2004

In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

• phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
• patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
• sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
• koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
• penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
• sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

If you have any more first-hand video footage, or higher-quality versions of any of these videos, please let me know and I’ll add them. Most of these videos are also available as direct downloads from Cheese and Crackers, Asian Tsunami Videos, and Wave of Destruction.

December 29, 2004: Added two more videos. There is also some new footage I haven’t converted yet: BBC footage from a second-story balcony in Aceh, Indonesia.

December 30, 2004: Wow, you people used over 400GB of bandwidth in a single day! I’m now redirecting all video requests to several mirrors, courtesy of Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, Nathan Perkins, and Ask Bjorn Hansen. Thanks for the help, guys! (Sorry about the temporary downtime while I was sorting out the details.) If you can contribute a mirror and have loads of bandwidth, please e-mail me ASAP.

December 30, 2004: Archive.org is now hosting all the videos. All download links will now redirect to the Archive.org mirror. Thanks to everyone who mirrored the files overnight.

Also, a final note… If these videos touched you in any way, consider donating to the relief efforts.

December 31, 2004: Basically, we broke Archive.org! The largest repository of public-domain audio, video, and text in the world couldn’t handle the demand for these videos.

I’m now hosting all these videos on my BitTorrent tracker instead. Because of the small size of these videos, I was hoping to avoid requiring a BitTorrent client for downloading, but the demand is just too high.

January 4, 2004: Back to Archive.org, at Brewster Kahle’s request. He thinks they can handle the traffic now.

January 12, 2004: If you’re looking for newer videos, the definitive source is the questionably-named Wave of Destruction. The site is updated constantly, with videos available by BitTorrent or direct download from multiple mirrors.

I know this comes dangerously close to breaking my First Rule, but what’s the point of a personal website if you can’t post baby photos?

With that said, here’s Eliot’s First Christmas!

And for everyone who can’t stomach adorable baby photos, Jason Scott has the complete soundtrack to The Last Starfighter, The Musical.

Last week, Apple Computer filed a patent application covering the iTunes Producer application and backend architecture, used for managing and sending music to the iTunes Music Store. The patent includes screenshots of the application, which Apple only distributes to authorized musicians and record labels.

One screenshot includes some interesting fields, such as Parental Advisory warnings, BPM, and various sales and copyright information. There’s a button for adding Lyrics, which may indicate future support for lyric searching in iTunes Music Store.

Unfortunately, you need a special plugin to view the embedded images at the Patent Office website, so I’ve converted all the drawings to GIF and included them below.

itunes_patent_cover.gif

itunes_patent_figure1.gif

itunes_patent_figure2.gif

itunes_patent_figure3a.gif

itunes_patent_figure3b.gif

itunes_patent_figure4.gif

itunes_patent_figure5.gif

itunes_patent_figure6.gif

itunes_patent_figure7.gif

itunes_patent_figure8.gif

itunes_patent_figure9.gif

The U.S. Patent Office Search is consistently interesting. If you search by “Assignee Name,” you can keep track of all the pending and approved patent activity by your favorite companies. For example, here are all approved patents and pending applications for Apple Computer. Some other interesting company searches: Google’s pending and approved, TiVo’s pending and approved, and Yahoo’s pending and approved.

Not surprisingly, there are a few good blogs that focus exclusively on new patents. Patently Obvious and Patent Pending. And I just found Fresh Patents, a fantastic daily index of new patents, with RSS feeds by industry.

I’ve been having a big debate with the guys here at work about the future of movie theaters, and I’m wondering what you think. Here’s my hypothesis:

Home video never hurt the theaters because of the movie industry’s staggered distribution schedules, from box office to DVD to cable. If DVDs were available the same day of a movie’s theatrical release, it would have hurt movie theaters badly.

Now here’s how it comes into play in the future:

Like in any other form of media, the Internet screws up traditional controls over distribution. Many people, confronted with the option of downloading a copy of a movie on the week of release (lesser-quality, cheap) or going to a movie theater (high-quality, very expensive), will choose the former. Of course, this assumes that downloading movies will inevitably be as fast and as simple as downloading music. (Which, in turn, leads to better ways of playing downloaded video on your TV with portable video devices or networked media players.)

Not everyone, of course, because seeing a movie in the theater is a different experience. It’s social and it’s great quality, focusing your attention completely. But going to a movie will become a more elite experience, like the $14 tickets at the Arclight.

But enough families and normal folk (the bread and butter of neighborhood megaplexes) will stop going to affect their livelihood.

This Forbes article, written in March 2001, discusses the state of the movie theater industry. Even without taking the Internet into consideration, movie theaters aren’t doing well as it is, and three of the top five chains went out of business in 2001. (I can’t verify it, but I’d wager that the rising ticket costs and increases in in-theater advertising was designed to offset these losses.)

Meanwhile, compare these 2003 statistics for the home video market to box office sales. The gap between home video sales/rentals and the box office has increased dramatically in the last few years.

The only thing saving the movie theaters is their exclusive access to new films for the first few months of their lifecycle. If the Internet loosens that hold, movie companies will be forced to adapt, most likely by radically minimizing the gap from theater-to-video or offering an iTunes Music Store for films. Earlier this year, Robert Occhialini nicely summarized this situation.

Predictions of the movie theater’s demise have been common (and wrong) for the last century, first by the television and then by the VCR. I’d argue that both did, in fact, erode at the popularity of the movies. But they survived because of their distribution rights. Any opinions?

January 5, 2005: IMDB reports that the number of tickets sold in 2004 fell 2.5 percent from the previous year, and is down 7.5 percent since 2002. Despite this, there was a slight increase in dollar totals. I can’t think of another reason besides rising ticket prices.

The Grey Video is the brilliant Jay-Z/Beatles music video mashup of DJ Dangermouse’s “Encore” off the infamous Grey Album.

The official site is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don’t know if it’s coming back. Until then, I’m going to mirror the high-quality Quicktime version.

Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)

BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)

Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.

I received a cease-and-desist from the Walt Disney Corporation for hosting the Kleptones’ Night at the Hip-Hopera mashup. (Disney owns Hollywood Records, who owns the rights to Queen’s catalog.)

The irony is that I’m not even hosting the files anymore… The links on my site are all redirected to someone else’s server, and have been for weeks. At any rate, I’ll be forced to remove the direct links by November 23.

As far as I know, I was the first person to put the DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album on the Web. Now, I see the suppression of artistic freedom again with the Kleptones album, which has always been freely-distributable and never made a dime. It’s depressing to think that our horribly broken copyright law means that nobody can legally hear this album or create others like it.

The cease-and-desist is below. The album itself can still be downloaded from the mirrors on the official Kleptones site, but I’m not sure for how long. If anyone has any ideas for creative protest, now’s the time.

Update: I’ve compiled a list of active mirrors to download the album. If you want to be added to the list, e-mail me or add a comment.

This morning, Eliot was constantly flailing his arms around while lying in his playpen. It reminded me of Stan, the used-boat salesman from the Secret of Monkey Island:

Yeah, I’m a geek.

Greg Knauss doesn’t have a blog, so I occasionally publish some of his writing here, because it deserves a wider audience. Today, Greg writes:

There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.

Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.

Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.

This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.

It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.

Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.

A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.

That’s a problem.

Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.

The question is, where do we start?

If you want to comment, take Greg’s advice and keep it reasonable and dispassionate. Whining (or gloating) about the election will be deleted.

With my current host, I have a one terabyte bandwidth quota. That should be enough for most anyone, but apparently not for me:

bandwidth_blown.gif

With less than two hours to go before my October monthly limit is reset, I’ve used 995 of my 1000 GB. (A disturbing 262GB of that was the Tony Hawk/Star Wars Kid video.)

I make an active effort to avoid discussing politics on my site. Like religion, political convictions are deeply-held, highly personal, and nearly impossible to persuade.

That said, I’d like to point you to Internet Veterans for Truth’s “Never Forget”, an election-related campaign that launched a few minutes ago. They’re featuring tons of documentary video highlighting the records of both George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Regardless of your political leanings, I’m impressed by this new form of political protest. This group of computer geeks (and close friends) is expressing themselves in the way they know best: by making information as freely available as possible.

They’ve collected hundreds of megabytes of video, all available for instant streaming over five ten 100Mbit lines. (For those less technical, this is an absolutely staggering amount of bandwidth.) In addition to streaming over http, all of the clips are also available from their BitTorrent server. (Including one 260MB torrent of every video.)

This reminds me of Marc Perkel, who rented a $2000 server for the month to serve high-quality downloads of Fahrenheit 9/11, but taken to the next level. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see several documentaries hosted in their entirety by the weekend.)

The copyright issues are interesting… Almost all the video is under copyright, but because it’s being moderated and used as a form of protest, it’s being turned into political speech. I doubt a free speech/fair use argument would fly in court, but more importantly, I don’t think the copyright holders will care in the days leading up to the election.

October 30, 2004: They added complete, high-quality versions of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Going Upriver, ready for streaming or download. This is an unprecedented move.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been passively looking for the identity of the Afro-Ninja. I posted a $50 question on Google Answers, but it didn’t turn up anything for several weeks.

Tonight, I finally got an answer! Edward Shen informed me that it was Mark Allen Hicks, a stunt man auditioning for a Nike commercial with Allen Iverson and Jim Kelly.

Edward works with people who know Mark, and one friend saw him come out of the audition “pissed off with a bloody nose.” Looking at his IMDB photographs, it’s clear this is the same guy. Compare for yourself.

Now, can someone get me in contact with Mark? I’d love to ask him some questions about the video.

In the last few days, Mazda started a new viral marketing campaign in the unfortunate style of “Raging Cow.” Take a look at HalloweenM3, a Blogspot weblog supposedly written by a 22-year-old New Yorker named “Kid Halloween.” (Update: The blog was taken down, see details below.)

With little effort, it’s clear this was designed to promote the new Mazda3 model. The clues are obvious: links to videos featuring the Mazda3 (here and here), the HalloweenM3 username, and rich media hosted at Rackspace, an expensive dedicated hosting provider. Plus, Mazda has tried the viral marketing thing before.

But this is the most half-hearted attempt at viral marketing I’ve seen, especially in light of recent web efforts like the elaborate I Love Bees and Be More Chill campaigns. Four entries in a Blogspot blog isn’t very impressive.

One interesting point is that this entry claims to have recorded the Mazda commercial off the Manhattan Neighborhood Network public access channel, and several seconds of MNN footage are edited into the beginning of this video clip. I wonder how MNN would feel about being exploited for commercial use by Mazda. (I e-mailed them to find out.)

Thanks to Witz.org for the tip.

Update: Autoblog has some thoughts about the campaign.

October 22, 2004: The blog was taken down! Fortunately, Yahoo has a cached copy. And you can still view the user profile and videos.

The blog world is freaking out about Jon Stewart’s incendiary appearance on CNN’s Crossfire today, in which Jon calls hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala “partisan hacks” that are reducing the level of political discourse in the country. (Here’s the complete transcript.)

My friend Phil was quick to post the complete appearance on his BitTorrent server, and my other friend Leonard is hosting the direct download. (It’s good to have friends with lots of bandwidth.)

Watch the video now, and watch Leonard’s bandwidth graph skyrocket! The 36MB WMV looks and sounds great, so don’t bother downloading the 97 MB version.

So I noticed these incoming links from Technorati, all of which appear to be from automatically-generated Blogspot weblogs. They all appear to steal entries from a legitimate Typepad weblog, The Last Minute. I’m guessing this is another attempt at gaming search engines, but I can’t figure out the details. Take a look at the sites and let me know if you have any theories.

http://digitalvideo.blogspot.com/

http://digitalvideoediting.blogspot.com/

http://appleg5.blogspot.com/

http://homestarunner.blogspot.com/

http://thelastminute.blogspot.com/

http://ipodjack.blogspot.com/

(I’m not linking to them because I don’t want to help promote their Pagerank.)

Update: The creator of the cloned sites contacted me… He was experimenting with techniques for improving the Pagerank of his own website. He now understands the problems with this sort of cheating and promptly took them all offline.

It may not be Episode 3, but the Star Wars Kid makes a cameo in Tony Hawk Underground 2. (Thanks to Dan Beckett for the tip and original video clip.) Update: Here’s a high-quality video of the appearance with audio, thanks to Erik:

tonyhawk_starwarskid_high.wmv (WMV, 5.5MB)

Here are instructions for finding him, courtesy of Travis Ogdon:

“On the Boston level if you ollie through the glass windows on one of the buildings (it’s one or two to the left of the one where Ben Franklin is hiding) you land in a living room with a flat panel tv on the wall. If you stand in front of the TV Ghyslain gets up and shouts something about watching Star Wars (which you’re now preventing). Hitting O (on the PS2) will result in him showing off his moves.”

October 13, 2004: Joe Ford confirms that you can unlock the “Geeky Kid” character by beating the all goals in all levels in Easy Mode. They don’t refer to him as “Star Wars Kid,” which indirectly answers the question about whether he was compensated for his likeness. (He wasn’t.)

October 14, 2004: The THUG2 SWK video was featured on G4TechTV’s Screen Savers show yesterday. Erik has the video of the Screen Savers appearance. No mention of my site, and they mistakenly assume that Ghyslain was paid for his appearance. Tacky!

The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera is one of the the best mashup remixes I’ve ever heard, a fluid blend of classic and modern hip hop with Queen’s epic catalog. Please don’t miss the last track, Question.mp3. It’s like a plunderphonic call to arms against bad copyright law.

The official site is having bandwidth problems, so I’m mirroring the entire album, as individual songs and an uncut 110 MB MP3.

As far as I can tell, nobody has listed the sample origins online yet. I don’t have the time to locate the short samples, but here are most of the primary sources. If you can fill in any gaps (in bold) or have any corrections, leave a comment!

September 24, 2004: The sample list is almost complete, except for the source of the vocals in Stop.mp3. If you can identify the artist and song, please let me know. Found! Shane did some expert Googling and identified the sample as Looptroop w/Chords & Timbuktu, “Heads Day Off.” [MP3, 6.4MB]

Last year, I wrote an entry about karaoke songs on Usenet, focusing on the oddball subgenre of indie and alt-rock karaoke. Well, a year later, not much has changed… Here are some of the recent hipster hits found in alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke:

Modest_Mouse_-_Float_On_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Yeah_Yeah_Yeahs_-_Maps_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Franz_Ferdinand_-_Matinee_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

The_Streets_-_Dry_Your_Eyes_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

The_Streets_-_Fit_But_You_Know_It_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Snow_Patrol_-_Spitting_Games_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Jet_-_Cold_Hard_Bitch_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Badly_Drawn_Boy_-_Disillusion_[Karaoke_Version].mp3

Which raises the question, is there a big overlap between karaoke fans and indie-rock fans? I can understand requesting Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” at a karaoke bar, but Franz Ferdinand?

As predicted, many of the Athens 2004 Olympics events are being digitized and uploaded to the Internet. The quality is good, often ripped from HDTV and international sources. (Many of the clips are from Brazilian television, with commentary in Portuguese. Those darn Brazilians again!)

To judge the video quality, here’s a sample clip of yesterday’s controversial judging of Russia’s Alexei Nemov, in which the audience’s vocal protests shut down the Men’s Gymnastics High Bar Finals for a full ten minutes.

Video: Alexei Nemov – Male Gymnastics High Bar Finals (Sample) (.MPG, 25MB)

Like Yahoo’s Most Popular, there’s an emphasis on women’s beach volleyball and women’s gymnastics. But many other events are represented, as well. Below is a list of every event posted to the alt.binaries.olympics Usenet newsgroup since the Olympics started on August 13.

The Assembly demo party in Helsinki is one of the largest geek gatherings in the world, where thousands converge to watch and compete in graphic demo competitions. (View the panorama photo from last year’s event, with over 5,000 attendees.)

This year, the winner of the “Browser Demo” category was Mooncheese, written in pure Javascript and DHTML. Several classic real-time demo effects are represented, such as copper bars, tunnels, voxels, Mandelbrot zooms, and various vector effects. In Javascript!

You can view the Mooncheese demo mirrored locally on my server, or download the source locally.

It works well in Firefox 0.9 and Internet Explorer 6, but not Safari. Read the release notes for more information.

As part of my ongoing interest in Metafilter statistics, I was curious to see which sites Metafilter users link to the most.

From a complete dump of Metafilter’s front-page post database back to July 1999 (thanks, Matt!), I extracted the unique domains linked from each entry and added them all up.

The Top 50 results are below, proving that the NewsFilter moniker isn’t too far off. (Or you can view the entire list.)

Greg Knauss doesn’t have a weblog of his own, so I asked if I could post his rebuttal to Paul Graham’s Great Hackers essay. Greg writes:

“Hello, my name is Paul Graham. I have a bunch of opinions and prejudices, and I’ll now present them as fact: Python is better than Java, Linux is better than Windows, quiet is better than noise, one big problem is better than a thousand tiny ones, hackers are better than normal people. If you disagree with me, then you are obviously not a super hacker, and are instead some sad little monkey, banging on a keyboard.”

Jesus. s/hacker/self-satisfied prima donna/g.

You know what a hacker is? It’s someone who enjoys solving problems. Great hackers do it elegantly. Good hackers do it at all. How they do it is irrelevant, and it certainly has nothing to do with what language they choose or what OS they run or if they’re politically correct or not. To claim otherwise is arrogant, narrow-minded foolishness.

The fact that I’m learning C# and Windows.Forms does not make me any less of a hacker. In fact, it makes me more of one, because I’m able to solve a problem I couldn’t with all the Python and Linux in the world. Oh, but I forgot: hackers only solve the problems that interest them, if they’re presented in the right way and in the right environment. Because hackers are special.

Joshua pointed out that while it may seem that every smart person I know is using open-source tools, it’s a product of observational bias. Open-source programmers hang out with other open-source programmers. I don’t know many Windows applications developers, so I’ve never met a Windows super-genius. But they exist, and to say they don’t is a form of technophobic racism.

At work, we’ve started using iDictate for transcribing audio. After sending them an MP3, they send back a written transcription within an hour or two for about $.01/word. (They split the audio into manageable chunks, distribute it to typists around the world, reassemble the text, and send it back.)

Phil noticed that they offered a 100-word free trial by phone, so decided to have a little fun. He called their toll-free number, started his favorite MP3, and held the phone up to the speakers. They e-mailed him the transcript below. (They couldn’t figure out the words “find emotion” and left it blank.)

Try it out! Call 1-877-DICTATE (1-877-342-8283), press “1” to dictate, then “1” to do the free trial, and start recording. If you have any good results, post them in the comments.

Update: Ryan sent them They Might Be Giants’ “Exquisite Dead Guy.” They mangled the lyrics.

An employee at All Music Guide just e-mailed me with a response to the nearly-universal criticism of their redesign. I pasted the entire text below. (The entire e-mail was just posted to their homepage. It’s gone now.) Feel free to debate in the comments.

Update: In response to the complaints, AMG is slowly fixing some of the more heinous rendering bugs with non-IE browsers. (On-hover link cursors and tabular data are mostly working, and the giant banner is gone.) If you want to use the old site, use the old IP address (for now). (It now goes to Allmovies.com.)

July 15, 2004: The site’s faster (though I’m still getting periodic timeout errors and slowdowns), and many of the worst rendering errors have been fixed (though a couple remain). They’re working out the little kinks and I appreciate the effort, even if it doesn’t address my larger complaints about the site.

Also of interest: In two hours, Tim Murtaugh was able to create a standards-compliant cross-browser version of the AMG homepage, proving that it doesn’t take a large company to make a website that works for everyone.

July 18, 2004: Jeff Veen wrote some interesting thoughts about websites working in conflict with user goals, using the All Music Guide redesign as a striking example of users routing around damage. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

July 20, 2004: Adrian Holovaty wrote All Music Guide Corrector, a wonderful Firefox extension that seamlessly fixes many of the three of the site’s biggest usability issues: the Javascript links, Flash spinner, and partial artist/album reviews.

August 24, 2004: All Music Guide responds again with an update about more recent changes to the site.

GENERAL COMMENTS
We’ve been on the net since 1995 providing a free music reference resource. We would hope that we’ve earned a little patience from our users as we work through the transition to the new site and some of the difficulties we’re experiencing. We’re a small company with small company resources. While we’re flattered by our users’ expectations, we are not Amazon or Yahoo! We’re a small company from Ann Arbor, MI, trying to provide a great resource for music fans.

SLOW RESPONSE TIMES
We are experiencing some response time delays as we work to get all of our servers properly balanced. Additionally, we will be adding server capacity over the next week which will further improve response times. While this site is bigger and more complex than and will be somewhat slower than the old site, the difference once we get everything at peak form won’t be very noticeable.

SUPPORT OF NON-IE FOR WINDOWS BROWSERS
Optimizing a site of allmusic’s complexity and size for all browsers and operating systems is no small feat. This isn’t a simple “brochure-ware” site of static pages. While we would love to optimize the AMG sites for all browsers and all operating systems, we simply don’t have the necessary resources to do so. Despite some users flattering comparison of our site with that of Google, Amazon and Yahoo!, we are a small company with limited resources. So, we had to pick the most widely used browser by our users (over 87%) to optimize the site for and then work on compatibility issues with the other major browsers as we go forward.

We are first concentrating on fixing some compatibility issues with the Mozilla browsers, which are mainly visual, not functional. The main Mozilla problem is a glitch in how tables are displayed. We’re hoping to have this fixed in the near future. We will also be working to fix some compatibility problems with Safari (Mac).

We ask for your patience as we work on these issues.

REGISTRATION
The allmusic site remains totally FREE to our users and only requires registration for access to new Premium Content. If you are uncomfortable registering, we understand and invite you to continue to use the portion of the site (roughly equivalent to the former site) that does not require registration. But we would like to take a moment to explain why we have introduced registration for Premium Content. The AMG websites are FREE sites that are marginally supported by only advertising and product sales. To attract advertisers and retailers, we need to provide them with basic demographic information of our users so they can determine if our site is a fit for their products. We provide this information only in the aggregate (i.e. 60% of our users are male, etc.) and never pass on any individual user information. Please read our privacy policy for more information. Without these advertisers and retailers, the AMG websites would be out of business. Registration is a common practice among free publishing sites such as the AMG sites (i.e. NY Times, LA Times, etc.) that fund their enterprise through advertising and product sales. AMG is in line with common Internet practices and, as a good Internet citizen, zealously protects the privacy of our users.

TAB FORMAT
We realized when we designed the tab system that we would make some folks unhappy, but we felt the trade off was worth it. If we stuck to the one page approach it would limit our ability to add additional information. That design approach (one page) just doesn’t scale as we expand content. And it’s a real problem with artists with extensive discographies. We think that once folks take some more time on the site, they’ll see that there is much more information available now than there was on the old site. The addition of the Songs and Credits tabs are both good examples of information that just wouldn’t be possible in a one page format.

One of my favorite music-related websites is All Music Guide, the most comprehensive reference source for music online. (Think IMDB for music.)

So when I heard they were redesigning, I was excited to see if they’d fix my laundry list of complaints with the existing site: the inadequate search engine, their convoluted URL structure, inaccessible and confusing Javascript tricks (like showing/hiding biography text and blocking right-click URL copying), and the frequent server timeouts.

Their redesign launched moments ago. (The old site can still be viewed here. It’s offline now.) They not only failed to fix any of my complaints, but they made it worse. Much worse.

Most frustrating, the site only displays properly in Internet Explorer. (In Firefox, Safari, IE Mac, and Opera, you get a big banner warning that the site is IE Windows-only.) Worse, display bugs make many features of the site unreadable and unuseable in other browsers. All tables are broken, like the search results, track listings and discographies. Some pages, like the New Releases, reposition content off the screen. I can’t tell what’s a hyperlink, because the cursor doesn’t change in anything except Internet Explorer. (July 15, 2004: Almost all of these rendering bugs have been resolved now.)

The problems aren’t limited to display bugs. The URLs are worse than before, now so long that they can’t be sent by e-mail. Biographies, discographies and album reviews are no longer a single page, so you’re forced to click through to multiple pages to view the content you want. And the site’s slower than ever, and I’m periodically getting server timeouts and connection delay error messages. (Oh, and the spinning Flash navigation is a waste of space.)

What a disappointment. As an early beta tester, I sent them a long e-mail outlining my new complaints. Let’s hope they listen. Does anyone know anyone on staff at AMG? I’d love to ask their web guys a few questions.

July 13, 2004: One commenter recommends using MP3.com, which licenses a near-complete database of AMG’s content. The only problems are the missing band member and “worked with” information, individual musician/producer/contributor profiles, genre information, AMG’s Editor Picks, browsing by genre or mood, and a few other features. For most daily usage, it’s a good drop-in replacement for Allmusic.com.

July 13, 2004:: AMG responds! An AMG employee e-mailed me their response to the criticism.

For their newest Gameboy Advance game, Jaleco Entertainment quietly borrowed the source code for an open-source Nintendo emulator. While the emulation community was outraged, the emulator’s programmer felt a bit differently.

Like the recent Classic NES Series, Jaleco Entertainment’s Jajamaru Jr. for the Gameboy Advance is a nostalgic reissue for the Japanese market In addition to one new game, the cartridge includes five different emulated classic NES/Famicom titles from Jaleco’s library: Ninja Jajamaru, Jajamaru’s Great Adventure, Exerion, City Connection, and Formation Z.

Instead of writing their own emulator, Jaleco used PocketNES, the best NES emulator for the GBA. After analyzing the game’s binary, it was obvious the code was borrowed without credit or payment. Emulation fans were upset, with cries of copyright infringement.

Loopy, the programmer behind PocketNES, responded to the incident:

Yes, PocketNES is public domain… I wanted it to be public domain. This “Jaleco incident”, in fact, is the very reason I wanted to make it FREE (as in public domain) rather than “GPL free” (strings attached). I’m not a fan of the GPL, I think it’s selfish.

Let someone take an idea, do something cool with it, and not have to hesitate because of legal nitpickings. If a company can take something that I made, and turn it into a product that other people enjoy, I’m all the happier for it. Why should I care if someone else profits off of something I made? It’s already free.

Demanding that someone pay homage to my work is just ego-stroking, and I’m not into that. Sure, as a courtesy it would have been nice for Jaleco to tell me “hey, thanks for the source”, and they didn’t, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it, because I didn’t write PocketNES so people would pat me on the back.

I wrote it so people could have fun playing old games. And that’s exactly what’s happening here. Mission accomplished.

For me, his message embodies the spirit of the open-source movement.

It looks like Dreamworks is using Friendster to promote the release of Anchorman, with user profiles for each of the characters. In addition to Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy, there are photos and descriptions for Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate), Brian Fantana (Paul Rudd), Brick Tamland (Steve Carell), and Champ Kind (David Koechner).

It looks like someone’s logging in every day to approve every new friend request and testimonial. (So far, Ron Burgundy has 273 friends from word-of-mouth alone.)

Is this sort of promotional tie-in a first for social networking applications? Does anyone know if Friendster approved (or was paid for) the creation of the fakester accounts, which they officially forbid? (Thanks to James for the original tip.)

Update: Some users are seeing giant Anchorman banner ads, proving that it’s an official Friendster tie-in.

March 29, 2012: Eight years later, Ron Burgundy joins Twitter to promote Anchorman 2.

Here’s a fun game… First, look up the most popular and critically-acclaimed books, movies, and music on Amazon. Click on “Customer Reviews,” and sort them by “Lowest Rating First.” Hilarity ensues! It’s the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game!

Post your own favorites in the comments! (Coming soon: The Slashdot.org Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game.)

July 14, 2004: In a weird coincidence, Justine Larbalestier came up with the same idea on her own weblog two days before this entry. Creepy.

July 29, 2004: Alan Taylor wrote a neat utility that lets you easily find the 10 lowest-ranked reviews, without even going to Amazon. Yay!

Starting this month, I’ll be burning through all my leftover bandwidth by posting large videos and audio on my site toward the end of every month. It’s Waxy.org’s Bandwidth Blowout!!

First up, the best TV pilot you’ve never seen: Ben Stiller’s Heat Vision and Jack from 1999. Jack Black stars as Jack Austin, an astronaut on the run from NASA after a solar accident makes him the smartest man in the universe. Owen Wilson plays his talking motorcycle. Produced by Stiller, who also appears in the introduction and as a strip club DJ.

Download it quick, before I change my mind.

BitTorrent: Heat_Vision_and_Jack (.MPEG, 301.25 MB)

Knowledge is power… for real.

June 27, 2004: Courtesy of Drew, here’s an early and later draft of the script.

June 28, 2004: Well, my bandwidth was blown. My server can’t handle the load, so I’m moving this to my BitTorrent tracker. It’s seeded locally, so it should be very fast. I’m looking into upgrading to a 100MBps uplink, so I don’t have to deal with this next month.

After serious deliberation with a secret cabal of expert judges, we’ve reached a consensus. And now, the winners of the Dave Winer Remix Contest!

Grand Prize: Ralph Brandi, “Smoking Weblogs”. Catchy beat, good musicianship, great samples. The “D-W-I-N-E-R” chorus is brilliant, and I can’t get it out of my head. Plus, cowbell!

2nd Place: Scott Mulligan’s “Goofin’ On Dave Winer”. Musically, the best of the bunch. The instrumental breakdown might be a bit too long, though.

3rd Place: Matt Canale’s “This Is Not A Morning Coffee Note”. The only one to use Dave’s voice as percussion. I was wrong; Exsend’s “Hi, It’s Dave Here” used exclusively Winer samples for all percussion. Therefore, a tie!

So, that’s it. Thanks for playing! I’ll contact the winners about your prizes, the increasingly-worthless currency of the web.

Yesterday, Dave Winer shut down the free Weblogs.com, inciting the wrath of his many critics and attracting media attention from Wired, News.com, eWeek, and Slashdot. Dave redirected every one of the 3,000+ Weblogs.com sites to this entry, with a 9-minute MP3 explaining his motives. (Full transcript.)

Brian Dear remixed the audio into a catchy number that I call “People Just Love to Jump Up and Down” [.MP3, 1.95 MB]. It’s good, but I know you people can do much better.

So consider this a call for entries… Remix Dave’s speech and e-mail/IM me a link to your MP3 (or Dropload the entire file), and I’ll gladly host it for you. Three Gmail invites to the winner, and one each for the two runner-ups. Have fun!

Entries:

Dan Dickinson – I’m Sorry (Dave Winer Remix).mp3 (7.6 MB)

Matt Canale – This Is Not A Morning Coffee Note (rcade Deep House Mix).mp3 (5.7 MB)

Ralph Brandi – Smoking Weblogs.mp3 (5.3 MB)

Phil Ulrich – Audio Thing.mp3 (5.7 MB)

Scott Mulligan – Goofin’ On Dave Winer.mp3 (3.6 MB)

Exsend – Hi It’s Dave Here.mp3 (1.9 MB)

June 17, 2004: Greetings, Scripting.com readers!

June 18, 2004: Feel free to use Dave’s second audioblog posting [.MP3, 4.3MB], now dubbing the shutdown as a temporary outage, into your remixes. Here’s a transcript.

June 22, 2004: The winners!

If you’re wondering why I haven’t updated my site in the last five days, here’s why: the birth of my baby boy, Eliot Andrew Baio.

Updates will be sporadic while I learn the best ways to swaddle, the physical properties of meconium, and the complete works of Dr. Harvey Karp.

Reagan’s body is being prepared for burial at Gates, Kingley & Gates Funeral Home, about five blocks away from our house and less than a block from our hospital, where we’ll be delivering our baby in the next week or so.

When we walked by the area earlier today, four full blocks of Arizona were closed down, with news crews swarming the area since 2pm today. I’ve never heard so many helicopters.

June 13, 2004: An anonymous comment in this entry inspired the launch of the new Republican 2004 presidential ticket: Vote Bush/Zombie-Reagan.

As predicted, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was camcorded and leaked online today, moments after the Friday matinees ended on the East coast. The NFO file released by UTi indicates that this may be their last release because of “not so recent but still evident events.” (Arrests? Increased security?)

The sample image distributed with the movie pokes fun at Warner Brothers’ attempt to thwart piracy by issuing military-style night-vision goggles to theater ushers. I guess it didn’t work very well.

June 5, 2004: Here’s a 50 second sample (MPG, 8.1 MB) of the bootleg video. As you can see, the video and audio aren’t very good, and the aspect ratio is bad.

High demand forced the official Fahrenheit 9/11 trailer offline, so I’m mirroring the high-quality Windows Media trailer right here.

• WMV: Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer – High Quality (25 MB)

Update: Apple is hosting the Quicktime trailer, and the official site is hosting both trailers again.

Five days after the assassination of John Lennon, radio engineer Rob Grayson compiled a montage of every Beatles song in alphabetical order and aired it following a ten minute period of silence.

• MP3: Rob Grayson’s “Beatles A-Z” (16 minutes, 9.1MB), from December 13, 1980.

The production effort involved is impressive, done entirely on tape. You can read more about it on the Rob Grayson Collection. Some of the comments are good, as well.

The Lennon tribute is a small part of Reel Radio, a massive archive of pre-1989 Top 40 Radio audio clips. Many are hour-long unedited radio broadcasts, like this Alan Freed broadcast from March 23, 1955, or these two Don Steele broadcasts from a couple months after I was born. Try using the search engine to find a clip from your year of birth.

Unfortunately, the clips are all in RealPlayer format, so be sure to install Real Alternative before you go, so you don’t have to deal with that bloated piece of crap.

Wayne White, a Chattanooga-born artist living and working in Los Angeles, buys mass-produced thrift-store/garage-sale lithographs and paints amazing 3D word-art onto them. His use of typography is stunning, reminiscent of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library covers.

The Clementine Gallery in New York has two high-quality photo galleries of his work, from 2002 and 2004. My personal favorites: I Love the Whole Fucking World, Take Your Forms Wrestled form the Void and Get the Hell Out, Painting that Came to Life Only to be Mocked-Forgotten, and Luv Hurtz.

In his professional life, he’s an acclaimed commercial artist, famously known as the art director for Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time,” the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight Tonight,” and the Snapple bottle puppet commercials. He was also the voice of Mr. Kite and Randy on Pee Wee’s Playhouse, where he was a set designer and puppet maker. ArtForum reviewed his artwork in late 2002. More information, including more images and a bio, is available at the Western Project.

Cameron Marlow posted Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community, an excellent research paper discussing methods of determining the influence and importance of weblogs. Basically, he shows that the number of permalinks to a weblog may be a better indicator of authority than blogroll frequency. Many newer weblogs — including mine — appear to have more influence than older, more established weblogs. This theory goes against Clay Shirky’s widely-accepted conclusions about power laws and inequality in the blogosphere.

Cameron expects debate, so go read the PDF and give him your feedback.

Shrek 2 debuted in wide release yesterday, though probably a bit wider than Dreamworks wanted… Shortly after the first matinees had ended on the East coast, the entire movie was released into private file-sharing networks and then onto Usenet.

The NFO file bundled with the release explains that it’s a new releasing group called MPT, or “Movie Premier Team.” The file claims the movie was released in theaters on Tuesday and on the Internet today, but I saw this posted no later than 4:30PM PST yesterday, which indicates their timezone may be at least eight hours ahead of the U.S.

The video is a Telesync (“TS”), a camcorder video with a direct audio source, usually recorded from in-seat headphone jacks provided for the hearing-impaired. (Without sourced audio, a video is usually called a “Cam” instead.)

The quality of camcorder videos is surprisingly good. This one-minute 10MB sample file was uploaded separately to demonstrate the quality of the complete video. (If you have trouble playing it with Windows Media Player, try the excellent Media Player Classic.)

It’s a testament to the efficiency of the bootlegging community, that a feature film can be captured, encoded, released and distributed on the Internet within hours of its commercial release. For what? As far as I can tell, “MPT” doesn’t get anything more than bragging rights, though their release will inevitably be downloaded and commercially released on the DVD black market overseas, and possibly domestically. Who’s to blame, the non-profit teen playing the releasing game or the big-time bootleggers getting rich off of piracy? Eh, probably both.

Me? I paid a ridiculous $20 to see it on the big screen last night with my wife, but it was worth it… The baby’s due in around three weeks, so it’s the last time we’ll be going to the movies for a while.

There were plenty of exciting high-profile games at E3 this year, dominated by sequels. Paper Mario 2, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Prince of Persia 2 were among my favorites, but they’ve been heavily covered on 1UP, Gamespot, Gamespy, IGN, and everywhere else. Instead, I’d like to mention some of the obscure and bizarre titles that might fall under the radar of the mainstream gaming press, including my favorite game of the show.

Best of Show: Katamaridamacy (PS2)

I found the Japanese commercial for this game back in February, and was intrigued. Playing it at Namco’s booth yesterday, I was stunned by the originality and addictive gameplay. (It also has the best game cover art I’ve ever seen.)

Namco says the game will come out in the US, but they’re not sure when. Gameplay video (MPEG, 10 MB), desktop wallpapers. 1UP loved it, and I love 1UP.

Other Highlights:

• Chulip (PS2). A “kissing simulator” with the goal of kissing underground-dwelling people to make them feel better. Read the 1UP preview, with screenshots. Punchline, the game’s developer, has a Chulip homepage, with videos and wallpaper.
• XTango: Shuffling Roses (Xbox). Multiplayer ballroom dancing, with a control scheme similar to fighting games like Virtua Fighter.
• Under the Skin (PS2). An alien comes to Earth, scanning and assuming the identity of people around town. When the citizens figure you out, they attack you with special moves and you lose your clothes. 1UP preview.
• Odama (Gamecube). Military pinball, a bizarre mix of the Japanese battlefield with a giant pinball and bumpers. Original concept, but didn’t seem particularly fun. From the developers of the very odd Seaman for the Dreamcast. 1UP preview.
• Rumble Roses (PS2). All-female wrestling game, pairing big-breasted characters against each other. The gameplay wasn’t very good, and the uninterruptible cut scenes were unbelievably long. But considering the game advertises a “hands-free” mud wrestling mode, I’m not sure the gameplay matters much. 1UP preview.
• Ribbit King (Gamecube). Like Frog Baseball, but played with golf clubs instead. Adorable, and approved by the ASPCA. Trailer.

Anyone find any other unusual and exciting games this year?

If anyone out there can get me a guest pass into E3 or wants to loan me their own badge for the third day, please let me know. I’ll happily take you out to lunch.

May 12, 2004: I’m all set for Friday! Thank you so much (you know who you are).

Like Brewster Kahle, Nicola Salmoria, Sarinee Achavanuntakul and other archivists of the computer age, Jason Scott is one of my heroes. He dedicates a large part of his life to preserving the history of the BBS scene, from the amazing collection of vintage textfiles and e-zines, historic audio recordings, artwork packs from the computer art scene, interesting papers and books, a growing list of every BBS that ever existed, a comprehensive timeline, and a work-in-progress documentary with over 200 interviews. (I could write an entire entry about every one of these. Go check them out when you have a chance.)

I briefly chatted with Jason in IRC earlier today about some of his current and upcoming projects. His newest project is CD.TEXTFILES.COM, a collection of over 90 CD-ROMs from the late 1980s and early 1990s. These “shovelware” CDs archived files from the era for easy distribution over fileservers and doors.

Most directories have a FILES.BBS text file, which gives short descriptions of each file. Reading these brings back such a hot flash of nostalgia, it’s like stumbling on all the ephemera of my adolescence on one site.

The graphics archives are a hilarious look back to the years before Photoshop 1.0. The TBBS Carousel’s GIF archives (part 1, 2 and 3), To The Maxx’s categorized GIF archive, and the very retro Swimsuits to the Maxx. Each of the eight “Night Owl” collections from the early-1990s have a GIF and JPG directory. Very bizarre.

There’s legal shareware, games, graphic demos, textfiles, MODs, audio clips, and utilities for the PC, Atari, Amiga, and Commodore 64. The PC-Blue archive is a collection of disk images for IBM PCs from 1983 to 1985.

It’s a treasure chest of pre-Web randomness that would take weeks to explore. Let me know if you find any gems.

Like last year, I’ll be keeping a running list of my favorite examples of the web’s April Fools Day (aka “Internet Jackass Day”) silliness. (There’s another much more thorough list being updated constantly.) Wired has a roundup of the bigger pranks, with a confirmation by Google that Gmail isn’t a hoax. Gizmodo added a gadget-oriented list.

• Interactive fiction Quake port, with playable downloads!
• Google’s hiring for their lunar lab
• Cold war bomb warmed by chickens (not a hoax)
• 1UP’s Metal Gear Solid 3 preview
• Teevee.org bought by Salon
• Maddox gets happy
• Dave Winer revives Netscape comeback, steals back RSS
• EFF merges with the DOJ
• Homestarrunner loses its domain name (give it a minute)
• XML Control Protocol
• Apple adds bleeper to Garageband
• Low Culture and J-Walk both find their femininie sides
• Mezzoblue and Stop Design swap designs
• Java ported to Apple //c
• Google files IPO
• Metafilter becomes a wiki
• ThinkGeek’s new products
• Video iPod announced
• Python on the C64
• First Annual March for Web Standards
• Streaming audio over Usenet
• W32ValidXHTML.A validation worm
• Livejournal’s Serial Adder hacker, and the community response
• Gawker, Weblogs Inc, AlwaysOn merge
• Duke University buys public domain
• RIAA sues Google, Internet doomed
• IRS announces social networking service
• Super-wide flat-screen TV
• GMail screenshot (confirmed fake!)
• Day lost to stronger trade winds
• Avril’s Theorem
• OpenBSD on the Gameboy Advance
• Special Edition “Virtual Boy” Gameboy Advance
• Podboy, Gameboy emulator for the iPod (this one almost fooled me)
• NPR’s Vanity ZIP Codes

At the 1964/65 New York World’s Fair, Walt Disney and his team of technicians debuted several new attractions, each with a corporate sponsor: Ford’s Magic Skyway, General Electric’s Progressland, Pepsi’s It’s A Small World, and the State of Illinois’ Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

I’ve posted a four-disc, 46-song collection of unreleased and rare audio from all four attractions, including outtakes and demos from the original recording sessions. The entire box set can be downloaded via BitTorrent from my new tracker.

Update – March 10, 2009: Disney’s going to be rereleasing this classic as a box set, so I’ve taken this download offline. Go buy it on Amazon!

According to one Disney fansite, the album was partially developed by Disney but never released because of conflicts with the outsourced record label. (Personally, I found it in alt.binaries.multimedia.disney on Usenet.) If anyone has more information about this collection, I’d love to hear it.

The complete track list is below.

Looking for the InfocomBot? Partly because of the Wired News article this morning, both bots are continually exceeding AIM’s rate limits and getting kicked off the network.

I’m trying to contact someone at AOL Instant Messenger’s Developer services to inquire about lifting the rate limits. (If you know anyone at AOL that can speed up this process, please let me know!) I’m not expecting much, so I’m trying to implement a new system that supports queued messages and several more bots.

In the meantime, you can play most of the Infocom collection in your web browser. (Java required.)

July 13, 2004: At some point, someone at AOL must have quietly flipped the switch that protects Infocombot, because it can no longer be warned or exceed rate limits! Whoever you are, thank you so much.

Also, I fixed a bug that prevented quote marks from working in the games. This affected two games, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (when typing the Vogon poetry) and Zork II (in the Riddle Room). This is resolved.

Recent news stories have covered the announcement of ChatNannies, conversational robots designed to locate and lure pedophiles in Internet chat rooms. Uncritical articles were recently published by New Scientist, BBC News, News.com, the skeptically-minded The Register, and many other news outlets.

Cameron Marlow managed to secure an exclusive interview with one of the “Nanniebots,” where he posted a complete transcript and some brief analysis. To anyone who knows anything about chatterbots and the history of artificial intelligence, the transcript represents either a revolutionary leap in technology or it’s clearly a human behind the keyboard.

So I did a little Usenet research on Jim Wightman, the 30-year-old UK-based software developer behind ChatNannies. His background is mostly in .NET and VB development, but I couldn’t find references to any interest or experience in artificial intelligence or chat technologies. One thread from 2002 critically discusses Jim’s claims of developing his own private Usenet newsreader software, even though his headers revealed he was using another popular newsreader. In another thread from mid-2002, he claimed to be writing a book on .NET for Wrox Press, but there’s no reference to him on their site. Update: I can confirm that Wightman was telling the truth, and was contributing to a book about ASP.NET controls that was later abandoned by Wrox UK through no fault of his own.

In Cameron’s comments, Jim himself stated that he has some psychological problems. But a bit more worrisome are his postings in alt.revisionism, a newsgroup largely centered around Holocaust denial. Someone posting under the pseudonym “Deaths Head,” with the exact same headers and IP address as Jim, regularly argued that the Holocaust never occurred. In another thread, he posted a graphic death threat to another user. (I can’t prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that these aren’t spoofed headers, but it seems very unlikely. Compare Jim’s message headers in alt.revisionism with a message by “Deaths Head” in the same group a couple days before.) Update: Jim only posted in the group for two months. He maintains he was only playing Devil’s advocate, and that these aren’t strongly held beliefs.

These personal beliefs suggest a skewed view of the universe, perhaps one in which he’s able to unleash 100,000 cutting-edge robots to save the world from pedophiles. The ChatNannies’ official Downloads page says the downloadable version of control panel for their chatbots will be available on April 2, conveniently one day after April Fool’s Day. So it’s either the prelude to an elaborate April Fool’s joke, an attempt at defrauding corporate sponsors and individuals of their money, or it’s the delusions of an arguably unstable person. Either way, the media bought it wholesale.

March 24, 2004: Things are getting interesting! In the comments on Cam’s site, Guardian UK science columnist Ben Goldacre mentions that Jim offered to give an in-person demonstration of the ChatNannies bot on an isolated, non-networked computer with an independent third-party observer. (I’m guessing Jim will conveniently schedule the demonstration just in time for April Fool’s Day.)

March 25, 2004: Ben Goldacre’s appropriately-titled “Bad Science” column covers the Nanniebots, and Jim Wightman’s attempts to avoid getting debunked. Essential reading. Also, a reader sent in pointers to several death threats that Jim made on Usenet, which are considerably more violent than the one I found. Read them here and here.

March 26, 2004: The Register and VNUnet both ran new articles about increased skepticism of the Wightmans’ continued claims. ChatNannies started a developers’ forum. And a commenter points to TivoMedia.org, another Jim Wightman project that appeared to be unfounded, unraveling in this long Tivo Community thread from April 2003.

March 31, 2004: Shortly after midnight on April 1 in the UK, the ChatNannies.com site went offline. Never mind, it’s back.

April 2, 2004: In the “News” sidebar on the ChatNannies homepage, Jim Wightman announces he’s closing down the site in a week. Here’s the announcement, removed a couple minutes ago:

“Due to being treated like criminals for trying to help save children, we are closing the ChatNannies website at 00:00:00 GMT 11-04-2004. Many thanks to those of you who have shown your support…after this time however your Children are once again at Maximum risk from Paedophiles. You can thank, amongst others, Ben Goldacre from the Guardian and Barnardo’s in helping us reach this decision.”

He’s referring to Ben’s new Bad Science column and Barnardo’s public statement about Chatnannies.

April 5, 2004: The Guardian UK wrote a new article about the recent criticism from children’s charities. (Strangely, the article doesn’t refer to the bots at all.) Wightman posted a response. VNUnet posted a similar article.

The Chatnannies discussion forum is getting interesting, as well. Jim Wightman is posting actively there.

April 8, 2004: New Scientist removed the text of the original story, replacing it with a temporary retraction. “Serious doubts have been brought to our attention about this story. Consequently, we have removed it while we investigate its veracity.” Good! BBC News also removed their story

April 13, 2004: Charles Arthur, the technology editor of the Independent UK, wrote a good column about the net’s skepticism.

June 16, 2004: New Scientist followed up with an amusing story of Wightman’s attempt to demonstrate the ChatNannies bot from his home. He couldn’t reproduce any of the intelligent conversation originally demonstrated in his transcripts, and analysis of the transcripts shows word-for-word dialogue from the freely-available ALICE bot, including typos from the AIML database. Their conclusion (and mine): still a big, fat fake.

June 17, 2004: Andy Pryke, one of the three observers of the Nanniebots demo for New Scientist, wrote up his observations and posted transcripts of the chats. It’s clearly an ALICE bot.

If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot, InfocomBot2, or InfocomBot3. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports “save” and “restore” commands, so you don’t need to lose your place.

If you’ve never played a text adventure game before, Brass Lantern has a great introduction to basic gameplay. There are hints for all of these games on the InvisiClues website.

How’s it done? In short, it’s a Perl wrapper that glues the compiled game interpreter to the AIM network. I tweaked Tim’s excellent Zorkbot script to be a little friendlier, with better (and more secure) support for saving games and cleaner output. (If you want my changes, let me know.)

Thanks to Ilya, who modified dumb-frotz, a “dumb terminal” port of the popular Z-machine interpreter, to properly flush the output buffer after every line.

An example transcript is below. The bot may get overwhelmed, so check back in a couple hours if it gets kicked off AOL’s network.

Update: It was posted to Metafilter, so AOL is limiting the messages it responds with. I’m going to set up an additional couple bots you can use instead.

March 25, 2004: The bots are continually getting kicked offline because of the traffic from the Wired News article. I’m posting status updates in a new entry.

If you’re looking for full-time work and live in the Santa Monica (Southern California) area, I’m currently looking to hire two web geeks: a Perl/Mason/MySQL programmer and a front-end HTML/CSS coder. You’d be working for the most intelligent company in the financial industry, with a really great team.

If you’re interested, e-mail or IM me and I’ll send you details. Feel free to spread the word.

I’ve been listening to an unusual radio station recently, the just-launched Radio Vox Populi. Built by Blogdex creator Cameron Marlow, the site reads aloud the most recent entries from over a million weblogs, using a combination of Perl scripts, voice synthesis software, and web services. I was happy to help out by supplying the transitional sound effects, randomized from a set of six radio samples that complements the broadcast’s lo-fi style. (Read more about the tech behind the site, and the accompanying art installation.)

In lieu of my usual MP3s, I’ve kept the stream running in the background for the last week or so. I feel like I’m eavesdropping in on the general mood and attitude of the entire blogosphere, lovingly read to me by the computer from Wargames.

For more geeky fun, check out the archive of sound clips that accompanies Dennis Klatt’s 1987 paper on the history of speech synthesis. My personal favorites are the Voder, the first-ever electronic speech synthesis, demonstrated at the 1939 World’s Fair, and the first song in synthesized speech, Bell Labs’ “Bicycle Built for Two” from 1961.

For over 15 years, from 1986 to 2003, MTV’s 120 Minutes was the most visible showcase for new and alternative music in the mainstream media. The two-hour time slot was terrible, starting at midnight on Sunday nights, but in the pre-Web days, you had to make sacrifices to find out about new music.

Altmusictv.com is trying to compile complete playlists from the 120 Minutes archives, which is interesting in its own right. Photographer David Hirmes e-mailed me earlier today with some analysis he did on the playlists. Below is a table of every band that appeared on 120 Minutes more than once, sorted by the number of videos/performances.

It looks like the playlists started getting more and more repetitive, starting in the late ’90s… When the playlist archive is more complete, I’ll try to chart the trend by breaking down the number of unique artists per year.

DJ/Producer Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album fused the vocals and beats from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with music sampled entirely from the Beatles’ “White Album.” Not surprisingly, EMI served Danger Mouse with a cease-and-desist order yesterday, along with ordering stores and websites to stop selling the album.

As a big fan of borrowed/remix culture, that makes me sad. So I posted high-quality MP3s of the entire album below.

I probably won’t be able to host this very long, so please help out by mirroring the files as soon as possible. When you’re done, send me an e-mail or post the mirrored URL in the comments. Enjoy, and thank you!

February 12, 2004: I can’t host the files anymore, but these alternate mirrors still offer the MP3 DOWNLOADS: Illegal Art, Grey Tuesday mirrors.

February 13, 2004: I was cc’d on an e-mail from EMI’s lawyers to my ISP, stating that I’m in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. As such, I have removed all of the MP3s from my web server. The text of the EMI letter is below.

February 19, 2004: Downhill Battle is organizing Grey Tuesday, a day of coordinated civil disobedience in protest of EMI’s attempt to squash this album. Even if you don’t like this particular remix, or even hip-hop in general, remember what the album represents: the universe of creative works stifled by the United States’ archaic copyright laws and the corporations that lobbied for them.

February 23, 2004: The law firm of Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman (representing Capitol Records) has started e-mailing cease-and-desist notices to the websites that are participating in the Grey Tuesday protest tomorrow, whether they’re hosting the album or simply changing the colors of their homepage. The cease-and-desist demands that website owners “cease any plans or efforts to distribute or publicly perform this unlawful recording,” “identify the names and addresses of any third parties who have supplied you with physical or digital copies of The Grey Album,” and “provide Capitol with an accounting of all units of The Grey Album that have been distributed via your website.”

The most disturbing part of the letter, sent to people who merely stated their intent to participate is this: “In addition, to the extent that you have already commenced distribution of The Grey Album, you must make payment to Capitol in an amount to be discussed. We demand that you contact us immediately.”

Does this sort of preemptive cease-and-desists set a new precedent for record label action? Do website owners have to obey their demands, when they haven’t even posted the album yet?

February 24, 2004: Despite legal threats, many sites are participating in the protest. I’ll be keeping a running list today of some of my favorite responses so far: Matt Haughey, Ryan Gantz, Lawrence Lessig, Chris Komlenic, Edverb (and his open letter to EMI), University of Iowa professor Kembrew McLeod, Justin Hall, Brian Flemming, Michael Sippey (plus his reply to my comment), Andrew Raff, Joe Gratz, Matt Jones, Scot Hacker.

Jeff Lowenberg
Vice President Operations/Designated Agent
Everyone’s Internet
2600 Southwest Freeway, Suite 500
Houston, TX 77098

Re: Unauthorized Use of Sound Recordings Performed by the Beatles

Dear Mr. Lowenberg:

It has come to our attention that Andrew Baio is currently exploiting sound recordings that are owned and/or controlled by Capitol Records, Inc. (“Capitol”). In particular, it appears that Mr. Baio is using, without authorization, on his website, http://www.waxy.org/archive/2004/02/11/danger_m.shtml, (the “Website”), copies of sound recordings embodying performances of the Beatles, including but not limited to recordings of “Long, Long, Long,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Glass Onion,” “Savoy Truffle,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Helter Skelter,” “Julia,” “Happiness is Warm Gun,” “Piggies,” “Dear Prudence,” “Rocky Raccoon,” “Revolution 1,” “Revolution 9,” “I’m So Tired,” and “Cry Baby Cry” (the “Capitol Recordings”).

Andrew Baio’s unauthorized exploitation of the Capitol Recordings constitutes copyright infringement, and renders Andrew Baio, and any other company engaged in the unauthorized exploitation of the Capitol Recordings with Andrew Baio, liable for all of the remedies provided by the relevant laws occasioned by Andrew Baio’s unfair competition and dilution of our valuable property.

I am the agent authorized to act on behalf of Capitol, the complaining party. It is our understanding that Everyone’s Internet, Inc. is the Internet Service Provider for Andrew Baio and the Website, and as such, you are the authorized agent for service of this notice in accord with The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, 17 U.S.C. § 512 et seq. (the “DMCA Notice”) for Everyone’s Internet, Inc.

We request that following your investigation of this matter you provide us full remedy under the DMCA Notice requirement, including but not limited to, expeditiously removing or disabling access to our copyrighted material. Unless we receive full and immediate compliance with this demand within a reasonable amount of time, we will be forced to consider pursuing our other remedies at law and in equity.

This letter is written without prejudice to any of our rights or remedies, all of which are expressly reserved herein.

By placing my signature herein, I state under penalty of perjury that the information contained in this notification is accurate and that I am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right of the Copyright alleged to be infringed.

Sincerely,

/S/: Jonathan Campbell
This electronic signature is made and adopted with the intent to authenticate this written agreement.

Jonathan H. Campbell
Legal and Business Affairs
EMI Recorded Music, North America
150 Fifth Avenue
11th Floor
New York, NY 10011