I saw the iPod (Slashdot) the other day at Fry's and then again at CompUSA. I've got to say, Apple is on top of design. At CompUSA I was able to compare the iPod to other hard drive based MP3 players like the Archos, the Creative Nomad Jukebox and Intel models too-awful-to-remember. The iPod is the most expensive of the bunch but it's by far the coolest. It's small, like a pack of cigarettes, and light, like a Nokia cell phone, and has a simple, intuitive UI and a backlight. It's actually not completely white, the back and sides are a silvery finish and the white faceplate is actually transparent plastic with a white backing. The jog dial works smoothly to perform menu selections and adjust the volume. The iPod is kept simple; there is one firewire port, a headphone jack and a hold button on top. It's chic.

The other players, on the other hand, were designed by adolescents living in the 1950s who dream about the future. They're clunky and heavy and cheap. The Archos looks like a Star Trek prop reject. The Nomad looks like an oversized CD player for kids. There's also an Archos Mediabox that's just been announced but it wasn't at CompUSA.

Of course, I don't have a Mac.

This poses several problems. One, how do I get songs on to the iPod? Two, how do I charge the damn thing?

Well, there's a company called MediaFour that has announced Windows software that will communicate with the iPod. A preliminary version is expected on Christmas Eve. All I need, in addition to the software, is a firewire card for my PC. The charging is taken care of through firewire.

The more adventurous among you might be interested in this Slashdot article about someone who took apart his iPod. It turns out the hard drive used in it is not a 2.5" laptop drive (which is how the Archos and the Nomad are able to beat Apple on price), but a 1.8" drive designed for PCMCIA cards (which is how Apple is able to keep the iPod so sleek). The PCMCIA version of the drive used in the iPod retails for $399, the same price as the iPod itself.

Is $400 too much for an MP3 player with "only" 5 Gigs of storage? I personally think an iPod is infinitely more useful than a PDA. Everyone I know who owns a PDA, owns a PDA which is gathering dust. People seem to have less of a problem justifying $300-400 for a PDA.

Hell, I listen to music constantly. I'll be watching MediaFour and their XPlay Windows software closely... The iPod goes on my Christmas 2001 Wishlist.

One caveat: the sound was a bit tinny, but I'm hoping it's the earphones' fault and not the D/A converter in the iPod.

I'm excited. Frank Miller is back with:

The Dark Knight Strikes Again

I'm getting long in the tooth but there'll always be a place in my heart for redemption games. After much cajoling Friday night, Joe was able to convince me to go with him down to Block at Orange to "take some pictures" for his friend... Liar! We ended up at Dave and Busters where to my surprise ;-) we met up with Allen, Candy Boy, Evan, Genie, Johnny, Lori, Hsuan, Sakura, and Terence.

The whole crew in one place! A birthday bash for Sakura and I!

After splitting up into two teams, we proceeded to compete in every redemption game Dave and Busters could muster -- we shot hoops, raced horses (in the saddle and otherwise), rifled targets, coin-dropped, and skeed balls (yeah, I made that up) until weary and tired and out of credits.

Terence was my first round draft pick for good reason. But in spite of Terence's Herculean effort and Virtuoso performance -- winning every game he played by doubling his opponents, hitting 100 points in skee ball multiple times, nailing "run" on the horse races consistently, and htting 80% of his baskets -- when we counted our tickets, Team Sakura had 1092 tickets and Team Danny... uh, I think we had like 563 or something...

Team Danny loses! In-con-ceivable!

After returning home, I consoled myself by playing GT3 on my brand spanking new PS f*ckin' 2!!! MUAHAHAHA! Thanks everyone. As I gun the Impreza through the turns on Smokey Mountain, Daypop and work are but distant memories...

"With over 100 terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to the present, the Wayback Machine puts the history of the World Wide Web and the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips."

You're kidding me! I've seen the Internet Wayback Machine before but I assumed they only saved news sites.

Nostalgia: www.danchan.com circa Sept. 16, 2000.
After the redesign: www.danchan.com circa Oct. 10, 2000.

Programmer stuff: Joel actually preaches a moderate view when it comes to code reuse. Finally, something I can agree with. Joel normally likes to take an extreme stance like "Completely rewriting code is big-time mistake...". But in his latest rant, he seems to backtrack a little, the main idea being "Pick your battles." Some things need to be rewritten for performance, for reliability, or for extensibility. Better you do it than trust a room full of monkeys. LOL. Unless you are a monkey...

Are Men Back?: I enjoyed reading Dave's latest fragmented piece which somehow touches upon 1970s feminism, gentlemanliness, listening, inclusion, George Bush "getting it", forgiveness and family fun.

I guess no one pays much attention to neutral countries because apparently Switzerland has moved.

And I can't help but repeat this link to the World's Unluckiest Tourist.

This link to Magnificent Obsessions (ugh, navel lint) on the Daypop Top 40 lead me to another Metafilter link that sounded promising with this title: "The Alternate Reality of the Prettiest Girl." What do you get for being pretty? 75% off food, discounts, gawkers, off-duty taxis, a boyfriend named Ole. What is the effect of beauty on society? You won't find much depth in this NY Times article, but it does have a slideshow! That article lead to another one about "Fei Qian" titled "Ancient Secret System Moves Money Globally." What a title. Ancient. (Chinese) Secret. Money... Ooohh. Intriguing! A couple minutes, a few phone calls and your money is half way around the world, untraceable.

It's a hot day -- almost Vegas-hot -- but today's Wall Street Journal has a short mention of Daypop on the front page of its Marketplace section, so I braved the mid-day sun all the way to Figueroa and 7th to pick up two copies. The title of the article is "New Web Search Tools Offer Useful Shortcuts And Some Nice Twists." It talks about Teoma, Vivisimo and Wisenut, three new contenders for Google's crown, then ends with this:

One other new search site worthy of mention is Daypop. This site, at www.daypop.com, isn't meant to compete with Yahoo, Google or other general-purpose search tools. Instead, Daypop scans and indexes some 3,400 news sites and weblogs, those personal online journals that usually contain commentary and links to other sites.

Daypop's creator is Dan Chan, an avid weblogger who got the idea for what he calls a "current events search engine" while trying to follow news about the 2000 presidential campaign. For news junkies, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Daypop is a must-bookmark site.

This is really good coverage. I only hope that readers understand the distinction being made here, that Daypop is a complement to general purpose search tools and that it is able to index news sites and weblogs daily and in many cases every few hours. Searches for news and commentary, what weblogs specialize in, can turn up articles that appeared today.

One update: Daypop now indexes 4,200 news sites and weblogs from around the world. This number is still increasing nicely given all the site submissions and all my surfing the past few days.

Back to work.

The anger and sadness of last week are slowly being replaced by questioning: Why did this happen? Is U.S. foreign policy to blame? And for people who are able to see both sides, no right way exists, no simple solution is laid bare. There's no easy way out of this.

You see, I'm bound by the three traits that characterize most programmers: laziness, impatience, and hubris. I wanted, early on, a plan of action. One that required the least amount work and the shortest duration of time to implement. Plus, I believed such a plan existed and that moral territory could be claimed.

Of course, I was wrong.

Now, the current state of re-examination that's occuring doesn't feel quite right to me in the context of this crisis, at this point in time. I couldn't explain it though.

Then along comes this article by William Saletan that argues against the consequentialists, the ones who believe "the attacks were a consequence of American behavior." Saletan acknowledges that perhaps re-examination should occur, but "if we do these things to avoid further attacks on our cities, we're granting the terrorists the power to dictate out acts by dictating the consequences." Instead, he calls to turn "consequentialism on its head. We can dictate what happens to people who attack us."

AHA! That's it.

Given this perspective, there are more tools to work with, but things still haven't gotten any clearer.

BTW, I think President Bush has done an excellent job so far. He's really improved, even just in the last week. He's poised and confident and in the midst of being a leader, he's still human. The fact that we didn't bomb someone back to the stone ages as retaliation immediately following September 11 gives me hope that the ones in charge are going to do the right thing, whatever that may be.

I'm currently chewing on this article which gives some background history of the Middle East starting with the Crusades. The author's "answer" involves changing the entire social and political structure of the region -- an "Enlightenment" of the Middle East. I don't yet see how this can be done (the author offers no plan of action) and I'm still wondering what the reaction will be to the West exerting influence to acheive this goal. (Or is he suggesting it will come about naturally?) While it's not religion that the West will be trying to change, could this be viewed as a new kind of Crusade?

Fighting back: Ten things you can do right now
"Show your confidence in the nation and our way of life." Evan told me about the email circulating telling everyone to show confidence by buying some stock on Monday. Any little bit helps. That idea has been reiterated all over the net. This article has nine other things you can do to fight back.

A heartfelt thank you
Pictures of shows of support from around the world.

I've been watching the news almost non-stop since September 11. And I have nothing to give myself. No trinket, no bone, no gift. No answers. I'm the kind of person who wants an answer. I'm selfish that way.

There are a couple concepts that kept popping into my mind over the last few days.

• This is not Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was a military installation. The enemy took responsibility for their actions. There existed the possibility of immediate retaliation.
• Colin Powell acknowledges that as a military man he is more used to fighting soldiers that occupy an area of land. That the enemy can be defined in space-time. How do you wage war against a group of people scattered across the globe? Is that a war you can win in the traditional sense?
• There are conflicting, but not mutually exclusive, interests between security, freedom and privacy. Another war between these ideals is brewing.
• Stricter airport security is only a first step.
• The attack was not sophisticated. The most sophisticated part of the plan was training a pilot. If you can train one group, you can train four or six or eight. The thing is, we'd rather not accept an enemy that was any less than sophisticated.
• Fear fear. It is one word repeated, but in two different contexts.
• "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." That seems to be a catch-phrase that's making the rounds once more. But what is the cost of eternal vigilance? What if it is freedom? Do we then have an endless cycle of debt?

Then I read this article by Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle. He conveys most of the ideas above more eloquently than I ever could.

A couple other articles:

A new breed of terrorism
Terrorists of the past used violence as a means to an end. They wanted recognition. They had political agendas. They understood that there was a line that, if crossed, would be counterproductive to their cause.

Metaphor and War by George Lakoff
Written during the Gulf War. In the Fairy Tale of the Just War, the villain, the victim and the hero are just three of the metaphors used to justify war.

A Quick Reaction by Noam Chomsky
In the Middle East the United States is the villain...

How to defeat bin Laden
Treat him as a criminal, a fugitive from justice instead of waging war.

An email about Gordon Sinclair's radio broadcast from 1973 has been circulating since the attacks on the United States. I approach these emails with a certain trepidation given the tendency of the Internet to spread hoaxes. There are numerous confirmations of Sinclair's broadcast on the net, and today there's been an explosion in the number of weblogging references to Gordon Sinclair. The emailed version differs from the transcripts of that broadcast, but they're both good reading to keep our spirits high.

Emailed to me by Greggman:

America: The Good Neighbor.

Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his broadcast.

"This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of these countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When France was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans Who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.When earthquakes hit distant cities, it is the United States that hurries in
to help. This spring, 59 American communities were flattened by tornadoes. Nobody helped.

The Marshall Plan and the Truman Policy pumped billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent, warmongering Americans.

I'd like to see just one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplane. Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tri-Star, or the Douglas DC10? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all the International lines except Russia fly American Planes?

Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or woman on the moon? You talk about Japanese technocracy, and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy, and you get automobiles.

You talk about American technocracy, and you find men on the moon – not once, but several times - and safely home again.

You talk about scandals, and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everybody to look at. Even their draft-dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, and most of them, unless they are breaking Canadian laws, are getting American dollars from ma and pa at home to spend here. When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke.

I can name you 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles. I hope Canada is not one of those."

Stand proud, America!

...made smaller by the Internet. I just got an email from a John Weir asking a couple questions about Daypop. Well, I was writing a response when I realized, "What a coincidence, I think I know a John Weir from my Berkeley days!" So I ask him if he's the same guy -- it's a total shot in the dark.

Turns out he is the one and the same John Weir that I knew almost ten years ago! Which goes to show, it doesn't hurt to ask.

He just did the design for the International Herald Tribune, which is pretty cool. I like the departure from the standard newspaper format with the headlines in one column and the short-copy in another column. Also, check out his site, Smoking Gun (not to be confused with the public records site, THE Smoking Gun), which has some interesting code snippets.

I'll never abandon my musical roots. I've said it before, I'll say it again:

BON JOVI ROCKS!

This is "Must-See WMV".

I was worried that I had committed a strategic error by launching Daypop right before I was leaving town for Labor Day Weekend. It didn't even occur to me that it was probably a bad idea. But what if something went wrong? It's not like Daypop had really been tested. Yet, it's not like I'm going to skip Vegas. Forgehduhaboudit. I'm there no matter what. So I come back last night and there were 99 new sites submitted that needed to be reviewed. This morning there are over a hundred more. Back to work.

Looks like Daypop is doing well. Word of it is spreading fast across the net. Do a search for "Daypop" on Daypop today and 23 sites come up!

I guess it's time to launch Daypop. I've been holding off on this since there is still so much to do, but I think it's important to just get this site out there.

Daypop searches news sites and weblogs on a daily basis. The idea for Daypop came with the realization that Google (at the time) was not indexing certain sites frequently enough. Most pages took more than a month to make it into the search results. While it looks like Google has fixed this problem recently -- indexing weblogs almost daily -- I figure there is still some value to be had from a search engine that can limit its search to weblogs only, and also limits its search to news and journals that are current.

While Daypop started off different, over time it came to resemble Google in a lot of ways... Kudos to Google for creating such an excellent search engine and for the kick-in-the-ass-that-I-needed to launch Daypop. Check it out and give me some feedback. I'll be starting work on Daypop Version 2.0 soon.

Time to release this baby into the world!

Chez Panisse, a small restaurant in Berkeley, turned 30 this last weekend. Eating at Chez Panisse is an experience to be savored. Far and away the best food I've ever had. I'm not talking about the cafe on the top floor. That's just mediocre. Make reservations for the main room on the ground floor a month in advance.

I never thought of describing Chez Panisse as hedonistic. But afterwards, you've got to remind yourself not to feel guilty of taking such pleasure in eating! Yes, it was that good.

The Dell PowerEdge 2500SC server arrived via UPS today. It weighs 99 lbs. in its box. Damn near killed myself getting it up to my loft. The thing is built like a tank.

I thought I was paying a couple hundred dollars extra by buying Dell, compared to just buying the separate parts from online discount vendors. But I was wrong. The Dell is a deal. The extra money got me an industrial strength case with six bizillion fans (enough air movement to cool my room in the summer time), redundant hot swap power supplies, six hot swap hard drive spaces and the most beautifully laid out interior of a computer I've ever seen.

Instead of a jumble of ribbons which is what my home-built systems look like, the Dell has one ribbon, nicely folded into the cooling duct (!) that is removed through thumb screws! Plus, as far as I can know, the Dell is the only computer with a ServerWorks HE-SL chipset motherboard that supports 6 DIMM slots. That means I can buy lower density, cheaper memory without worrying about using up all the slots.

Dell makes a lot of their money off memory and hard drives and options. I ordered a fairly minimal configuration and planned on adding memory and SCSI drives myself.

Installing extra memory (Crucial is excellent!) was a cinch so I'm now up to over 1GB of SDRAM. That was an easy upgrade. Waaaaaay cheaper than buying memory through Dell.

I was going to add a couple hard drives for the RAID array too but here's the catch. Ha! There's always a catch. The computer doesn't include the hot swap drive carriages, so it's not just a matter of buying the drives from say Googlegear for cheap and plugging them in. Tomorrow I've got to call the spare parts division at Dell to see if they sell the carriages. If not, or if they're expensive, then I guess I'll have to buy the hard drives from Dell at about a $100 markup per drive. This is not too bad considering things are less likely to go wrong this way.

A secret about the 2500SC. It's about $500 less than the 2500 model. What does the extra $500 get you if you decide on the non-SC model? It's "certified" for clustering. There's also the option to rack mount the 2500 for several hundred dollars more. That's it. Same machine otherwise, supposedly.

I was pretty proud of myself today at having the will power to eat lunch first before opening the box and geeking out all afternoon. "Ooooh, two level motherboard!"

Now, it's a matter of getting FreeBSD to recognize the Perc3/Di RAID controller in this monster... I haven't had any luck so far.

I've been listening to Rooty recently.
These guys are way ahead of the curve.
This is my kind of House.
The whole album is excellent,
but my fav is Track #2, Breakaway.

"Taming the Web" attacks three myths concerning the future of the Internet.

Myth #1: The Internet Is Too International to Be Controlled
Myth #2: The Net Is Too Interconnected to Control
Myth #3: The Net Is Too Filled with Hackers to Control

The main point of the article is that control of the Internet is inevitable and that we need to actively participate in determining the rules, otherwise the rules will be set for us.

via Slashdot

I want a girl who gets up early.
I want a girl who stays up late.
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity,
who uses a machete to cut through red tape,
with fingernails that shine like justice
and a voice that is dark like tinted glass.
She is fast,
thorough,
and sharp as a tack.
She is touring the facility and picking up slack.
I want a girl with a short skirt and a looooong... looong... jacket!

...and the mandatory drug testing that goes along with it. Including Chess as an Olympic sport is just the first step in a plan by the IOC to fish for higher ratings with competitive Jeopardy.

Actually, in this day and age, I'd expect the IOC to include QuakeCon in the Olympics. At least Quake requires immense physical skill and endurance on the part of the virtual character who runs and jumps going full bore.

OK. Why don't I just get to the point? Chess is not a sport.

Perfect.

From Scott-living-Down-Under comes this article about Ghost Sites, web sites that are still running long after its creators have abandoned them.

I watched the Ghost Sites Movie. Yes, I have nothing better to do. I swear I saw Fandango flash by. Given that every movie in L.A. is preceded by a Fandango commercial, wouldn't it be great if those commercials were paid for before Fandango went bust, and therefore are "Ghost Commercials"?

I'm not saying Fandango isn't perhaps reincarnated after receiving further funding. I just like the idea of life after death for these companies because of pre-paid web-hosting and commercial slots. These companies gather a certain momentum during operation that is able to keep them in our collective consciousness long after the last employee has left.

The web as life? Do you sense the religious overtones? Daily Radar, you will always be remembered...

There are a couple interesting comments on Dog and Pony Shows from Hell on Slashdot. Make sure you set threshold to 3 to weed out most of the crap. A couple recent stories started the discussion about faked Dog and Ponies. Here's one of them:

VisuaLABS' GroutFree(tm) technology allows LCD panels to be tiled with no visible break in the display image. Except the 42" GroutFree(tm) demo unit, supposedly four LCD panels tiled together, was actually a consumer plasma display bought at a local electronics retailer.

Sounds like a lot of hype for software that takes at most a day to write. Blogdex ranks popular links in weblogs. Something's definitely wrong with the software because after indexing 9000 weblogs there'd be way more than 4 instances of the top ranked link, which at this time, according to Blogdex, is www.humanforsale.com. I know this because I did this same experiment and came up with 10 links for that useless page on The Periodic Table for Men from a pool of several hundred weblogs. Plus, Blogdex seems to include weblogs into its list of popular links, which defeats it's purpose in gauging the popular memes of the day.

Someone jumped the gun here by telling the world about Blogdex before it's ready for primetime.

Update 7/31/01: I may have spoken too soon about the "4 link" thing. Checking again today, there's a new list of top ten links which leads me to believe "4 links" means 4 added links since the last time Blogdex updated. I guess other people are confused as to what "4 links" means also.

I got an email telling me my Budapest pages were linked to on Backwash.com under a column called Newthink. Backwash calls itself a web surfing community that organizes the web "according to personality", not subject matter. It looks like a collection of strictly structured weblogs: the entries are weekly columns and there's a separate listing for recommended links.

Interesting that someone is trying to impose some structure on something as amorphous as a weblog. I have a feeling non-webloggers don't really know what to make of weblogs. Is Backwash a format that's easier to understand, having the weekly (hence predictable, familiar and like print) publishing schedule and the separate list of links? Will this kind of idea bring the concept of the personal reputation manager to a wider audience?

The highlight of the day at the Mercedes Open was Taylor Dent serving Carlos Moya sixteen (!) aces in a game that would go t