No Passengers Equals No Threats?

A terrorist threat is thwarted in London.

The reaction here and there – making flying more uncomfortable for everyone else, heighten the ‘threat alert’ to ‘red’ (because something might happen we’re not aware of? – hmmm. I felt more secure).

Seems that with the plot foiled, we should be _safer_ in the immediate short term – not less so.

Bruce Schneier on the new no carry-on rules (as always, read the comments).

Doc Searls from the front of the line…er front lines. Good luck Doc.

As always, insightfulness and thoughtfulness on risk comes from our comedians – Ze Frank on Red810.

Thomas P.M. Barnett on the terrorists’ success being the disruption they caused.

Great stuff from Rex Hammock:

“I’ve discovered I have less tolerance for someone else — especially a producer at a cable new channel — determining the priorities and sources of my information on such a story.” and “The stock market stood rock solid and even airline stocks were up.”

Free and Open vs Not – At a Glance

Steve Borsch weighs free & open against for-fee and closed. In in he brings up some great points – namely, if the problem you have is solved – good enough – by a hosted, for-pay service, then installing and setting up a “free”, open-source system isn’t worth it.

Personally, I’m not keen on SurveyMonkey’s presentation – and if I had need for a browser-based survey, I’d want to polish the presentation more than they permit easily. In that sense, tweaking PHPSurvey might be worth the effort. Same may be true of integrating into other systems. Same may be true if I, for whatever reason, don’t want the service provider to have my data.

Whichever solution I go with, it will take some amount of setup time, time to get familiar with the tool, and time to make it work the way I work. Question is – which will make the most sense for my specific problem.

Depends. If the problem doesn’t include customization or integration, then open source isn’t a good candidate. If the inverse is true, then an open source project will get you up and running faster than building from scratch.

I do agree with Steve, there’s a huge opportunity for organizations to take free, open-source projects, polish them up, make them dead-simple for a specific group of people to use, and sell access to the implementation back to the audience. Stikipad v. Instiki as wiki solutions come to mind. This transformation:

  1. Is dependent on the open source project’s license (GPL doesn’t allow this, MIT license does) and
  2. No longer makes it a free and open source project – it’s then a commercial product. Hopefully contributing back to the original project.

Finally – Multiple Speakers in iTunes AirTunes

Spent a few moments over lunch refining my wireless network, while making sure everything worked as expected, I noticed a ‘Multiple Speakers’ option in my iTunes v6.0.5 (20).

About Frigging Time!

When we first set up the Airport Express, I was baffled why I couldn’t have the same music playing in the room with the laptop as the room with the Tivoli.

Thankfully that bug has been fixed – and with enough Airport Expresses, I can fill the neighborhood with podcasts just like the crappy music blaring from Silver Lake Village.

Seriously, it’s a horrid place to make phone calls – despite being outside and away from traffic.

Nathan Stohlmann says this is part of the AirPort Express Firmware 6.3 Update.

Agent FeedSeeder Says ‘Hi’

If you see: FeedSeeder/Development (http://workingpathways.com); TEST Furrow in your logs, that’s me. Well, technically, the T-minus project I’ve been talking about.

Hi. How are you? Things are good. Thanks.

I’m pretty happy with how things are behaving, even at this yet early stage. Just the poking around I did tonight felt very comfortable. I’m looking forward to when I can live in it for a while.

RSS 2.0 feeds are no problem – just as I suspected. Atom, RDF, and some Feedburner feeds are yet to come.

Compare and Contrast

  1. Exhibit 1: The lastest Morning Coffee Notes talking frankly, casually, honestly about business and the internet. There’s a pile of very valuable lessons in this conversation.
  2. Exhibit 2: TechCrunch’s heavily produced, seemingly scripted, wardrobed, cast of 14 CEOs talking buzzwords.


Update 12 August 2006: The Om and Niall Podsessions have left me unsatisfied lately. Too much of the later, not enough of the former.

“Aside from personal, near-term gain, why sell out at all? Wait until the 1.0 era giants crumble, and buy their worthwhile assets” – Stowe Boyd

Blog Networks Are An Oxymoron

It’s a rare recording label with more fans than the artists it supports, a rare television company with more fans than the programs it broadcasts. Anyone can create a network just by installing MagpieRSS on their favorite server and loading it up with their favorite RSS feeds. Er, I think that’s a network, maybe a channel, eh, it’s close enough not to matter.

There are 333 feeds in my version of NetNewsWire. The vast majority of them, independent publishers, somewhat unrelated to the next. As of this writing, there are 73 feeds over at PodcastMN. Same goes for them.

But, aggregation is only so useful. Filtering, editing, whathaveyou is the other side of the coin.

“These network directors, as I call them, would add critical value to the plaza, and make the user experience much more than just a combined stream.” – Stowe Boyd

Does the above link make me a Network Director or simply a blogger?
(yes, this is all about the T-minus project)

Different Words for a Sandwich with Meat Cut from a Vertical Rotisserie

Last night, over a dinner of thinly-sliced lamb in a small, round piece of bread with tomatoes and onions, we wondered what we should call this sandwich. According to Wikipedia, here are our options:

  1. Gyros – this is the Greek term, ‘jeeros’, and the first time I had one at Drag’s Pizza in Rice Lake, WI about 15 years ago, I ordered a ‘yeero’ – no ‘s’. In Belgium, you’ll find french fries in the bottom of it.
  2. Döner – this is the Turkish term, and what I lived on in Germany. There, it’s served in fladenbrot with cabbage.
  3. Schwarma – is the Arabic word for it. I ate some of these while in German as well – I’m sure it depended on emigration. Of the 3, this seems like the easiest to pronounce correctly.