Interview with David Winton, Director of "Code Rush" Mozilla Documentary

Posted September 19, 2008 by Andy Baio

First, the bad news. Two days ago, I received a polite email from David Winton, the director of Code Rush, asking me to take the out-of-print documentary off of Waxy.org. As promised, I immediately complied.

Now, the good news — In my reply, I asked David if he’d mind being interviewed, and he agreed! He’s an accomplished director and producer, the creator of the Big Thinkers series for TechTV, and the cofounder of Winton/duPont Films, located in San Francisco’s Presidio.

We had a wonderful conversation about the film, which revealed for the first time that he’s planning on not only re-releasing Code Rush digitally, but considering releasing the original outtakes (100 hours of footage) to the public domain on Archive.org.

I wish all my takedown notices were like this! Read on for the full interview, with selected clips from Code Rush, used by permission.

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September 19, 2008

Stack Overflow on favorite programming-related cartoons — they're doing some interesting things with reputation, like gaining points to acquire new powers #

Star Simpson speaks out for the first time about her Boston Airport "hoax device" ordeal — her year-long battle's over, and chose Boing Boing to tell her story because they had the most responsible news coverage #

September 18, 2008

Dan Hanna's Daily Photo Aging Project — the mother of all photo-a-day projects, he shot himself front-to-back for 17 years #

Google adds pirate translation for Talk Like A Pirate Day — be ye feelin' lucky? #

TechCrunch posts the three new Microsoft "I'm A PC" ads — much better than the Seinfeld ads #

Sergey Brin starts blogging — his first entry's interesting, about his predisposition to Parkinson's he discovered using 23andme (via) #

Twitter launches redesign — small, subtle improvements all over; FriendFeed and Yahoo redesigned, too #

September 17, 2008

4chan member explains the Sarah Palin hacking — I hate to link to Malkin, but this is the definitive story, quoting deleted posts from the original 4chan member who did the hack #

Inside Obama's Gmail Account — nicely timed parody from The Onion (via) #

Ben Walker's "You're No One If You're Not On Twitter" — you might as well not have existed (via) #

Sarah Palin's Yahoo! Mail account hacked, password posted to 4chan — excellent summary of the events; screencaps on Wikileaks, discussion on Reddit #

Crazy rumor of the day: Google to buy Valve Software? — update: Valve's Doug Lombardi said it's false (via) #

Artemis Fowl author asked by Douglas Adams's widow to write new Hitchhiker's novel — a Slashdot user imagines the results #

Atari Modern Classics — related: TIGSource's bootleg demakes contest #

Oddpost Co-Founder Launches Bandcamp, Publishing Platform for Musicians

Posted September 16, 2008 by Andy Baio

Ethan Diamond, co-founder of the pioneering webmail service that became Yahoo! Mail, today lifted the veil on his new startup and gave me an exclusive first look.

Bandcamp is a free hosted publishing platform for musicians, taking the technical challenge out of setting up a site — transcoding music into different formats, streaming audio, analytics, payment processing, and so on.

Band websites are often pretty bad, hacked together by a friend of the band with Flash and Dreamweaver, or worse, by the record label. There are exceptions, but mostly, it’s a sea of Flash intros, popup windows, mystery navigation, and 30-second sound clips.

Bandcamp is trying to change that, giving every album and track its own page with clean URLs and semantic markup, with the accompanying SEO benefits. Even before launch, they’re topping Google results for many searches for song titles of participating bands.

As an infoviz geek, I’m particular fond of their analytics and audio visualizations. Detailed stats let bands track recent activity on their songs and albums, including where people are coming from, trend tracking, and which songs were skipped, played partially, or played in full. A number of real-time audio visualizations in Flash are available on each song’s page, which can be shared and embedded on other websites.

Like Oddpost, the team’s small and nimble — only four people, all splitting engineering and design duties. Co-founder/CTO Shawn Grunberger (also formerly with Oddpost and Yahoo! Mail) and two engineers working from Seattle and Vermont round out the distributed team.

Ethan was kind enough to sit down with me on launch day to talk about their inspiration and process developing Bandcamp.

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September 16, 2008

Summary of Pew Internet survey of teen gaming habits — a staggering 99% of boys and 94% of girls, and half of teens surveyed played a game yesterday; read the full report #

Fifty People, One Question — what do you wish would happen by the end of today? #

Soulja Boy reviews Braid — that's a sentence I never thought I'd write (via) #

Cabel Sasser tracks down Sonseed's full album — the 1980s Christian ska band is very real #

Portal: Prelude trailer, fan-made Portal prequel — coming soon; eight months in development with a new storyline, NPCs, and longer than the original (via) #

Google Audio Indexing — a dedicated site for their YouTube transcription experiments, hopefully soon expanding beyond political videos (via) #

Wild Beasts' music video using the Droste effect — extensive recursion; see more on Flickr #

September 15, 2008

Gruber debunks excuses for Apple's removal of the Podcaster app from App Store — idiotic policy that should make every iPhone developer question their participation #

Pakimono, bizarre Mac game about streaking — run the naked Japanese guy through Copenhagen and jump in front of tourist's photos (via) #

Ninja Cat — and the inevitable remix #

Meme Breaks 1.0, famous Internet memes in turntable-friendly format — Peanut Butter Jelly Time is the new Amen break #

Everymoment Now, charting election news coverage — from the developer of Buzztracker (via) #

Computability: Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows' Computer Video from 1984

Posted September 14, 2008 by Andy Baio

Election coverage, natural disasters, and Wall Street meltdown got you down? Let’s go back to a simpler time — 1984! It’s morning in America again, and the dawn of a new information age.

Fortunately, one unlikely celebrity couple is here to guide us through the brave new world of spread sheets, data banks, and modems. In Computability, an instructional VHS tape from 1984, comedian Steve Allen and actress Jayne Meadows “take us on a light-hearted but detailed tour of the ways a home computer can change your life by simply using the correct software packages to suit your needs.”

The video was originally inspired by the couple’s Grammy-nominated “Everything You Wanted to Know About Home Computers,” a vinyl LP released by Casablanca/Polygram Records in 1983. The LP’s completely unavailable, but thanks to Sammy Reed’s wonderfully strange podcast, I was able to recreate the full album. (Stream it below or download the 11 MB MP3.)

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September 14, 2008

Hip-hop songs that sampled video games — they mention ytcracker's N.E.S. from 2005, available as a free download #

September 13, 2008

David Foster Wallace, dead at 46 — sigh #

Every Filter — Dorothy applies every Photoshop filter, in order, to a photograph #

September 12, 2008

Joshua Schachter's Mechanical Turk experiment with behavioral economics — where else can you get 2,100 people to answer a question for a total $30 in three hours? #

Redrawing the Obama/McCain tax plan chart to scale — the original chart doesn't visualize the extent of the disparity #

The Big Picture on the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games — NBC's waiting until October to air the coverage, but they're posting highlights daily online #

Adam Kimmel's Claremont HD, downhill skateboard speedrun — absolutely insane, just watched it for the second time; Sippey has the route #

September 11, 2008

PleaseDressMe, the t-shirt search engine — been playing around with Gary Vaynerchuk's new startup and it's great; also, Gary's broadcasting live on UStream #

The Mountain Goats and Kaki King's "Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is in Another Castle" — wistful song sung from the perspective of Toad #

Anil Dash on September 11, Seven Years Later #

When Algorithms Attack — how Googlebot, the Chicago Tribune's CMS, and a careless Bloomberg analyst killed United Airlines' stock #

Dopplr open-sources their "find and invite" feature — Rails plugin for locating your friends on other social networks #

Bioshock creator Ken Levine talks about growing up nerdy in the '70s — finding his tribe, losing it in Hollywood, and finding again in game design (via) #

EepyBird's Sticky Note Experiment — from the Mentos/Diet Coke guys, soon to be seen everywhere (via) #

Seth MacFarlane's AdSense Cartoons Now Available — new videos weekly, subscribe on Burger King's YouTube channel #

Hands-on demo video of the Plastic Logic Reader — cool stuff, but someone needs to take lessons from Apple #

OiNK admin charged with "conspiracy to defraud" — his bail date was extended five times; related: Elite Torrents admin sentenced to 18 months in jail #

TIGSource's brilliant Bootleg Demakes game dev competition — the entries remade famous games for retro systems; my other favorites are parodies of GTA, Burn the Rope, American McGee's Alice, Silent Hill, Bioshock, Legend of Zelda, and Shadow of the Colossus #

Heroes in Guitarland, NES-style remake of Guitar Hero — download the game from TIGSource #

Super 3D Portals 6, remaking Portal for the Atari 2600 — and yes, it actually runs on 2600 emulators #

Why do people participate in Mechanical Turk? — he asked the Turker community, by creating a HIT paying ten cents per answer #