Journal: News & Comment

Last day of June

Here's how the day went:

1. My oldest daughter stepped on a small terra cotta pot by accident last night. Shortly after midnight this morning, we returned home from the emergency ward, and she had eight stitches in the bottom of her right foot. No swimming for at least a week, and she needs crutches to walk. (Yesterday was the last day of school.)
   
   
2. B.C.'s Queen of Oak Bay ferry lost power and plowed through a small-craft marina at Horseshoe Bay, crushing 15 to 20 small boats and causing chaos in Vancouver's traffic all day, just as the Canada Day long weekend (one of the busiest for the ferry service) got going. I wasn't anywhere near the crash, but it was all over the news.
   
   
3. Vancouver's straight-talking mayor, Larry Campbell, announced that he will not seek another term, and is leaving any kind of public office altogether. Indicting politics in the city, and more generally, he essentially said that political life isn't cut out for a pragmatic, extremely popular, and all-around good guy like him. I work in Vancouver, but I don't live there, but I admire Larry. Too bad he's leaving.
   
   
4. At work, we had a mysterious and persistent computer problem that stressed everyone out for most of the day. On top of that, in the process of running around to try to fix it, one of the staff accidentally tripped a burglar alarm in the office, jarring us further.
   
   
5. Because of the late-night hospital visit, I took the car to work today instead of biking or taking transit. And the traffic on the way home sucked.

But to make up for it all, my family and co-workers all wished me happy 36th birthday, and my wonderful, lovely wife got me gift certificate for a spa treatment this weekend. At home, we had some Me-n-Ed's pizza and nice cabernet sauvignon wine for dinner. My daughter is feeling okay, and is learning to hobble along—her younger sister has been a great help too. No one was hurt in the ferry accident, and the computer problem is on its way to being fixed. Traffic has calmed down. So after everything, I feel good tonight.

Maybe it's the wine. But you know, it's damned good wine. Have a happy Canada Day.

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First podcast update

That didn't take long, did it? My first Podcast update is another song, this time with vocals. They are a remix of some samples from The Chris Pirillo Show. Why? Because he and Ponzi did such a good job with gnomedex last week, and because the show was funny. So go check out "Pirilloponzi."

If you're subscribed to the Penmachine Podcast, you probably have the song already even if you didn't know it.

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Getting Apple to accept your podcast into its directory

Anders in Norway found a fix for when Apple's iTunes Podcast directory won't accept your podcast feed:

I had this problem as well, even when using the Apple supplied example from their PDF. The fix was to remove the categories outside the item tag. (ie: categories only inside an item) I wasted a day on that one right there.

In other words, if you use Apple's new <itunes:category text="Music" /> element inside your podcast feed (no matter what's inside the quotes), make sure it only applies to individual <item> elements, not to the overall <channel>—even though Apple indicates otherwise in their podcast specifications (PDF).

In other words, when iTunes says, "We are currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later," it really means, "You followed our instructions, but they were wrong and we won't tell you how to fix them." Whoops.

Still, it's good that it works in the end, and I hope Apple makes the effort to go beyond just the big media podcasts over time.

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Let's rock with the Penmachine Podcast

To put my money where my mouth is, following the new version of iTunes from this morning, there is now the Penmachine Podcast.

Right now it consists of my previously-published demo songs. However, now you can subscribe to them with a program like iTunes (version 4.9 or higher). Then, whenever I add a new track (and I have some ideas for the next few days), you'll get it automatically, and it can go straight to your iPod. Cool, eh?

How do you subscribe? The easiest way, once I've indexed it there, is to search for "penmachine" in the iTunes store's Podcast directory (see instructions). Otherwise, you can click and drag the orange and grey "RSS Podcast" button or the address http://www.penmachine.com/rss/podcastmp3.xml to your iTunes window (or other podcast subscription program). Get the latest version first.

If you don't know about podcasting, then read up or check out Technorati's Podcast search for more references.

Alas, I won't be in the iTunes Podcast Directory just yet:

UPDATE: See the fix for that problem.

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Well, that's pretty cool

As of today, you can publish your own radio show to iTunes for anyone to download and listen to on their iPods, or listen to thousands of shows from around the world. It looks like Apple won't publish them automatically, but will vet them somehow, and I'm not sure how that will work. But this is big news for the podcasting community.

Go ahead and subscribe to CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks or Todd Maffin, why don't you?

Here are some podcasts from Gnomedex at the Gnomedex wiki.

Or go make your own show! Here's some music to listen to while you're at it.

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How far did the tsunami go inland?

Six months later, I find a lot of people coming here trying to figure out how far the tsunami of last December 24 went inland. Here's one:

Derek, I apologize for asking this question but I find there are over 9 million entries on the Asian disaster. I have a friend who does not have a computer and she asked me how far the tsunami went inland. I cannot find the information. She has relatives there and they were not harmed so I'm not sure why she wanted to know. I "thought" I saw on the news when this first happened that it went 1 mile inland. Do you know if that is the approximate? Thanks for your help.

Following up on my earlier consolidated article about the Indian Ocean tsunami, here's my answer:

There were several places where the tsunami went a lot further than a mile inland, and many, many where it did not. But it's not a simple relationship of how close those places were to the earthquake that caused the tsunami.

How far inland the tsunami went (or any tsunami would go) varies widely depending on:

• How close the land location you're talking about was to the quake (it would be different for Sumatra than Somalia) and in what direction (Sri Lanka was in the east-west path, Bangladesh wasn't).
  
  
• What sorts of intermediate objects (islands, channels) lie between it and the quake (Thailand and the west coast of Sri Lanka and India were hit even though they weren't in the direct path, because the waves diffracted around channels and headlands; much of Malaysia and the rest of Indonesia was protected by intermediate islands, and outside the Indian Ocean there was little effect because of intervening land masses).
  
  
• The shape of the seafloor near land (shallower and steeper slopes lead to very different kinds of tsunami waves once they hit shore). Watch the simulation at the Seed tsunami page to see what I mean.
  
  
• The shape, slope, and composition of the land itself where the tsunami hit (a cliff would be very different than a gentle shore slope) and how far that shape, slope, and composition reach inland (a steep slope that ends in a wall wouldn't let the tsunami get far; a shallow slope that extends a long way would).
  
  
• What kinds of buildings, plants, and other material were on the seashore (dense forest or habitation can slow or redirect or channel the tsunami's waves).

So, in some places (like where my friend Mark was in Malaysia), there were just higher than normal surf waves (and he was able to walk out of chest-high water), while only a few hundred metres away people were swept out to sea by massive surges. Similarly, in places with shallow, gradual slopes both under and above the sea, close to the quake, the tsunami traveled several miles inland, as in Banda Aceh in Sumatra and in some places in Sri Lanka.

In other places nearby, it may have gone hardly anywhere because of steep cliffs, or because it was a long way and perhaps also in an off-axis direction (Somalia, Bangladesh). The local topography (above and below the sea) determines almost everything.

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Fixing Blogger's clear:both weirdness

UPDATE: Here's Blogger's fix, which works fine for me—there is now a setting to get rid of the extra code, which is okay, but not the best for usability for site publishers. But it will do.

My sidebar is back. Blogger changed the way they did a few things, which inserted a chunk of useless web page code into my site—and that put a huge blank space between the first journal entry title on this page and the entry itself, but I think it's fixed now.

I still wish Blogger hadn't broken it, and I'm hoping nothing elsewhere in my site has been harmed by my fix, which is this one (I had to do it in two places—my stylesheet and my Blogger template file—to make sure it stuck):

I was able to fix the "clear:both" Blogger glitch with the following addition to my stylesheet:

div { clear: none !important; }

Adding "!important" will override the "clear:both" that Blogger is inserting in our posts.

If you do spot something that is out of whack, please post a comment. Blogger has at least acknowledged the problem, so I'm hoping they can back it out and get things back to normal.

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Cheap Frankenstein drums

Jeremy, with whom I sat on a panel in February, is buying some new drums.

In my 16 years of playing drums professionally, I've only owned two kits, both cheap Pearl Export and CB Percussion setups from the early '90s. (I rotate which ones I use onstage and which ones remain set up in the basement.) I used a band-mate's classic Ludwigs for awhile, but preferred my cheapies. My snare drum and cymbals are the only things I spent a lot of money on. (Note: low-end modern stands and other metal hardware are superior to the stuff that used to come with even expensive drums in the '60s and '70s.)

In part, I think it's because with cheaper drums I don't worry much about them. I replace hardware and stuff as it breaks over time, so the kits become more Frankenstein by the year. Maybe one day I'll spring for something higher end, as Jeremy is. Ayotte and Taye (where Ayotte's founder now works), both HQed here in Vancouver, are on top of my list.

I recommend Sabian cymbals. Not only are they good, they're Canadian, made in New Brunswick.

Interestingly, Jeremy's Gretsch drum brand is owned by Kaman (like my CBs), while Gretsch guitars come from Fender. They began as part of the same company decades ago, but now only the brand remains in common—a sign of the times.

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The nominator

I think, although I am not certain because of a fuzzy memory, that I nominated John Gruber's "The Location Field Is the New Command Line" for inclusion in Joel Spolsky's anthology book on great writing about software—in addition to Rick Schaut's essay about Mac Word 6.

So while I may not be all that good at writing about software, I'm on a roll nominating it, with up to 7% of the essays in Joel's book originating from my recommendations.

Or maybe it was someone else.

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That is one serious mocha

Can't say how it tastes, but this caffè mocha from Victrola Coffee in Seattle is the most impressive thing I've seen, including those from world-renowned Caffè Artigiano here in Vancouver.

Rowrr!

Still, because I do know how it tastes (stupendous), and because they now have a few locations around downtown and West Vancouver, I'll plug caffeartigiano.com anyway.

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All of Derek's Gnomedex photos

gnomedex at Flickr

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Post-Gnomedex thanks

I wanted to thank three other people for the experience at Gnomedex this weekend: Kris Krug, who took a ton of great photos—plus set up the aggregator—and (of course) Chris Pirillo and Ponzi for putting the event together.

But really, Chris and Ponzi, six-pump vanilla lattes? That's scary.

Scary.

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Last night in Seattle

Sorry my family and I had to bail out from the Gnomedex Seattle Fairmont get together this evening—the kids were getting hungry!

Thanks to Mike from Hacking Netflix, Angela from USA Today, Dylan from DABU, Thomas from Soot-n-Smoke, Jason, Sheila and Brent, and everyone else I met at the conference—and of course the people from Bryght, Darren, Julie, and Ted (plus their kids), whom I knew already.

I've posted 35 photos to Flickr so far, and there will be more tonight. So far, my favourite is this one, which wasn't even from the conference itself.

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Adam Curry's keynote notes

Years ago, Adam Curry was an MTV veejay, who registered the mtv.com domain before the network even understood what was going on with the Web. More recently, he helped co-invent podcasting, and he gave the closing keynote for Gnomedex. Here are the live notes... [READ MORE]

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Tomorrow's digital realities notes

How the law applies to blogs, RSS, websites, and the new digital environment is an ever-changing set of questions and answers. Denise Howell (lawyer), Buzz Bruggeman (lawyer), and Jason Calacanis (lawyer-baiter from Weblogs Inc.) had a big talk about it at Gnomedex. Here are the live notes... [READ MORE]

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Tomorrow's RSS and tomorrow's media notes

Before and after lunch today at Gnomedex today, Bob Wyman from PubSub, Mark Fletcher from Bloglines, and Scott Rafer from Feedster spoke about "Tomorrow's RSS," and JD Lasica, Terry Heaton, and Cory Bergman spoke on "Tomorrow's Media." Here are my notes:

• Tomorrow's RSS
• Tomorrow's Media

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Notes from Julie Leung's personal blogging talk

At Gnomedex this morning, Julie Leung (whose family shared dinner with my family and David Robertson last night at Ivar's) gave an adapted version of her talk from Northern Voice in Vancouver, about personal blogging. [READ MORE]

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Notes on MindManager

Hobie Swan from MindJet spoke about his company's MindManager mind-mapping software to open the day today. Here are some brief notes... [READ MORE]

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Notes from afternoon Gnomedex sessions

There were several sessions in the afternoon at the Gnomedex conference, and I made a few (incomplete) notes. [READ MORE]

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What does the Microsoft RSS announcement mean?

In effect, Microsoft has said that it is bringing online syndication feeds into Windows sometime next year. So what will happen?

Microsoft's ideas—subscriptions and syndication part of every part of the operating system or any application that wants to use it; let's make the way we've tweaked subscriptions open for anyone to use and modify—are good. But if that's going to work, it will start right now.

By the time Longhorn is actually released, it will bring to a wider audience something that will already be a fait accompli on the web through applications, Linux, the Mac OS, and so on. I think it will happen, but if it doesn't, I doubt subscriptions will be the revolution they're being purported to be at Gnomedex this morning. [READ MORE]

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Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch and Amar Gandhi's Gnomedex keynote on Internet Explorer 7

• Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch and Amar Gandhi’s Gnomedex keynote on IE 7.
• Chris Pirillo: This will be a keystone for how RSS and stuff are going forward.
• Amar is the Group Program Manager for IE.
• Dean: Honoured to be at Gnomedex because of everyone who’s here.
• Microsoft is about 10 or 12 miles away.
• You may not have seen Microsoft’s campus, so I brought some photos.
• (The Death Star.) It’s an artist’s rendering based on what some of you have written in your blogs.

Here are the live notes… [more]

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Notes from Dave Winer's Gnomedex keynote on OPML

• “The smarts are out there.” - the “unconference” idea
• Unconferences are kind of like blogs — you don’t need an editor. If you want to publish it, that’s good enough.
• The same thing is true about the Internet as a development environment.
• Let’s chop things up into tiny little pieces.
• It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
• The RSS wars were about a misperception that Dave was a platform vendor, not an individual.
• Things are now really shifting in a very visible way.
• Technology control is not the way of the future.
• Warning: I have opinions, and you’re allowed to disagree with them. I’d prefer that you don’t argue with me about my right to have it.

Here are the live updates… [more]

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It's not my fault that Blogger broke my website today

UPDATE to the UPDATE: Here's Blogger's fix, which works fine for me—there is now a setting to get rid of the extra code, which is okay, but not the best for usability for site publishers. But it will do.

UPDATE: I'm far from the only one, and have found some potential fixes. We'll see what happens.

As of my first post today (24 June 2004), but not on earlier posts that I have not updated, the first paragraph of any journal entry here that I add or edit (but not the headline) begins with an odd chunk of HTML code: <div style="clear:both;"></div>

That's not in my website template. It's not in the text of entries I write. It screws up the way my stylesheet behaves, so my blog is visually broken (you'll notice it if you visit on the Web instead of reading in RSS—just scroll waaaaay down to read things).

Where did it come from? How can I fix it? I wonder if Blogger can fix it, since I didn't put it there? Did they update something that added it recently, as in around sometime in the last 12 hours? Did they do it because I snuck out of the Blogger/Google-sponsored Gnomedex soirée for dinner with my family?

I've told them, "It's annoying! Make it stop! Thanks."

Examples:

• Home page
• An earlier post this morning
• My June archive

• Last month's archive
• Yesterday's post

Argh.

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Laptops, digicams, glasses, and seaside views

Attendees at Gnomedex are posting many photos at Flickr. You'll notice that many of us resemble the logo of conference organizer Chris Pirillo—my wife and daughters all thought it was a picture of me. [READ MORE]

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One big feed of news

Kris Krug's Gnomedex aggregator has an RSS feed. Navarik has a page explaining feeds for those who don't know about them. One thing I've learned about already are the strong rumours of a big announcement at the conference: a Gnomedex preview of Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7... [READ MORE]

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Bathrobe blogging

While the family sleeps here in a motel in Arlington, Washington on our way to Gnomedex, I have turned on the iSight camera I borrowed from Bill (he's on vacation).

It works surprisingly well in near–total darkness, with my face illuminated only by the flat panel of my iBook. You sure can see those smile creases on my nearly–36-year-old face now.

The iSight may be the most efficient way to capture off-the-cuff photos at the conference sessions, as I suspect I'm likely to do. Keep an eye here, at Windward, and at Flickr (where I note I'm not the only one blogging in a bathrobe this evening) to see how that goes.

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Rick Schaut's essay on Word 6

I'm glad to see that Microsoft's Mac Word guy Rick Schaut had his essay on Mac Word 6 published in Joel Spolsky's new book. Apparently it was thanks to my nomination, which is a surprise.

Maybe that will make up for all the nasty things I say about Word, even when I'm making money teaching people how to use it.

By the way, Rick, will you be at Gnomedex?

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Open formats: what does it take?

Even traditional technology companies are coming to see the value of open data communication and storage formats—a key element of Navarik's success, and a common thread in this week's big tech conference in Seattle. Yet problems remain.

Gnomedex is a bit of an anomaly. For one, the registration fee includes food. More generally, it's a conference with no clear purpose—and that seems intentional. Organizer Chris Pirillo's tongue-in-cheek taglines for it include calling it "the technology people aggregator," saying that it's attended by "influencers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts," and that it's about "producing, consuming, and monetizing technology." [READ MORE]

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Top 100 movie quotes

It's telling that many of the top 100 movie quotes of all time have so entered our consciousness that plenty of people don't even think of them as being from movies at all—especially if, like me, you know lots of the quotes despite never having seen the films:

• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
• "I coulda been a contender."
• "Go ahead, make my day."
• "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
• "I see dead people."

...and so on.

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Acres of bloggers

A few of us with families coming to Gnomedex are going to Ivar's Acres of Clams (on Pier 54, a few blocks south of the conference's Pier 66 on the waterfront) for dinner Friday around 6:00 pm, following the conference agenda but before the networking soirée. We'll be making reservations (thanks, Julie), since a mob of hungry geeks with hungry families won't want to wait around.

If you're coming—kids not required, of course!—please add yourself (with number attending) to the Gatherings wiki page (you'll need to set up a free account, then click the Edit button at the top) under the "Family Dinner" heading.

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They're tails

In honour of this week's trip to Seattle, here is a history of the Starbucks logo.

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Gnomedex blog aggregator

Vancouver's Kris Krug has created a web page that automatically compiles and aggregates current blog posts from people who will be attending the Gnomedex conference this week in Seattle... [READ MORE]

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Skunk truck

A couple of weeks ago, there was a distinct whiff of skunk in our neighbourhood. I assumed one had run into a raccoon or a dog and let loose with its scent. But the smell persisted over several days, which was more like Pepe le Pew than a real skunk.

Kerry K-Love figured it out this weekend. There was, it turned out, a dead, bloated skunk trapped just beneath one of the storm sewer grates in the alley next to our house. My wife called it in to the city's sewer maintenance department, and this was the reaction of Deirdre, who answered the phone:

"Yuck."

Today a large, orange City of Burnaby sewer-pump truck arrived. The operator spent some time talking on his radio, so I went out to chat with him.

"My supervisor told me there was a storm drain to unclog," he said. "But he didn't say what was clogging it, and he chuckled a bit when he told me to come clear it out. I was wondering why. Now I know.

"It looks like it's been decapitated, by the way."

A dead, bloated, decapitated skunk carcass trapped in our storm sewer. Greaaaaat.

It must have died or been killed uphill from here, then fallen in (or have been sleeping in) the storm sewer during one of our recent heavy rains, which washed it down to our block, where it became trapped under the grate.

Before the pump-truck operator proceeded, he called in the SPCA, who arrived and performed a quick inspection. Then he pulled up the sewer grate and used the large-bored suction hose to suck the dead skunk into the truck's (thankfully) sealed sewer tank. He drove off.

"Thanks!" I shouted after him.

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Wrong

Robert Scoble writes something you don't see very often from anyone: "In the face of overwhelming evidence, I admit I'm wrong."

It's unfortunate that, for nearly all of us, overwhelming evidence is what it usually takes. I hope that the next time I'm wrong I can be similarly forthright.

He also implies that his employer Microsoft will be one of those companies making a big gnomedex announcement this week.

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Profiling a conference and its founder

The Seattle Times has posted a profile of gnomedex conference organizer Chris Pirillo, which also provides a good summary of what the conference is about... [READ MORE]

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Navarik's man on the street at Gnomedex

Rumour has it that at least a couple of big technology announcements will happen at Gnomedex this week. In the meantime, attendees are posting to the conference wiki news page and its forums, reading the latest updates, figuring out what to do in Seattle, and arranging to meet for lunch.

I'll be cross-posting whatever I write about all that gnomedexness here and at the Windward weblog over at Navarik's site, since I work for them and they're sending me down. You can find the rest of this entry over there already... [READ MORE]

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Links of interest (2005-06-18):

• "As I can personally attest, there's a good reason that fewer young Americans are pursuing careers in the sciences: the jobs suck."
  
  
• Queen Elizabeth has an iPod.
  
  
• "Smart and creative people are inevitably complicated, and the more successful they are, the less pressure there is on them to resolve those complications."
  
  
• VanEats is five.
  
  
• "The best recruiting department in the world can't make people want to work at a company that's moribund."
  
  
• "No one was particularly happy when I told them I found a vintage wedding dress for $40. In fact, they made it seem like spending so little on a dress was somehow cheating myself, as if spending cash consummated an essential female ritual. I, however, was elated with my score. I had never particularly dreamed of zeros flying out my bank account as if they were bubbles."
  
  
• Win yourself a free nice Mac keyboard. (Disclaimer: if you use that link and win, I win one too.) Enter by tomorrow, Father's Day.
  
  
• "What College Bakery is saying with that sign is 'The risk of being sued is so high that we'll give up on helping paying customers create their own cakes.' This is Trusted Computing for frosting."
  
  

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Maybe I should print it out

I hope this link to the Teenager's Guide to the Real World is still available in five years, when I gain my first teenage daughter. I sure could have used knowing some of this stuff in 1982.

The first chapter puts it this way:

• If you don't pay the rent, you are homeless
• You must have a job to pay the rent
• Working 60 hours a week in a dead-end, minimum wage job to live in a crappy apartment with no a/c really stinks
• Even if you don't care one bit about adults and jobs and school right now, you will once you have to pay the rent

Incidentally, this bit (and the whole love, sex, and marriage section) is rather too moralizing and also, on occasion, untrue by my moral compass. It also, as far as I can tell, completely ignores anyone who's gay. But the introductory portions of the book are extremely good, and even the love, sex, and marriage part has some good points, so on balance it's still worth reading.