publisher of the new “Harry Potter” book, obtained a subpoena to learn the identity of a user who allegedly posted copies of the final sequel, scheduled for release Saturday, on a California website.

Scholastic said in a court filing Monday that “materials hosted on Photobucket.com’s system” contain materials that infringe copyrights owned by Scholastic and J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. Photobucket.com, a News Corp. unit, is a website for sharing photos and videos on social networks such as MySpace.

I might have to disconnect from the Internet until Saturday to avoid seeing the spoiler of book seven’s ending.

ConnectU may rain on Facebook’s IPO parade [∞]

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, accuse Zuckerberg of stealing the source code, design, and business plan for Facebook in 2003 when he worked in the Harvard dorms as a programmer for their own tertiary education focused social-networking site HarvardConnect.com, now known as ConnectU.

UCLA was one of the first schools on the Facebook network, and I remember being a member of the service when this charge was brought against Zuckerberg. He may have stolen (some of) the original site code from ConnectU, and if that is the case, they should be rewarded for the intellectual privacy breach. However, they should not receive tens of millions of dollars from the suit; Facebook’s recently popularity is due to major design changes to the backend and the site interface, which was independently developed by Zuckerberg and crew.

Changes made on July 16, 2007

Pitchfork’s overlooked records of 2007 [∞]

An interesting list — I didn’t have any of this records when I came across this article.

The Beckhams visit Toys ‘R’ Us [∞]

Look at all the Papparazzi!

Apple Store coming to Ann Arbor

I stopped by the U of M Student Union yesterday to pick up a copy of Vista Ultimate. I asked one of the employees if they were planning on stocking the new Mac Pros over the summer, and he said they weren’t, but the new Apple Store that’s going in at the Briarwood Mall will!

Fox Soccer Shop has the new Beckham LA Galaxy jersey on sale [∞]

It’s priced at $80. I just wish Herbalife wasn’t their sponsor.

Radiohead 10th anniversary tribute album on Stereogum [∞]

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer we’ve asked some of our favorite musicians to participate in a song-by-song covers compilation. Indicative of the album’s continued importance, each invitee jumped at the chance; the results are personal, intense, tellingly various. Slow down, dig in, enjoy. But note: we did this all legal and everything, so we can’t keep these up forever…get ‘em before someone else does. Ambition makes you look pretty.

TB patient on the run in Arkansas [∞]

No, it’s not that crazy lawyer.

Kill thousands of ads with one line of code

Open up a text editor and save this line of code to a file named userContent.css:

iframe { display: none !important; }

Follow the instructions on Floppy Mouse for activating the userContent.css file in your browser. This trick works with Mozilla browsers and Apple Safari. I disable the remaining unaffected ad servers on a domain name basis with Saft.

Fanboy’s adblock list [∞]

The best one I’ve come across that works with Saft on Safari. It also synchronizes with the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. When adding the list to Safari, make sure to strip out the whitelist section from the .txt file.