Question: Why does Amazon.com have a dog named Rufus on their 404 error page? Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com and generally nice guy, found out the short history of Rufus, the Amazon dog.
Waxy Backlinks v0.05
A couple new improvements to the Waxy Backlinks script. It can now be called from PHP scripts, referrers from some search engines are now excluded by default, and you can set the maximum number of backlinks to display and the minimum threshold of hits before a link gets displayed. Any of these options can easily be changed in the script itself. Many thanks to Joe Utsler and Ben Trott for bug reports. Download Waxy Backlinks v0.05 now! (Installation and configuration details inside.)
Spock and Data
Two strange Star Trek-related tidbits:
1. The short-lived cottage industry of Y2K survival books and videos probably isn’t doing so well these days, but the materials are still available if you’re interested. These ranged from the alarmist Y2K Millennium Meltdown: The Silent Bomb (“science fiction has become a science nightmare”) to the outright paranoid Y2K: Hidden Dangers of Martial Law and a Police State (“Will President Bill Clinton use the Y2K computer bug crisis as a pretext to declare martial law and usher in a brutal Gestapo police state?”). Compared to others in the genre, Leonard Nimoy’s Y2K Family Survival Guide seems almost rational. Almost. Anyway, I uploaded the short introduction video that I found on Usenet (6 meg AVI). If you want to see the rest, you can still buy it on Amazon. ($7.50, cheap!)
2. Another recent Usenet discovery is the little-known album recorded by Brent Spiner, most famously known for his role as Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Maybe he was jealous of Spock and Kirk.) Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, released in 1991, features everyone’s favorite android crooning his way through twelve Tin Pan Alley standards. “It’s A Sin (To Tell a Lie)” features backup vocals by fellow cast members Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker), Michael Dorn (Worf), and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard). The album is long out of print, but you can hear “It’s A Sin” here (4 meg MP3).
Easynews
The Usenet alt.binaries.* newsgroups have been a haven for file trading since 1993, but never received much attention because of the learning curve and limitations of ISP’s Usenet feeds. Even if you manage to install a newsreader, locate your news server and figure out how to decode multipart attachments, there’s no guarantee that your ISP carries the binary newsgroups or has anything more than a day’s worth of files.
Easynews provides a web-based interface to the Usenet binaries archive, with roughly 40 days of retention for all groups. A staggering number of albums, software, movies, and images are posted daily to Usenet, decoded by Easynews, and placed for download from the Easynews website. $10 gets you six gigs of downloaded files per month, and it’s the best $10 I’ve spent in a long time. The free trial gives you a one gigabyte quota and three days to play around with the interface, which I highly recommend. My comments are inside.
July 26, 2003: The free trial is no longer available. They’re up to 10 GB/month for $10, though their retention is closer to 21 days as Usenet traffic increases. Still highly recommended.
Fidonet creator Tom Jennings in Chinatown
Tom Jennings, the creator of Fidonet and all-around renaissance guy, will be speaking this Saturday in downtown Los Angeles. This Wired article from 1996 gives some background on the man that made my first taste of the Internet possible (indirectly, through a Fidonet news/mail gateway). He’ll be speaking about his Story Teller project, an experiment in obsolete computing that prints and vocalizes text and symbols stored on punched tape. Time and directions inside, if you’re interested.
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The First $20 Million
The film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is slated for a limited release on June 28. Originally written in 1995, it sounds like the screenplay was heavily changed to avoid being horribly dated. The story now takes place after the bubble burst instead of during the long short boom, and the product has changed from a sub-$300 computer to some sort of “hologram machine.”
They should have tried to create a snapshot of the era instead of hopelessly modernizing it. I mean, who funds hologram machines these days?
Meaty vs Meetup
Well, this is depressing. Meaty.org, the real-life event organizer for online communities that I started developing last August, is now completely pointless. Today, Meetup.com launched. Designed by some of the most talented people in the industry, it’s exactly what I envisioned, with a couple extra neat features I didn’t think of.
They finished the entire thing in three months of dedicated work with a full staff, while I worked alone in my free time for the last eight months. I was totally outgunned. Note to self: Next time you have an idea like this, quit your day job and devote yourself to it full-time.
But, on the lighter side, it’s an outstanding site. The interface is perfectly designed, though I wouldn’t expect anything less from 37 Signals and Eric Costello. Kudos to the Meetup crew on a successful launch, you bastards.
ID3 Tag Editing
My new Rio Riot, unlike most other portable MP3 players on the market, ignores paths and filenames when determining artist/album/song/genre information. Instead, it relies exclusively on the ID3 identification tags for artist/album/song/genre organization.
So it goes, only a small fraction of my 60 gigs collection has normalized ID3 tags. (For some reason, the folks on Audiogalaxy and Kazaa don’t seem care much about metadata.) Editing them all by hand would’ve taken months, so I started looking around for a good ID3 tag editor. By far, the best I’ve found is Tag&Rename. It’s fast, usable, and feature-rich. One of the more inspired features is the ability to import album information from Allmusic.com (including genres, album reviews and cover art). It can also export your collection to comma-separated values, query CDDB/FreeDB, rename MP3s/paths based on ID3 tag information (and vice-versa), and so on.
That’s hard to beat, but if you’ve found a better ID3 editor, speak up.
The Onion's Meta Tags
The Onion has some interesting keywords in the meta tags on their front page, with references to Smoove B, Marilyn Manson, Phish, the NBA, “All your base,” ferrets, and Taco Bell. Keyword jamming like this is common, but particularly dumb in this case. If the Onion is trying to attract search engines with keywords, then why are they excluding all search engines from indexing their content?
March 6, 2004: In hindsight, it’s so clearly a joke. It’s hard to believe I ever took it seriously. I just checked, and they’ve updated their meta tags with more relevant keywords. It’s very odd.
SonicBlue is Awesome
While in Arizona this weekend, I managed to drop by SonicBlue’s branch office in Scottsdale. I scored a refurbished Rio Riot jukebox (20 gigs!) out of the visit, and a few great photos of their office and internal paraphernalia.
Don’t miss this poster spelling out their corporate motto: AWESOME. I guess it could be worse.
