June 2010 Archives

I have a Kodak Zi8 recorder that I am planning to use to upload videos to YouTube with. It produces fantastic quality videos, but more important, it has a stereo microphone jack, so that I can use it to record live music or interviews with a high degree of audio quality.

Tim Conneally, over at Betanews, has put together a great guide to putting together a kit that will fit into a 15 inch notebook sleeve.

Based upon its recommendations, I have already purchased a Dynex Video Bracket.

Next steps are two by a microphone and lastly, a lamp. I'm looking for recommendations if you have them.

Mat Schaffer has offered, based upon personal experience, the SP-BMC-1 from Sound Professionals.

My price limit is up to the Rode VideoMic being used by Tim Conneally.

Fran Guidry recommends the SP-SPSM-15 from Sound Professionals and the (discontinued) AT825 from Broadcast Production & Microphones.

G4 and Kevin Pereira: "BP Oil Spill Effect on Wildlife".

G4, the games channel. Yes, the games channel!

This makes sense in a world where the most informative pieces of national news journalism are coming from a music magazine and nightly comedy show doesn't it?

This thread at Stack Overflow is just terrific. One for your bookmarks.

Related:

help.hackshackers.com: "What are the best tools for "scraping" data off a Web page for analysis in Excel or other software?"

Will Larson: "An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping"

Michelle Minkoff: "How to Scrape Websites for Data without Programming Skills"

Firefox plugin: Outwit

Dan Nguyen: "Coding for Journalists 101 : A four-part series"

Prog-a-Month: "Easy HTML web scraping with Groovy and Java. (w/XOM)"

The fact that stories like this one about ToyStory 3 are still being published - and still need to be published - is frustrating.

It's okay for men to be emotional. If anyone tells you otherwise, give 'em a head butt (I kid, I kid!).

Michael J. Fox's latest book is 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future' and yes, he is the high school drop out in question. In the book Michael J. Fox certainly does not promote quitting High School! Far from it. What the book focuses on, by sharing his story, and the challenges he faced and took on along the way, what you can learn as a student of life, being open what the people around you (especially your children) can teach you, and to be present in the moment. The only book I can think of to compare it to, and this is high praise considering my love of it, is Randy Pauch's "The Last Lecture" (another must read). It's a fantastic book, a great story, with lessons all of us can learn from.

Thank you Richelle for buying me this for Father's Day. It came at a good time.

YouTube: "Good Morning America: Michael J. Fox's Life Lessons "

NPR.org: A Lesson In Life From Michael J. Fox (with excerpt)

Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research

He signs the book off with "Live to learn.".

This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for programmers who want to become familiar with journalism, and journalists to become familiar with programming.

Just wanted to wish all the dads out there a happy father's day. Hope you are having a great one.

PS - Newsweek put up a great series of lessons in fatherhood from YouTube

YouTube: "Rick Astley vs Nirvana Never gonna give/smells like teen spirit MSAH UP!":

Merlin Mann on "Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion":

Nothing can actually "future-proof" anything. Anyone who claims to know the future is either a madman, a charlatan, or, often as not, both.

Thing is, regardless of the passions (or goals or values or priorities or whatever) that we hope to protect or defend, we'd all do well to remember that it is still ultimately OUR passion that's at stake.

That means we're the only one responsible for seeing that its functional components survive and adapt in a world in which each one of us has just north of zero control.

If we embrace the fact that no one can or should ever care about the health of our passions as much as we do, the practical decisions that help ensure Our Good Thing stays alive can become as "simple" as a handful of proven patterns--work hard, stay awake, fail well, hang with smart people, shed bullshit, say "maybe," focus on action, and always always commit yourself to a bracing daily mixture of all the courage, honesty, and information you need to do something awesome--discover whatever it'll take to keep your nose on the side of the ocean where the fresh air lives. This is huge.

Anything else? Yeah. Drink lots of water, play with your kid every chance you get, and quit Facebook today. No, really, do it.

It is easy to be depressed about the oil leak in the Gulf Coast. It is easy to feel helpless. It is easy to feel ineffectual rage.

So don't.

Share what is it that you, me, we, us can do to help the Gulf Coast in the here and now? (examples: aid packages, directed money, etc)

Share what is it that you, me, we, us can do to help the Gulf Coast from ever experiencing a man-made tragedy like this again in the future? (examples: carpooling, public transportation drives, home energy usage improvements, etc)

We are not helpless.

Don't be fearful and not offer an idea because it is not a fleshed out solution. An idea you have might turn into a solution when others see it and can build off of it.

PS - I will be taking your suggestions to our CIM Volunteers meeting.

Derek Sivers: "After 15 years of practice...".

Derek, you do the same as you did for singing, and you will become a great programmer in 10.

Related: A great thread at Hacker News.

Dante's blog is really taking shape. His latest interview is with Joey Z from "Life of Agony.

Our perspective of time drives how we perceive the now we live in and the decisions we make.

Watch (it's only 10 minutes) YouTube: "RSA Animate - The Secret Powers of Time by Professor Philip Zimbardo":

I can actually trace where, in different parts of my history, from living day to day sleeping on the train, to going to Chubb Technical Institute, to meeting Richelle, to becoming a Dad, my perspective has changed.

It reminds me of a short video I posted to my Facebook account I tripped upon earlier that is worth posting here again (2 minutes - watch it): YouTube: "The Unsettling Truth About Life":

You can tell what orientation Alan Watts thinks we are all being distracted from.

Both of these are worthy of your time - thought provoking stuff.

Know Your Meme: "Keanu Is Sad/Sad Keanu (2010)".

The source of this is a Reddit thread started by user rockon4life45.

The combination of a photoshop manipulatable image of movie star, in a private contemplative moment, whose personal story has depth that people can connect to (including myself), has proven too compelling not to be spread around and mashed up in sometimes humorous, sometimes deep, ways.

I'm even sharing it here in my own way.

You will want to checkout the original Reddit thread.

Read Zed A. Shaw in his latest post, "The Wrong Aesthetic", on a common coding craft error.

37signals: Bad call, great apology. It should be something we all learn as children, that our culture should encourage, but somehow, that's not the case, and so this speaks to us a special lesson.

YouTube: "Jim Joyce Tearfully Accepts Lineup Card From Galaraga":

If you make a mistake, admit it. It doesn't make you a mistake. By admitting it you can learn from it. Others can learn from it. And hopefully, there is growth.

Fellow CIMers release open source on github a utility built on node.js.

O'Reilly Radar: Mike Loukides: "What is Data Science?"

Media Shift: Marc Glaser: "Why Journalists Should Learn Computer Programming"

Rafe Colburn: "Why journalists should learn to program" - with a suggestion on what really to be digging into - and I agree.

Resource: Hacks/Hackers

Consumerist: "Debtors Increasingly Thrown In Jail. Wait, What?"

ACM Queue: Ken Arnold: "Programmers are People, Too"

Communications of the ACM: "API Design Matters"

JavaWorld: "Joshua Bloch: A conversation about design"

InfoQ: Joshua Bloch: "Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design"

InfoQ: Video: Joshua Bloch: "How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters" (and a good thread on Hacker News).

Possible Resource: APIDesign Wiki

Good move on Google's part. Nieman Journalism Lab: "Google News experiments with human control, promotes a new serendipity with Editors' Picks"

Mashable: "Google News and Why Human Editors Still Matter"

Previously: Techmeme: "Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work."

I am guilty as charged and with Richelle's help, changing my ways: NYTimes: "The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In":

...children in higher socioeconomic homes hear an average of 2,153 words an hour, whereas those in working-class households hear only about 1,251; children in the study whose parents were on welfare heard an average of 616 words an hour.

Part of the reason the children in affluent homes she studied developed larger vocabularies by the time they were 3 is that "parents are holding kids, the kids are on their lap while the parent is reading a book," Dr. Hart said. "It is important for parents to know when they're talking to kids, they're transferring affection as well as words. When you talk to people, there's always an implicit message, 'I like you,' or 'I don't like you.' "

Hopefully you've read the docs and know that you can override settings and implement your own extensions rather easily:

Create a Lisp file under ~/.emacs.d/ specific to your username ($USER-NAME.el) or system ($SYSTEM-NAME.el) that Emacs with emacs-starter-kit will load automatically at startup.

I've created mine specific to my user name - ~/.emacs.d/kmarti05.el. You can determine the value of your user-name in emacs by issuing C-h-v user-login-name.

Here is the contents of my ~/.emacs.d/kmarti05.el file:

;; visible bell
(setq visible-bell nil) 
 
;; allow selection deletion
(delete-selection-mode t) 
                                    
;; make sure delete key is delete key
(global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char) 
 
;; turn on the menu bar
(menu-bar-mode 1) 
 
;; have emacs scroll line-by-line
(setq scroll-step 1)               
                 
;; set color-theme
(color-theme-zenburn) 
 
(defun my-zoom (n) 
  "Increase or decrease font size based upon argument" 
  (set-face-attribute 'default (selected-frame) :height 
                      (+ (face-attribute 'default :height) (* (if (> n 0) 1 -1) 10)))) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-+")      '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom 1))) 
(global-set-key [C-kp-add]       '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom 1))) 
(global-set-key (kbd "C-_")      '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom -1))) 
(global-set-key [C-kp-subtract]  '(lambda nil (interactive) (my-zoom -1))) 
 
(message "All done!") 

E.W. Dijkstra ACM Turing Lecture 1972: "The Humble Programmer":

Automatic computers have now been with us for a quarter of a century. They have had a great impact on our society in their capacity of tools, but in that capacity their influence will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture, compared with the much more profound influence they will have in their capacity of intellectual challenge without precedent in the cultural history of mankind. Hierarchical systems seem to have the property that something considered as an undivided entity on one level, is considered as a composite object on the next lower level of greater detail; as a result the natural grain of space or time that is applicable at each level decreases by an order of magnitude when we shift our attention from one level to the next lower one. We understand walls in terms of bricks, bricks in terms of crystals, crystals in terms of molecules etc. As a result the number of levels that can be distinguished meaningfully in a hierarchical system is kind of proportional to the logarithm of the ratio between the largest and the smallest grain, and therefore, unless this ratio is very large, we cannot expect many levels. In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 1010 or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with an environment where highly hierarchical artefacts are both possible and necessary. This challenge, viz. the confrontation with the programming task, is so unique that this novel experience can teach us a lot about ourselves. It should deepen our understanding of the processes of design and creation, it should give us better control over the task of organizing our thoughts. If it did not do so, to my taste we should not deserve the computer at all!

It has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers.

It has some decent defaults (I needed just a few overrides), and it has a layout that makes it easy to extend. You can get a copy from Github here.

Maureen Johnson: "Manifesto":

The internet is made of people. People matter. This includes you. Stop trying to sell everything about yourself to everyone. Don't just hammer away and repeat and talk at people--talk TO people. It's organic. Make stuff for the internet that matters to you, even if it seems stupid. Do it because it's good and feels important. Put up more cat pictures. Make more songs. Show your doodles. Give things away and take things that are free. Look at what other people are doing, not to compete, imitate, or compare . . . but because you enjoy looking at the things other people make. Don't shove yourself into that tiny, airless box called a brand--tiny, airless boxes are for trinkets and dead people.

Read the whole thing

I try and spend some time each week serving lunch at Project H.O.M.E.'s "Women of Change" with other fellow CIM Volunteers. I'm engaging some of the folks who work at Women of Change into possibly trying a project along these lines. I think Mark Horvath is onto something by sharing these stories as raw as he does.

NPR.org: "Former Homeless Man's Videos Profile Life On Street"

Reference Links:

Invisible people.tv

Mark Horvath: haRdLy NOrMal

Philly.com: "A Flyers Season of Thrills"

A dear friend to my Mom, and a source of many, many warm memories, my aunt, my Godmother, Jeanette Holohan, passed away Friday morning.

How exactly aunt Jeanette encountered Mom shortly after I was born was never fully outlined, they had talked a little bit about the job Jeanette had at the local grocery store in Fairview, NJ, and Mom just striking up a conversation with her out of the blue about something seemingly random. That sounded like Mom, ready to reach out to anyone and make a connection. And that sounded like Jeanette, ready to lend an empathetic ear.

Aunt Jeanette was a warm, loving soul whose friendship to Mom, during me and my brother's earlier years, provided her with a kind of acceptance and understanding she needed during dark days. Mom loved her so much she made Jeanette my Godmother, and Dante's and my aunt. Through the years she would talk of her in the way all timeless friends talk of each other, with that knowledge that here is that other person that really understands me, that really gets me. We each need that so much in life. Mom and Jeanette provided that for one another.

I have great memories of being over Jeanette's, being babysat by her daughters, and having dinner. We lived down the block and all I wanted to do was to hang out there. Lena Horne, the Muppets, and spaghetti.

Life takes many twists and turns when you face the difficulties my Mom had so contact became sporadic. Richelle deserves credit for helping us re-establish a connection, which helped me reconnect her and Mom after she had stopped swirling after her husband's death.

My thoughts and prayers are with her daughters and friends this morning. Their Mom left a huge impact in my life. I hope I've learned some major lessons from her. The power of the random connection, the importance of friends and unconditional acceptance, love and working to understand one another.

Her kisses, her hugs, her voice saying, "love you Shane, you be good to your Mom sweetie" will be with me till the day I die and I hope I am as good a friend as she was.

Love you too aunt Jeanette, miss you,

Shane

Imagine you are unemployed and are applying for a new job at a company you are qualified for, and want to work for, and being notified that your application will not be accepted, because you are already unemployed.

This is what some job hunters are facing in this increasingly look-the-other-way unemployment situation according to Laura Bassett in The Huffington Post: "Disturbing Job Ads: The Unemployed Will Not Be Considered". There is a good thread at "Hacker News" as to why this makes no sense, getting beyond the ethical and moral concerns of it.

TheServerSide.com: Cameron McKenzie: "The Easiest Way to Get Started with Spring" - good toe-dip to the Spring container, dependency injection and inversion control.

java.net: Will Iverson: "Building Web Applications with Maven 2" - great intro to Maven, building a small web-app, and running it with Jetty.

JavaWorld: John Ferguson Smart: "An introduction to Maven 2" - a bit more detailed then the previously mentioned Maven tutorial, but does not include Jetty unfortunately.

If I could find one tutorial that brings these elements together, with a little Eclipse IDE configuration and usage thrown in, it would be great.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

Press on!