MaisonBisson.com

# · (0)

Video Game Controller Family Tree

July 8, 2008 – 2:25 pm

Sock Master did some outstanding work tracing the lineage of video game controllers from 1977 to now without missing any of the weirdness in between.

Search Trends vs Community Standards

July 7, 2008 – 12:36 pm

Via MotherJones: Pensacola residents Clinton Raymond McCowen and Kevin Patrick Stevens, producers of a very NSFW website last week faced a judge in an obscenity and racketeering trial for their work. The interesting thing? The defense planned to use Google search trends to demonstrate community standards.

“Time and time again you’ll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private,” said the defense. Using the Internet data, “we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes, which, parenthetically, is where this material was intended to be viewed.”

My own Google Ttrends search shows three Florida cities in the top ten nationwide for searches for “sex,” and Pensacola ranks sixth in the state. Even the website’s narrow niche terms (facials, orgies, and gangbanging) rank highly compared to the Florida community favorite NASCAR. I’ll be interested in learning the jurors’ reactions to this.

By Casey | Tagged with: community standards, Google Trends, obscenity, porn, search history, search logs, trial| Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | 74 hits, about 37 daily | Comments (0) |

Censorship, Unpublishing, and New Media

July 6, 2008 – 12:34 am

The actual reasons may never be discovered, but Boing Boing, the perennially top ten ranked blog, has “unpublished (NSFW)” stories by, about, or mentioning author and sex columnist Violet Blue (NSFW).

Much has already been said about the Orwellianism of “unpublishing” and how it conflicts with the ethics of the web, as well as the incongruence between these actions and Boing Boing’s position on web censorship, media manipulation, and revisionism. And on July 1 Boing Boing itself joined the discussion. Thad didn’t go so well.

One theory suggests that Blue’s April 2007 column slamming Amanda Congdon may have touched this off. Another theory suggests that Boing Boing was pressured by (or simply wanted to please) closely embedded Federated Media. And if you think you know how this will play out, then play the news game (above), where they suggest this all started with a lovers’ spat.

My interest in this, however, is in how new media like Boing Boing are struggling with growth from small personal sites to multi-million dollar businesses ($one million in 2006). The question now is if the site will survive the transition without alienating the community that makes such sites successful in the first place.

New Theme

July 4, 2008 – 11:57 pm

For the past year or so I’ve been wanting to design a non-bloggy theme for this site — a beautiful theme with a magazine-like front page showing the most recent post in a handful of categories. But I’m further from it now than last year, so it’s time to move on.

Which isn’t to say that I settled for my new theme. It’s based on Neo-Sapien by Small Potato. I made it a bit wider, the header a bit shorter, and the image is random-ish (random, but cached). I’m still not done tweaking it, but I’m really pleased with where it’s going. Most importantly (this one’s for you, JTPratt), you can now find easy links for things like bSuite and my other projects. And I’m also following Nielsen’s advice with the about and contact pages (though I have slightly hidden the about Casey page).

In my haste to actually finally do this, I decided to do it live. WP Super Cache, without which my blog falls over, made confirming changes a chore, but that forced me to work a bit more methodically. The fastest and easiest way to clear the cache after making a change is to either edit a post or select a new theme (and then change it back again). So if you looked at the site today, you may have found it switching back and forth between the old and new themes for most of the afternoon. And if I’d realized I’d just been linked by Lifehacker (for Sandee’s independence day daiquiri post), I might have done it differently.

# · (0)

WordPress Survey Tools

July 3, 2008 – 1:27 pm

Lorelle and Samir both point to a number of plugins to do surveys within WordPress, but neither of them say any of them are that good. And Samir is pretty disapointed: “at the end of it all, I never did find my ideal online survey tool.”

Survey Fly is the best recommendation from both of Lorelle and Samir, but it isn’t WP2.5 compatible and was las updated in summer 2006. It’s also limited to tracking only one survey at a time. Ugh.

Optimizing Inserts/Updates On MySQL Tables

July 1, 2008 – 1:32 pm

When doing a bulk insert/update/change to a MySQL table you can temporarily disable index updates like this:

ALTER TABLE $tbl_name DISABLE KEYS

…do stuff…

ALTER TABLE $tbl_name ENABLE KEYS

From the docs:

ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS tells MySQL to stop updating non-unique indexes. ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE KEYS then should be used to re-create missing indexes. MySQL does this with a special algorithm that is much faster than inserting keys one by one, so disabling keys before performing bulk insert operations should give a considerable speedup. Using ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS requires the INDEX privilege in addition to the privileges mentioned earlier.
While the non-unique indexes are disabled, they are ignored for statements such as SELECT and EXPLAIN that otherwise would use them.

Truemors Powered By WordPress

June 30, 2008 – 6:57 pm

In the “They Did This With WordPress” category (though from about a year ago, sorry) comes Truemors, a Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit clone from Guy Kawasaki.

Calling it a clone might be a backhanded non-compliment, but the truth is that it does a credible job in this increasingly crowded space*. And it’s built on WordPress.

The relevant plugins are WP-PostRatings and Share This. Electric Pulp did the design, and the whole thing apparently went live quickly on a tiny budget.

Anyway, add this to the growing list of sites using WordPress in some rather interesting ways.

* My real feeling is that all these sites could probably learn something from MetaFilter, where the inward facing parts are as important or more than the outward facing bits. Have you ever heard of a del.icio.us meetup? MetaFilter has them regularly.

Kitty Porn

June 29, 2008 – 7:51 pm

Newton isn’t really a kitten, but he is cute. Anyway, I got a new video camera and all I’ve done with it so far is shoot closeups of a cat. Is that why I got it? At least it’s not as bad as this.

Music is Jungle Struttin’, by The Lions.

1975 Programming vs. Today’s Computer Architecture

June 26, 2008 – 12:18 pm

Poul-Henning Kamp, the guy behind the Varnish reverse proxy, talks about 1975 programming:

It used to be that you had the primary store, and it was anything from acoustic delaylines filled with mercury via small magnetic dougnuts via transistor flip-flops to dynamic RAM.

And then there were the secondary store, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk drives the size of houses, then the size of washing machines and these days so small that girls get disappointed if think they got hold of something else than the MP3 player you had in your pocket.

And people program this way.

They have variables in “memory” and move data to and from “disk”. [...]

Well, today computers really only have one kind of storage, and it is usually some sort of disk, the operating system and the virtual memory management hardware has converted the RAM to a cache for the disk storage.[...]

Virtual memory was meant to make it easier to program when data was larger than the physical memory, but people have still not caught on.

MySQL Bug?

June 24, 2008 – 2:13 pm

After an upgrade to MySQL 5.0.51b on RHEL 5 I started seeing curious results in a fairly common query. Here’s a simplified version:

SELECT ID, post_date_gmt 
FROM wp_posts
GROUP BY ID
ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC 
LIMIT 5

What I expected was to get a handful of post ID numbers sorted in descending order by the post_date_gmt. Instead, I got a list of post IDs sorted in ascending order by the ID number. Something like this:

3	2007-05-21 00:00:00
4	2007-05-21 00:00:00
5	2007-05-21 00:00:00
6	2007-05-21 00:00:00
7	2007-05-21 00:00:00

After some fiddling I discovered that the GROUP BY clause was causing a problem. So this query works:

SELECT ID, post_date_gmt 
FROM wp_posts
ORDER BY post_date_gmt DESC 
LIMIT 5

…and outputs the results I expected:

337832	2008-06-20 15:20:03
335991	2008-06-17 13:00:42
337777	2008-06-02 12:15:46
337390	2008-05-28 00:00:00
337831	2008-05-28 00:00:00

The GROUP BY clause may be unnecessary, though it was originally written in to accommodate conditions where a JOIN (which is often added when the query is dynamically generated) causes MySQL to return multiple rows representing the same record ID.

Still, isn’t this behavior weird? It’s certainly different from previous versions.

Huh. I wonder what he thinks about the iPhone 3g?

June 20, 2008 – 11:27 am

David Lynch doesn’t like the iPhone. At all. At least not for watching movies. Maybe the guy doesn’t take the subway much.

Abandoned Malls

June 19, 2008 – 4:01 pm

What is it about abandonment that’s so compelling? From Chernobyl and Pripyat to mental hospitals to lost theme parks from Korea to California, we can’t help but stare at darkly vacant buildings.

Now add malls to the list. And put South China Mall, in Dongguan at the top of it. Unlike most every other expanse of empty hallways we can name, this one’ been empty since it opened in 2005. And, even more amusing, it’s actually still operating. Sort of.

The place was designed to house about 1500 shops, but only a few dozen storefronts are leased. Dismembered mannequins and an operating amusement park add to the Twilight Zone effect. Shoppers are rare. Some people show up for the amusements, but rarely venture inside “because there’s a weird smell.”

What sets the South China Mall apart from the rest, besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure.

Looking for more? There are lots of dead malls in the US.

# · (2)

.SHP to MySQL

June 17, 2008 – 6:21 pm

GIS data seems to come in .shp (shape?) files, but it’s not like MySQL knows what to do with those. this MySQL forum post points to a PHP tool and Windows executable that promise to convert the .shp data into something more useful to MySQL.

Superfluo explains a little more, and there’s lots of .shp data to be had here.

Dear Steve

June 17, 2008 – 11:05 am

I’m really glad to see the news about the iPhone 3g. I’m interested in how the new mobile me service takes a small step toward cloud-based storage services that I’ve wanted for a while. And the news that Max OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” will focus on speed and stability, rather than features is good, especially considering the following.

You see, I’m a fan of Apple products. Not because I like the brand, but because the products work for me. I do enjoy that the Apple style is rather compatible with mine, and I have to admit that Apple products have influenced my work and choices, but now I’m realizing that I really do enjoy the products simply because they help me do the things I want to do faster and better…until they don’t.

I used to love iPhoto. Even more than taking pictures, I enjoy sharing them. iPhoto did that, and the editing tools made quick work of preparing my photos for sharing. I find iPhoto’s adjustment tools faster and easier to use than Photoshop’s (I started using Photoshop at version 2.0, so I’m more than comfortable with it), and the organization tools — the digital shoebox — have given me been a fair place to keep the large number of photos I’ve taken over the years. And that’s the problem.

I now have over 20,000 photos in my iPhoto library, and the performance of the application has dropped significantly. Further, my whole computing experience falls down when it’s open, even though I’m running a not-too-slouchy 2.16 GHZ Mac Book Pro with 2GB of RAM. It’s gotten to the point that I cringe when I plug in my iPhone after taking a few pictures and it opens to download them. And yesterday I finally worked up the courage to download the 300 photos that had been collecting on my DSLR.

In short, I realize now that iPhoto’s non-performance has taken the fun out of photography.

People suggest that I could archive my old photos to DVD or create separate libraries, but that misses the fact that a huge part of iPhoto’s value to me is in having easy access to all my photos without having to remember what disk they’re on. The storage issue was what had me propose Space Ship, as the 53 GB of photos hardly have to remain on my local hard drive, and it’s keeping me from switching to a MacBook Air, but the performance issue may drive me from iPhoto, and possibly the Mac platform all together.

You see, without easy access to my media, I lose much of the value that the iLife suite brings to me. Why use iMovie if the media browser can’t find the source photos and videos that are no longer in iPhoto? Keynote’s integration of the iLife media browser was great, but again, if my source material isn’t there, why use it? If I have to go through the effort of manually managing my now far-flung media, why use a Mac at all?

Please Steve, I’ve loved Apple products all these years because they did what computers where supposed to do: they made my life easier, more fun, and more productive (even if “productive” means getting an great photo of a family vacation). But you’ve not mentioned the Mac being the center of my digital life in some time, and it’s clear from Apple’s recent product announcements that the company is focusing elsewhere. Please remember that I enjoy creating media as much as consuming it, and I need products and services that support that creativity.

We knew iLife 08 was a bit ho-hum when you announced it in January, but now it’s looking pretty tired.

Could BuddyPress Go The Distance?

June 16, 2008 – 3:14 pm

Facebook and MySpace are trying to turn themselves into application platforms (how else will they monetize their audience?). Google is pushing OpenSocial to compete with it. But no matter what features they offer their users, they user still orbits the site.

Scot Hacker talks of BuddyPress changing the game, turning “social networks” from destination websites, to features you’ll find on every website. And the “social network” is the internet, with all those sites sharing information meaningfully.

Some might say this is little more than overgrown XFN, but Tris Hussey thinks Ning is on the ropes and Facebook should be worried.

At least the design shows all the right stuff.

Video Game Controller Family Tree

Search Trends vs Community Standards

Censorship, Unpublishing, and New Media

New Theme

WordPress Survey Tools

Optimizing Inserts/Updates On MySQL Tables

Truemors Powered By WordPress

Kitty Porn

1975 Programming vs. Today’s Computer Architecture

MySQL Bug?

Huh. I wonder what he thinks about the iPhone 3g?

Abandoned Malls

.SHP to MySQL

Dear Steve

Could BuddyPress Go The Distance?

Search

Bookmark & Feeds

Today's Popular

Recently Commented

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Elsewhere...

Subscribe (RSS)

Meta

Popular Searches

Photos

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Related:

Search

Bookmark & Feeds

Today's Popular

Recently Commented

The Requisite Tag Cloud

Categories

Recent Posts

Archives

Elsewhere...

Subscribe (RSS)

Meta

Popular Searches

Photos