Monday, December 2, 2002

CityBlogs Blog and the City City Guide Meets Blog "Veteran blogger John Hiler of Corante and blank>Microcontent News has launched a city events guide in blog form for New Yorkers, blank>CityBlogs: New York. The site and e-newsletter focus (initially) on event listings for cinema, book readings and talks. Hiler explains the concept this post, Bringing the Power of Blogs to a City Near You: 'I started devouring the local listings guides to find more events: the Village Voice listings, the Time Out NY events calendar, the New Yorker's Goings On About Town. I found the hundreds of events in the listings overwhelming: what I really wanted was someone to find the most interesting events and tell me which ones to go to. I wanted that someone to be an expert in their field. And I wanted that someone to cover niche categories that just weren't in the local event listings: jazz jam sessions in the Village, kickboxing matches in Queens, or Haitian dance classes near Union Square.' He also defines the the advantages of blogs over local listings: • Personality versus Dry Descriptions • Useful Recommendations versus Overwhelming Comprehensiveness • Readable by Anyone versus Accessible Only to Experts • Niche Coverage versus Mainstream Coverage • Local Stringers versus No Followups 'This is what Jeff Jarvis calls the killer app of weblogs: local coverage of events,' Hiler writes. 'Bloggers can provide the sort of distributed coverage of local events that newspapers can't even dream of.' True. This is an exciting venture, one well worth watching. And Hiler definitely has a handle on a successful value proposition — niche events listings and coverage." [Hypergene MediaBlog] I just know that John is going to include events sponsored by the New York Public Library, RIGHT JOHN? I mean, how can you have a "book readings" category and NOT check in with NYPL? Why, I'll bet Carrie Bickner (drat - her site seems to be down at the moment) or one of the many other fine folks at NYPL would love to help out with this project. After all, I really like the idea behind CityBlogs, and I hope he's trying to start a Chicago version. As for asking John why his blogs don't have RSS feeds, don't get him started. We debated this during dinner after the Yale conference, and John has his reasons for not providing feeds for his own work. It's a crying shame, though, because it means I can't keep up with all of the great work that he and the other Corante bloggers are doing, although that wouldn't stop someone else from scraping their sites, now would it? [The Shifted Librarian] Can't wait to find/start a San Francisco CityBlog. But how do I filter on just the event types I'm interested in? 11:01:16 PM

Planning the move I've been contemplating it for quite some time, and now I'm building the motivation: I'm planning to move the deeje.com domain to my server. This involves quite a bit o' work! install 10.2 update fink install Roller? get email working move domain The rub here is in choosing a weblog server. Roller is the strong contender because it is Struts-based. The downsize is that it uses Castor, and I'm preferential to Torque right now. I've been following the blogosphere threads about persistence and Java, and it seems the whole community can't agree on a successor to EJB for the 80% who don't need EJB. Castor gets a lot of play, as does Hibernate; but no one seems to talk about Torque. :-( Well, get it into MySQL, and we can work on the persistence layer later on... The other rub is email. I couldn't get the 10.1 server to set up email, and the UI should have made it drop-dead simple. Steve has had good results, so maybe I just need to try again, this time with 10.2. Eventually, I want to turn all of the categories on my current site into RSS channels in my weblog. So in effect, the website will be one gian weblog: with the following categories: java mac os x family music photos videos gallery The multimedia channels would probably be better served with Bloxsom, while the others are handled by Roller. The front page weblog would then be aggregated fia Flock? Ah cool! Geez, at this rate, this is gonna take forever! 10:44:26 PM

Best practices Work is hella busy right now... they want to code freeze last week, and are dead set on shipping next week. Whew! As I reflect on the last few contracts, I can re-affirm several simple software development best practices, like: triangulated specifications: marketing, engineering, QA assertions unit-tests automated builds code review regression tests baking time concentric testing: QA, alpha, beta... ...things to emphasis in my future contracts! 10:29:59 PM

Thanksgiving and Grandma Anne the trip down to LA was good, if short. The drive down was OK, and Jackson was an angel. He slept a lot of the time, and played with his mom the rest of the time. It took us about 7 hours, with a few rest stops to stretch. We stopped at Kettleman City for lunch, but In-n-Out was closed! It took Paulette a while to accept this, as there were tons of people in their parking lot eating burgers. TG dinner was great, as always! Dorian and Jenny were there as well, and we had a fabulous time around the dinner table. Jackson, unfortunately, couldn't stay up for the festivities :-) On Friday, we visited with Grandma Anne at the hospital. She looked really good, alert, and happy to see her great-grandson. A tear welled up in her eye when it was time for us to go... damn, that hurt. On Saturday, my mum made her famous meatloaf, and we had another great family meal around the table. Mom works herself to a frenzy cooking during the holidays, but I don't think she'd stop if we asked her to. The drive home wasn't as smooth, what with the increased traffic, the rainy weather, the darkness, and the shift in Jackson's routine. He was still very good, but he looked as uncomfortable as we felt, so god bless him for putting up with it all with so little fuss! 4:44:08 PM

Thanksgiving and Grandma Anne the trip down to LA was good, if short. The drive down was OK, and Jackson was an angel. He slept a lot of the time, and played with his mom the rest of the time. It took us about 7 hours, with a few rest stops to stretch. We stopped at Kettleman City for lunch, but In-n-Out was closed! It took Paulette a while to accept this, as there were tons of people in their parking lot eating burgers. TG dinner was great, as always! Dorian and Jenny were there as well, and we had a fabulous time around the dinner table. Jackson, unfortunately, couldn't stay up for the festivities :-) On Friday, we visited with Grandma Anne at the hospital. She looked really good, alert, and happy to see her great-grandson. A tear welled up in her eye when it was time for us to go... damn, that hurt. On Saturday, my mum made her famous meatloaf, and we had another great family meal around the table. Mom works herself to a frenzy cooking during the holidays, but I don't think she'd stop if we asked her to. The drive home wasn't as smooth, what with the increased traffic, the rainy weather, the darkness, and the shift in Jackson's routine. He was still very good, but he looked as uncomfortable as we felt, so god bless him for putting up with it all with so little fuss! 4:44:02 PM

Science and Buddhism Reality seekers unite Wired: What Buddhists Know about Science. The Science and the Mind conference, held last month in Canberra, Australia, explored areas of possible contact and cooperation between Tibetan Buddhism and modern science. [...] While Tibetan Buddhism and other ancient practices like Taoism have developed scientifically accurate explanations of some phenomena, the Dalai Lama has also said Buddhists can abandon scripture that has been reliably disproved by science. No creationist controversies here, then. The Dalai Lama has an intense non-specialist interest in science, and he believes there are points of contact (with Buddhism) in cosmology, neuroscience, physics, quantum physics, and modern psychology. He has even opened a school of science at his monastery in India. "I feel it is basically the Buddhist tradition to try to see reality. Science has a different method of investigation. One relies on mathematics; Buddhists work mainly through meditation. So different approaches and different methods, but both science and Buddhism are trying to see reality," he said. "When I meet with scientists, it has nothing to do with religious faith. It's just theory or the experience of experiment. So, today's meeting is using reason only, not faith. I'm not trying to convert scientists to Buddhism, and they are not trying to convert me into a radical materialist!" (Someone who believes all phenomena are physical only.) Problems remain, however. While Tibetan Buddhists are keen to embrace science along shared points of contact, scientists frequently remain uncomfortable with that kind of intimacy. [...] I suspect that the practice of attentive examination, which is the main way scientists obtain their insights, hunches, big pictures and all, has more to do with meditation than we usually think. [Seb's Open Research] I nice middleground! 3:03:45 PM