I've Stumbled and I Can't Get Up

I discovered several hundred links from StumbleUpon this morning in my referrer logs, a multi-browser, multi-platform toolbar for reviewing and recommending web sites. Installing the toolbar as a Mozilla Firefox extension took less than a minute.

The toolbar has "I like it" and "Not-for-me" review buttons to rate the site being viewed, using these ratings to find sites that people similar to you have liked. A "Stumble!" button sends you to one of these recommended sites.

StumbleUpon also provides a chance to do some egosurfing, even without the toolbar: Users write site reviews, which are shared publicly.

These review pages provide a new place to argue about web sites, as you can see on the SaveToby, Daily Kos and Andrew Sullivan pages.

Each user's reviews and comments form a weblog with its own RSS 2.0 feed and another feed for comments. Here's one for Janah, a user who enjoys cats, gardening, Led Zeppelin, Robert Heinlein, and me me me!

The end result looks like the out-of-wedlock love child of LiveJournal and de.licio.us. I can't decide if or the site's , but you could do cool things with that data if the developers offered an API.

2005/04/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Jumping Over the Lazy Dog

In another story about the no-holds-barred cage match between journalists and bloggers, Samantha Israel writes that she only has been corrected once by a reader.

Let's go for two.

Israel writes:

More than arrogant, some old-time reporters think bloggers are plain old lazy. Former CBS news correspondent Eric Engberg made himself clear in his "Blogging as typing, not journalism" article on CBSNews.com last November. "Given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility," he wrote, "the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on." The dog certainly bit back when it revealed that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who averages more than 350,000 visitors a day to his Daily Kos political blog, was paid US$12,000 to promote Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination.

The mainstream press didn't reveal that deal. Zuniga disclosed it to his readers in June 2003:

I spent this weekend in Burlington, VT, where we officially accepted work on behalf of presidential candidate Howard Dean. Dean joins a Senate candidate in our still small but hopefully growing roster of clients.

He also put a prominent disclaimer on the home page of his site, "I do some technical work for Howard Dean," linking the word disclaimer to a full description of the financial relationship. You can see this yourself in the Internet Archive's June 2003 copy of the Daily Kos home page.

I'm not aware of a single mainstream media web site that displays its conflicts of interest as prominently and permanently as Zuniga did.

The only thing journalists revealed about this deal was an inability to do even cursory fact checking, misleading people into thinking that a fully disclosed financial relationship was shady Armstrong Williams-style payola.

In an article where she offers a derisive "sor-ry" to the only reader to correct her, Israel continues this trend. The fact that this slanderous falsehood lives on in the mainstream media, even turning up in a high-minded academic review of journalism, demonstrates one reason that readers might turn to bloggers for information.

Journalism · Politics · 2005/04/13 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Schiavo's Parents Visit Jacksonville

A Catholic themed weblogger here in Jacksonville, Jeffrey Miller, attended the funeral mass held today in his parish for Terri Schiavo by her parents:

The president of the Justice Coalition, Ted Hires, spoke after Bob Schindler. He gave a passionate speech about what happened to Terri and talked about how the Schindler's were going to be working in the future to "prevent anybody else from being starved to death." He mentioned that those who participated in the death of Terri will one day meet justice. This was the first time I have ever heard a number of Catholics shout out "amen."

Though I respect the strength of their convictions, I can't agree with people who would prevent doctors from ever removing feeding tubes, especially for patients who have expressed a desire not to be kept alive in a hopeless condition.

Read about the subject of palliative care, and you'll find that tube removal is both humane and commonplace, especially for people suffering from end-stage dementia:

Studies she and others have done show that for those with end-stage dementia -- the eventual fate of millions of Americans with Alzheimer's disease -- feeding tubes do not extend life, do not prevent pneumonia, and actually can inflict pain and discomfort.

Politics · Jacksonville · 2005/04/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Dell Recalls Hazardous Notebook Power Adapters

I received a boxed letter from Dell today advising that the power adapter for my Inspiron notebook computer was being recalled as a fire and electrical hazard.

The recall covers a large range of Dell Latitude and Inspiron models and one Precision notebook sold from September 1998 through February 2002:

Potentially affected adapters were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers:

1. Latitude CP, CPi, CPiA, CPtC, CPiR, CPxH, CPtV, CS, CSx, CPxJ, CPtS, C500, C510, C600, C610, C800, C805, C810, V700, C-Dock, C-Port

2. Inspiron 2500, 2600, 3500, 3700, 3800, 4000, 4100, 4150, 5000, 5000E, 7500, 7550, 8000, 8100, Advanced Port Replicator, Docking Station

3. Precision M40

   The adapters were also sold separately, including in response to service calls.

These adapters were manufactured by Delta Electronics of Thailand and have the model numbers 04983D, 07832D, or 09364U.

It took a couple of minutes on Dell's recall site to verify that my adapter was affected and order a free replacement. In the meantime, users are advised to unplug the adapter from the wall while not in use.

I imagine that leaving the laptop plugged in as I fall asleep listening to Texas Rangers games is probably a bad idea too.

Several of these adapters are being auctioned on EBay, which makes me wonder if the auction site does anything to actively spot and remove sales of recalled products.

2005/04/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Avoiding Movable Type's Comment Date Bug

I was reminded today of a nettlesome Movable Type template bug with how comment dates are displayed by the MTCommentDate tag.

As noted by Michael Hanscom, if you place an MTCommentDate tag inside an MTCommentEntry container, it displays the date and time the entry was published, not the comment's date and time.

A workaround is to place the tag outside the container, even if you have to use two MTCommentEntry containers for the same comment.

Here's template code to display the 10 most recently posted comments with proper timestamps:

Incidentally, in Six Apart documentation and most books on the subject, template tags like MTCommentDate include dollar signs in their names, as in <$MTCommentDate$>.

In writing Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, I decided to never put dollar signs around tags. They're unnecessary -- you can refer to all tags without them -- and they don't work with container tags, so it's a confusing aspect of template creation.

Movable Type · 2005/04/12 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Laura Lemay, the legendary Teach Yourself uberauthor who cowrote several of my Java books, solved a 20-year-old mystery by turning to the last place anyone would expect to find information:

"I'm looking for a book," I explained to the librarian. "Published probably in the 70's, about a psychological experiment done on teenagers. They are imprisoned in a maze and have to dance in order to get food pellets. It was a really dark book. There were escher-like stairs on the cover."

The one-minute response time was much slower than Google and returned only one result, but it was accurate.

Publishing · 2005/04/11 · Comment · Link

Mason Glaves believes that Sun has killed the Java Media Framework without telling anyone:

If you've got a six-month project, and you only need one small addition, or one small bug-fix to JMF to complete it on time, it's fairly easy to assume that by the time the release date comes around, you'll have the next release of JMF and will be ready to go.

The next release is not coming. From the chatter on the list it has become more and more obvious that Sun has quietly abandoned JMF, but isn't willing to let the general population know about it.

If true, it wouldn't be the first time that Sun has put little resources towards one of its Java multimedia projects. For several years, Florian Bomers was the only programmer working on JavaSound.

Bomers left in August 2004 and is coding for his own small company, which releases several programs as "postcardware." He's also a contributor to an open source implementation of JavaSound called Tritonus.

Java · 2005/04/11 · Comment · Link

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