Author Archives: Karl

Fan created guitar tablature – illegal?!?!?!

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A friend at work sent this along over the weekend: BBC: Song sites face legal crackdown:

The US Music Publishers’ Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006.

MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.

He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the internet but were “completely illegal”.

Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can “throw in some jail time I think we’ll be a little more effective”.

Lo and behold, my favorite tab site on the web shut down in reaction to it: Powertabs.net.

Back in 1998 this happened to OLGA, it went overseas and relaunched. OLGA has a solid claim on being the first collaborative file archive on the web – 1992. Guitar tablature written by fans, for fans, in plain text. It is still running today. But probably not for long.

Make archives people. Quickly.

Strange, Weird, Fun, Linkarama

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LATimes: At Inland Base, Scientologists Trained Top Gun: As Scientology’s highest-ranking figure, Miscavige, 45, has found in Cruise, 43, not just a fervent and famous believer but an effective messenger whose passion the church has harnessed to help fuel its worldwide growth. “Across 90 nations, 5,000 people hear his word of Scientology — every hour,” International Scientology News proclaimed last year. “Every minute of every hour someone reaches for LRH technology … simply because they know Tom Cruise is a Scientologist.”

Did you watch the Apprentice on Thursday? Come on. Admit it. Okay then, be a snob. If you missed it, you missed awesome live television. Randal revealed himself the dick he was on winning. Richelle and me were speechless and friends at work argued over if he was right in doing what he did.

Stephen Lynch: Kill a Kitten

Edison Hate Future: edison say: hate keep you young. edison is A HUNDRED FUCKING YEARS OLD

O RLY?

Spoken Word by Ernie Cline: Genuis.

Google Video: Car faces a 747 backwash. CRIKEY!

An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer: A Christmas Carol:

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don’t say when.

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas Day you can’t get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore.
There’s time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.

Relations, sparing no expense, ‘ll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
(“Just the thing I need, how nice!”)

It doesn’t matter how sincere it is,
Nor how heart felt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What’s important is the price.

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry merchants,
May ye make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high,
Tell us to go out and buy!

So, let the raucous sleighbells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don’t stand underneath when they fly by.

Joining in moral support for Six Apart

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At Philly Future Howard asks a good question, Blog Service Downtime: How Much Is Too Much?. Blogger.com, Bloglines, TypePad and others have suffered growing pains these past few months and this week users of TypePad, suffered an outage that due to its scope, caused concerns across the web. One I share with Dave Winer is how this underscores the importance of interop between blogging tools.

As is typical, the negatives get shouted loud and clear and sometimes hard realities, and positives that should be heard get lost in the uproar.

Building systems that people rely on is hard. Building systems that touch the public even harder. I’ve been there (indeed I *am* there) myself. But as Brent says, building weblog systems is especially difficult, “It’s not just hard work, it can be tough on the psyche too – you’re talking about weblogs, which people feel are an extension of themselves. It’s not some boring abstract thing, not at all, it’s about people’s passions. Their lives, really.”

The folks at Six Apart have handled this outage admirably in many ways:

1. No one lost data.

2. They are back online!

3. Six Apart, and Anil Dash in particular, was fantastic at reaching out and being communicative about what was going on, as it was going on. A rare thing for any company. A lot of grace under pressure.

Read Anil’s in-depth interview with Niall Kennedy for example. Niall is community manager for Technorati, which has dealt with, and has solved, scaling/performance issues themselves, so the interview is from one who has faced similar circumstances. Frank and informative.

Personally, while I am a do-it-yourselfer, I have recommended TypePad as a great blog hosting service for folks who need more than what Blogger.com provides. I’m even more likely to do so now.

Update: Correction: I had incorrectly stated Six Apart was giving a 45 day refund. They gave that option to users who suffered with TypePad’s previous service outage. I hope they consider something similar this time around.

Where have conservatives gone?

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Atrios says the news today is a test, because anyone that claims to stand for the principals of conservatism should be up in arms over it.

Well here’s California Conservative: Homeland Security: Spies & Lies:If eavesdropping on our thrilling telephone conversations, listening to us rant about politics or use vulgar epithets in reference to certain public officials, is required to prevent another 9/11, “bring it on.” We got nothing to hide. Who does?

Is this the real face of conservatism these days? Is the party of small government is now the party of big brother? The next few days will be telling.

Anyway, make sure to read the Washington Post: Bush Authorized Domestic Spying and the NYTimes: Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.

It’s not like folks didn’t suspect this wasn’t the case already, but why did it take so long for it to be reported? Will Bunch has a theory.

I hate ‘stop energy’

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I have a bit of a broader definition then Dave Winer who coined the term: Stop Energy is not reasoned, it never takes into account the big picture, it is the mirror image of Forward Motion. In the Stop Energy model, everyone, no matter how small their stake in a technology, has the power to veto. Nothing ever gets done, and people who want to move forward are frustrated in every attempt to move. Unfortunately, Stop Energy is the rule, not the exception.

Stop Energy, to me, is defined by one or more persons using fear, uncertainty and doubt to draw energy from one or more persons attempting something positive – especially when there is room for more than one effort or approach – and especially when solutions are not agreed upon.

That’s what I saw spring up in response to Structured Blogging‘s announcement of plugins for WordPress and Moveable Type. There maybe interesting arguments as to why it might not fly – but in this instance – the only way to find is by trying.

I’m biased of course. I think microformats and ideas similar will enable community empowering tools in the future. So I think the work of Shelley Powers and others holds a lot of promise. I can’t wait to experiment honestly.

On Elections

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While democracy is taking hold in Iraq, it might be a good time to look at matters…errr…. closer to home….? Ehh?

Miami Herald.com: 12/15/05: New tests fuel doubts about vote machines: Ion Sancho, Leon County’s election chief, said tests by two computer experts, completed this week, showed that an insider could surreptitiously change vote results and the number of ballots cast on Diebold’s optical-scan machines. After receiving county commission approval Tuesday, Sancho scrapped Diebold’s system for one made by Elections Systems and Software, the same provider used by Miami-Dade and Broward counties. The difference between the systems: Sancho’s machines use a fill-in-the-blank paper ballot that allows for after-the-fact manual recounts, while Broward and Miami-Dade use ATM-like touchscreens that leave no paper trail.

SecurityFocus: 12/15/05: Diebold troubled by e-voting security: Computer scientists have questioned both the reliability and security of the systems, as well as pointing out that the confusing and secretive certification process made testing of the systems is essentially meaningless.

Yahoo! Press Release: 12/14/05: Stull, Stull & Brody Announces Class Action Against Diebold Inc.: The complaint alleges that defendants violated provisions of the United States securities laws causing artificial inflation of the Company’s stock price.

BlackBoxVoting: 12/13/05: Devastating hack proven: Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, together with Black Box Voting, demonstrated that Diebold made misrepresentations to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the “memory card” (the credit-card-sized ballot box used by computerized voting machines.

Slashdot: 12/13/05: Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud: Discussion on his resignation.

AP: 12/12/05: O’Dell Resigns As Diebold CEO, Chairman: Diebold Inc., a maker of automatic teller machines, said Monday that Chairman and Chief Executive Walden W. O’Dell has resigned “for personal reasons.”

philly: 12/05/05: Diebold in North Carolina II: Updates from Albert on North Carolina

EFF: 12/8/05: North Carolina Sued for Illegally Certifying Voting Equipment: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Thursday filed a complaint against the North Carolina Board of Elections and the North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services on behalf of voting integrity advocate Joyce McCloy, asking that the Superior Court void the recent illegal certification of three electronic voting systems.

Wired: 11/29/05: Another Blow to E-Voting Company: One of the nation’s leading suppliers of electronic voting machines may decide against selling new equipment in North Carolina after a judge declined Monday to protect it from criminal prosecution should it fail to disclose software code as required by state law.

philly: 11/29/05: Diebold in North Carolina: Albert’s thoughts on what was occuring in North Carolina at the time.

Metafilter: 11/16/05: Deafening silence over GAO e-voting report, new evidence of abuse: Ultimately, there is no real security on these machines; the report shows that overturning election results would not be at all difficult for even a single moderately skilled attacker.

Brad Friedman: 11/3/05: Mainstream Media to American Democracy: Drop Dead:t’s been a full two weeks now since the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO came out with their 107-page report [PDF] confirming what so many of us have been trying to ring the bell about for so long: The Electronic Voting Machines which are proliferating counties and states across America even as I type, are not secure, not accountable, not recountable, not transparent, not accurate and not adequately monitored or certified by anybody.

truthout: 10/21/05: GAO Report Finds Flaws in Electronic Voting: GAO report summary

First the dishwasher goes, then the furnace, and then ya get…

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A kidney stone! My first and I hope only. This week, from Sunday on, has been ummm… memorable. Sunday our dishwasher decided it was time to check out, it was over twenty years old, and was acting weird these past few weeks, but I loved the thing’s look and charm.. anyways, it died on Sunday, not really a big deal. Always could wash dishes by hand. But then the furnace goes haywire. Turns out it was a circuit board related to the igniter. While that was getting fixed yesterday (just in time for today – but the last couple nights have been nothing to sneeze at), I was in the hospital with a kidney stone.

Got a new dishwasher, furnace is working great (I can take a shower this morning without flashbacks to the squat I lived in), and I’m alive!

Yesterday was crazy. Went to work as I always do, read some email, checked PF, opened Newsgator, got to Scripting News, and then… the pain in my left side was worst then I could describe – deep inside – like an organ was being squeezed.

I have Spondylolisthesis, and at first I thought it was simply a case of it getting worst – I have pain from it I deal with everyday, I don’t talk about it much. It’s just a reality of life to deal with. This, however, didn’t feel muscle or bone related. My family doctor agreed to take me at 1PM. Far away from center city, near Willow Grove. I made it there, coping with the pain using similar mental exercises I use for the spondi.

My doctor at first thought it was back spasms, but the urine analysis said otherwise – lots of blood cells – and she had me rush to the ER. By the time I got there, the pain was subsiding, coming in waves instead of constant pressure. The doctor there said it was probably a kidney stone, based on diagnosis – but that I didn’t look like someone having them – bent over crying in pain. Well inside I was. And earlier in the day, at work, I know I looked terrible.

A short time after arriving at the ER it passed. Around the size of the large end of a sesame seed. So damn small. According to the docs, however it wasn’t. Didn’t need a filter to see that thing. I have it now to send to a urologist if my family doctor thinks I should go. Piss, blood, and a pebble. How pleasant.

Speaking of piss and blood, the pissing match between John Harris, Jim Brady and Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post, is fascinating. More here. What’s for sure is Dan Froomkin is now an online star. Where’s his RSS feed?

Heh, anyway – this will be a good day. Damn straight.