Old-Time Radio, Way-Nu Format

I'm helping Yesterday USA, the first old-time radio station on the Internet, start podcasting its programs.

The station has been produced for 22 years as a labor of love out of the home of Dallas audio engineer Bill Bragg, who's better known these days as the voice of Big Tex.

YUSA broadcasts 23 shows that already sound like podcasts. They're 30- to 90-minute programs created by listeners who briefly introduce the old-time radio shows and music they love, with little editing, polish, or pro-radio fakery. One of the longtime hosts is the singer Ronnie Millsap.

In order to podcast, YUSA needs a Visual Basic component that converts WAV files to MP3 and then uploads the resulting files to a web server.

I don't code much in VB, so I'm having trouble trusting the free code I've found on the Internet to perform the MP3 conversion.

An ActiveX component from United Research Labs looks promising, as you can see from the documentation for a WaveToMp3 function.

Before I encourage YUSA to shell out $299 for the license, I'd like to find some Visual Basic coders who can tell us if there's a cheaper alternative.

Visual Basic · Podcasting · 2005/05/19 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Let's Put Everything on the Table

Of all the insults I received for popesquatting, the ones that stung the most were about my web skills, such as this comment on MetaFilter:

Eh, his website needs work. The text overflows the white box and he must've used the nowrap attribute as there is a hideous amount of rightwards scrolling. pls fix ur website b4 u sho it to teh whirled, pls ok tks.

Ouch. F U 2.

I like three-column designs, so I lay out my sites with HTML tables, often putting ads in the rightmost column. This lends itself to a creative trick some cranks like to employ -- putting a really long word in a comment to hose my layout and push ads way off the page, depriving me of money I need to put food on my family.

I'm currently moving the 14,000 weblog entries and 232,000 comments on the Drudge Retort from Movable Type to my Wordzilla PHP/MySQL software, so I wanted to solve this long-word problem.

I can't use PHP's wordwrap() function, which breaks long words that exceed a set maximum, because my weblog comments include hyperlinks. Any URL longer than the maximum would be broken.

I found a nice open source PHP script by Brian Huisman, htmlwrap, that solves this problem:

htmlwrap() is a function which wraps HTML by breaking long words and preventing them from damaging your layout. This function will NOT insert br tags every "width" characters as in the PHP wordwrap() function. HTML wraps automatically, so this function only ensures wrapping at "width" characters is possible. Use in places where a page will accept user input in order to create HTML output like in forums or blog comments.

Wordzilla · Php · Mysql · Movable Type · Html · 2005/05/19 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Dismembering the Eighties

SoapNet airs reruns of the cancelled soap Another World, digging 16-year-old episodes out of the Procter & Gamble archives.

They've reached June 1989, and every time I hit this show during a channel surf I can't find my way back out -- it's a hypnotic time capsule of excruciatingly bad '80s fashion. Movies that mock the decade, such as The Wedding Singer and 200 Cigarettes, don't come close to how ridiculous we looked. There may be no more unseemly spectacle than men in feathered mullets, Member's Only jackets, and wedgie-tight acid wash jeans looking for love from women in shoulder pads, molasses-thick mascara and giant Dee Snider hair. If not for beer goggles, my generation would have single-handledly cured overpopulation.

I was reminded of this when I saw old photos of Tina Fey, who sang at a blogger's wedding.

Fey, who may top the list of attractive female celebrities with corrected vision, appears in wedding photos wearing a flowery Homer Simpson mumu under a dense hair helmet. The only recognizeable feature is her wry lockjaw smile, the universal gesture that tells the world I'm not sure I flossed.

Television · Soaps · 2005/05/18 · 1 COMMENT · Link

The online magazine Slate, now a part of the Washington Post Company, has developed an anal fixation.

A line from David Edelstein's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith review:

With his lisp and his clammy little leer, he looks like an old queen keen on trading an aging butt-boy (Count Dooku) for fresh meat -- which leaves Anakin looking more and more like a 15-watt bulb.

Jack Shafer:

I've been called many ugly things in my life -- neo-con, without decency, Michael Kinsley's butt boy -- but school monitor, never.

Dana Stevens:

Things quickly escalated into a full-scale food-fight. Carlson accused Stewart of being John Kerry's "butt boy" and "sniffing his throne."

Journalism · Jargon · 2005/05/18 · 1 COMMENT · Link

I've Been Owned

I live in a neighborhood governed by a community association, which means I pay several hundred dollars a year for the privilege of being ordered by strangers to drag my trash cans into the garage.

Like any government, the association has found it much easier to expand its authority than to occasionally unclench, review the rules, and get rid of the more nettlesome ones.

In some ways, it's kind of entertaining, like having a busybody in-law who can't repress the desire to micromanage your life. My actual in-laws are delightful people I got to know for the first time when they took me to an Orlando nudist camp against my will. It would take a lot of neglect for this free-spirited pair to object to the condition of my home. Even then, they'd be more likely to drag the trash cans in than put their concerns in writing. I wish all my problems could be solved by annoying other people until they fix them.

I was informed by mail today about my unclean mailbox and four other "compliance issues." The letter, copied to the Compliance Committee, is worded masterfully, suggesting that I must make things right within 10 days or find myself in a world of hurt:

Perhaps you have already started to address the problem or are having difficulty in doing so. In either case, would you please call our office ... and let us know the status? ...

Otherwise we will assume that you are taking care of this problem and will make a note to check again in 10 days to see how you are progressing.

The complaints were so specific -- "treat turf for weeds on right side of driveway" -- I'm surprised I didn't see someone walking my yard with pencil and pad.

Centuries after our forefathers tamed a wild verdant frontier, I can't help but think they'd be ashamed at what's become of the land they killed millions of indigenous people to acquire.

I'm thinking about flying one of the "Don't Tread on Me" Gadsen flags in my yard -- a giant mustard yellow symbol of America's unquenchable thirst for freedom.

I just have to get it approved by the Architectural Committee first.

Politics · Jacksonville · Florida · 2005/05/16 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

My Friend the Warblogger

Michael Bolduc, one of my college pals from the University of North Texas, grew up to become a warblogger.

This was, of course, a source of distress for mother and I. You do everything you can to raise them properly, but ultimately all you can do is love them, cherish every day together, and hope they make the right decisions.

When Mike ventures into political subjects on his weblog, I'm pretty sure that we'll pick opposite sides whence comes the War of the Bloggers, then meet in a trench where one of us receives a gaping bayonet wound, the other a lifetime of guilt.

Until then, I enjoy finding things on his site that I missed because I am a let-the-gay-whales-marry liberal, such as an incredible essay by Gerard Van der Leun on the day he didn't kill anybody:

... as humans, we have an almost limitless ability to forget any hint of 'could' when it comes to horror. In those few moments when our forgetfulness fails us, we remain secure in our belief that we would never do such things to those we love. We know to an absolute certainty that anyone who could must not have been "in his right mind."

That's a common but still strange phrase -- "in his right mind." Everyone uses it as shorthand for things people do that are, large or small, somehow far outside what we normally expect them to do. Nobody that I know of takes it to the other side of that common phrase and looks at what a person does when he's "in his wrong mind."

It's a brilliant, honest, frightening piece, and I love the fact that he wrote it without a single editor pondering whether his thoughts merited a global audience.

Another mark in Mike's favor: He's riding Paula Abdul harder than a disqualified contestant.

North Texas · Politics · 2005/05/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Serving Files with a Cache to Save Cash

Some podcasters and other publishers who serve large, high-traffic files have begun using the Coral service to keep from going offline or going broke. The iPodder client added support in March.

Coral's a network of several hundred servers that can store and serve copies of any file on the web. To offer a file via Coral, all you have to do is add .nyud.net:8090 to the host name in its URL.

Here's an example -- the trailer for the underappreciated Brat Pack thriller Bad Influence starring James Spader as a passive yuppie and Rob Lowe as the devil. If Video Detective wanted to save bandwidth and offer the file over Coral, it could change the original URL to a Coralized version.

Coral's also a useful place to look for any URL that can't be loaded due to high traffic or some other problem. Just add .nyud.net:8090 to the host name of a request, as in mp3.example.com.nyud.net:8090/podcast.mp3. There are Coralize bookmarklets for browsers that can request any page from Coral's cache.

The long-term plan for Coral is to expand the network, adding any host who wants to serve requests. This brings up integrity issues raised in the debate over Google Toolbar's autolink feature, as noted by Wes Felter -- there must be a way to ensure that a Coral server is not modifying the original content in transit.

The NYU Secure Computer Systems Group that developed Coral has created an Apache module for signing web content. Clients could use this signature to verify that content has arrived in unaltered form.

I'm going to see if this module can be fished out of Coral, so I can sign content on Workbench as a testbed for the concept.

Security · Publishing · 2005/05/14 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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