Russian Novelist's Biggest Mystery: His Identity

There's an interesting profile in today's San Francisco Chronicle about Grigory Chkhartashvili, a Russian translator and intellectual who was inspired by boredom to start a new career as mystery novelist Boris Akunin, the creator of the kickboxing, czarist-era Russian detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin:

His novels ... wear their period politics lightly. Each plays on a familiar genre. There's the contract killer, the spy and the picaresque swindler. There's a closed-room mystery. And the sixth book features a serial killer, who turns out to be Jack the Ripper, back home in Russia after a stint as a medical student in London. The appeal lies in the quality of the writing, the carefully drawn villains and killers, and the character of Fandorin.

Publishing · 2006/04/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Monopoly's 'Inventor' Stole the Game

In a story about Hasbro's plan to remove Atlantic City from Monopoly, the New York Times repeats the thoroughly debunked lie that Charles Darrow invented the game during the Depression:

Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed salesman, sketched the prototype board game on a tablecloth at his home in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, using 21 street names from Atlantic City. (The final space, Marvin Gardens, was a name taken from the neighboring community of Margate City, where it is spelled Marvyn.)

The Parker Brothers game company rejected Mr. Darrow's proposal, so he went to a printer and began selling it himself. It caught on so quickly that Parker Brothers eventually reversed itself. It began mass-marketing Monopoly in 1935, and that year it became the world's best-selling board game.

Versions of Monopoly were played for decades when the game was taught to Darrow, according to the real history. He patented the game, robbed the creators of the credit and the game's publisher fought for 40 years to hide this fact.

Louis Thun, who played the game with the person who taught Darrow in 1931, said, "It wasn't at all clear to me how Mr. Darrow could be the inventor of a game ... we'd played since 1925."

2006/04/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

They Call Me Mush Mouth

I live in a ------ apartment that was supposed to be temporary. I work at a job that was also supposed to be temporary until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, which apparently is nothing. I have lots of sex, but I haven't had a relationship last more than a couple of months. I don't even have the self-discipline to floss daily. I've had four root canals. Four. I'm thirty-five. I've had four root canals. -- Nate Fisher, Six Feet Under

I loved Six Feet Under until the show jumped the shark when Nate didn't fall in love with his wife Lisa until after she died. From that day onward, the show was an unrelenting series of miseries piled upon the Job-like Fishers and anyone else who had the misfortune to know them. Even on pay cable, that's not entertainment.

Nate Fisher's lament about root canals was my favorite line from the show, because it's such a great way to measure your commitment to personal responsibility.

I was informed by my dentist this morning that I need two root canals, which will be the second and third times I've spent hundreds of dollars to replace nerve tissue with coagulated tree sap. My mouth has become a dental Falluja.

Dentistry · Television · 2006/04/26 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software.

Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs.

First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, tagging, an application programming interface and other features.

Shellen's also a member of the PayPal Developers Network Advisory Board and the Social Software Alliance.

Jake Savin has developed software since 2000 for UserLand, so he's been a part of the company during the four years that it published Really Simple Syndication and helped popularize the format.

He's the cocreator of the weblog publishing tools Manila and Radio UserLand, two of the first commercial programs to support RSS, and a content management system for the publisher of MacWeek, MacWorld and MacCentral magazines.

Savin's also a professional musician who runs a mobile recording studio in Dallas that publishes some of its work as podcasts.

Welcome aboard!

Rss · Podcasting · Music · Google · 2006/04/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Sony's Universal Media Disc Format Lays an Egg

Sony PSP games and movies are released on Universal Media Disc format, but the name's a joke. No other devices support the format, Sony won't support burners or third-party efforts to open it up, and Brian Carnell passes along the news that movie studios have now cut back or abandoned UMD releases:

It's hard to see why UMD failed.

The movies were expensive -- $20 to $25 per movie.

The PSP couldn't be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.

The failure should make UMD movies dirt cheap on eBay as Wal-Mart and other large retailers dump their inventory.

I've been interested in failed media formats since discovering deadmedia.org and Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto, a rumination on the implications for a society that pours so much creative energy into formats that will be lost to the future when there's no devices left to support them.

How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won't they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas?

Movies · Television · 2006/04/24 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Handling Daylight Savings Time in ColdFusion

SportsFilter has been misreporting the time on posts and comments since the U.S. sprang forward, reporting times in CST instead of CDT.

To fix the problem, I wrote a few lines of ColdFusion code to set a tzid variable to the proper timezone identifier:

<cfset tzinfo = GetTimeZoneInfo()>
<cfset tzid = "CST">
<cfif tzinfo.isDSTOn IS "True">
  <cfset tzid = "CDT">
</cfif>

Coldfusion · 2006/04/21 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Buzzword.Com Will Shut Down May 21

Buzzword.Com will shut down on May 21, which means the last two dozen weblogs on the free Manila hosting service have one month to find a new home.

I've enjoyed running the server for the past two years, but I'm doing all of my work these days on Linux servers running Java, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Buzzword runs on UserLand Frontier with Windows 2000 Server.

All Buzzword weblogs can keep using their domain names after they move, so Google pagerank and existing traffic won't be lost. I'll provide free name service for any publisher who requests it.

There are several options for bloggers to consider:

1. Move your site without modification to a commercial Manila host. Erin Clerico of Weblogger.Com has offered Buzzword users a discount -- the first year of hosting for $49.95 -- and UserLand also provides commercial hosting.
2. Move your site to Movable Type, WordPress or another tool that supports Movable Type's export format.
3. Create an HTML archive of your existing site.

The easiest option is to stay on Manila. BookNotes is moving to Weblogger.Com today, and it takes around 10 minutes to export the site, copy the files over and install it on the new server.

Moving to other weblogging software takes around 8-16 hours, depending on the size of the weblog, and requires some testing to ensure that all links and images continue to work properly. Some features won't be copied over, such as the site's blogroll and page templates, but all weblog entries, articles and images will be transferred.

Creating an HTML archive takes 1-2 hours, but you won't be able to edit the site afterward with Manila or any other blogging tool.

Buzzword users should let me know which option you'd like to pursue. I can package sites for export to another Manila host at no cost and handle the other options for a fee.

When I launched Buzzword, the server was front-page news all over the place. A lot of bloggers wanted to know what I'd do with 3,018 sites that had been hosted on Weblogs.Com for years until they were taken offline in an abrubt shutdow-, er, server outage.

With a lot of help, I installed the blogs on a dedicated Super Celeron 2.4 Windows server at ServerMatrix that had a monthly 1,200 gigabyte bandwidth limit (later expanded to 1,400).

The server never exceeded 150 gigabytes a month in bandwidth, primarily because less than 100 of those 3,018 blogs were still active. My total cost for two years has been $2,200 -- a $400 setup charge plus $79 a month for hosting and backups -- and around 2-4 hours a week to keep the server ticking.

Manila · 2006/04/21 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

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