fnt (fascinating new thing)

Courtesy of Dan, I now have an Atom feed!

[Wed Jan 20 12:22:10 2010] p

Too much good music, and too many great links to let them get washed away in the torrent of constant information overload that is Facebook

It all started with some photos by Michelle that led me to check out her ACCOUSTIC Galleries

What? There was some kind of Asian-Am Art/Music show back in... December 2008 at Broadway Studios (where Michelle's the house photographer)? Ok. Oh hey Vienna Teng, and who's this Goh Nakamura guy? Oh wow, he's good. His cover of "We Can Work It Out" is solid. Hrm, playing at an As-Am Variety Concert Feb 5 at the Palace of Fine Arts? Oh yeh, and his newest album is available as a free download.

But wait -- Julie Plug? Why does that name sound familiar? OH RIGHT. Late 90s -- last time As-Am bands were all the craze. Or well, I guess they've always been grinding away. Well heck, the music is still GREAT. Just listened to everything up on their MySpace. Man, what was the name of that club on the corner of 11th and Mission where Glady reminded me that we *saw* Julie Plug? Ah right, the Paradise Lounge!

A lot of times I'll bemoan the fact that I never got to see this band or this artist back when they were still playing or still together, or still alive. But I'm trying to get over that and be content with the fact that the music will still live on even if the band or artist doesn't. [Oh look -- it's Cub's "Come out Come out" CD on my desk. If it was an LP it would be worn to death. Also, it would be much harder to play in iTunes. I missed seeing them as part of the Ear of the Dragon when they made it to L.A. because Cub wasn't on the bill anymore at that point. But still, "It was good!"] Well, Cub's long gone, but apparently Julie Plug stil plays from time to time. (The Make Out room back in April 2009). Hrm, and that show was with drummer Rob Uytingco's new band Sugarspun, and they're playing The Make Out room Feb 27. A little lighter than Julie Plug, but still great tunes. Oh, and what's this, Julie Plug headlined the "Social Disturbance" music fest back in May? And who are all these bands? Oh, down the rabbit hole...

Oh, before my disovery of Goh and rediscovery of Julie Plug, I was watching a video of powder riding up at Homewood. Oh who's this singing "Simple Things"? Julie Collings? Wow, that's some nice stuff too.

Back when JetBlue offered their $599 all-you-can-fly pass, these two artists bought passes and decided to tour like crazy. Brilliant! Followyourwhim.com of bands and their

[Fri Sep 25 17:03:43 2009] p

Finally...
...face recognition for the rest of us: Picasa 3.5.

And woot, unlike iPhoto, the data is a little easier to get at in case you wanted to programatically turn those "Name Tags" into IPTC Keywords. Check out the .picasa.ini file in each directory of photos you've imported into Picasa. Then compare those UIDs against what's in ~/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2/contacts/contacts.xml
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: Add a bit of Perl and exiftool and stir liberally.)

[Tue Sep 22 00:40:39 2009] p

World's shortest-lived blog: http://thisamericanmusic.wordpress.com/

[Mon Jul 13 22:55:19 2009] p

Kindle

I want one. Glady wants one.

But even reduced to $299, it's *too much*. I mean, I'm going to be buying books on it. Lots of books, I reckon. First chapter free? Isn't that what a drug dealer says? "C'mon, the first taste is free..."

So why isn't the Kindle subsidized, a la cell phones? You know, where it's $49-$99 if I agree to be locked me in to Book of the Month club or join Oprah's Favorite Books for 2 years. Or remember the old Columbia House CD deals where you'd get 12 CDs for a penny but then you have to buy one CD a month for the next year or two? Or "return it at no cost" (except shipping and handling). I'd *totally* agree to buy 12 NYT Bestsellers in the next year. Boom, $120 right there. Please give me my $99 Kindle.

I'd even, maybe, consider getting a subscription to the New York Times to get a cheaper Kindle, except that apparently that offer is only valid if you can't get local delivery. What? Only folks that live in the sticks can get cheap Kindles with their NYT subscriptions? Who in the sticks wants the NYT? (Apologies to sophisticated yokels.)

Ok, so they're offering them free to... 6 colleges. Great. Also, duh, why didn't you do that in the first place? Oh wait, because the textbook market is a racket. Still, it would be great for those "course readers" (assuming the greedy copyright owners don't try to extract royalties for printing a single article, which is also an ongoing fight.

ANYways. Googling for what I thought was an obvious idea, I found an article arguing that the high cost of Kindle hardware is actually subsidizing cheap e-books. It's an interesting take that I hadn't even thought of. I don't know if I buy it, but it would explain why Amazon are being such jerks.

Also, here's a detailed analysis of the actual costs of a book vs. an e-book. After a while my eyes started to glaze over. But it seems to say that publishers are *not* really losing money at $9.99 a title, which contradicts the "hardware subsidizes cheap books" argument above.

A few last links: analysis of how much it costs to print the NYT and a nice in-depth review of the experience of reading the NYT on a Kindle 2

So yeah, did I mention I really want one?

[Wed May 20 11:55:28 2009] p
Perl helps me vote:

if ($argument_text_in_voter_guide =~ /(\b[^\Wa-z0-9_]+\b/g) { &vote_for_other_side ; }

(That regexp is blatantly stolen from the Perl Cookbook. What I came up was far less elegant: /[A-Z][A-Z]+/g) [Um... I guess this might need some explanation. That bit of code in between the /slashes/ looks for anything written in ALL CAPS, which is often found in hysterical Voter Guide arguments for or against a particular measure/proposition.]

[Mon Apr 27 23:52:47 2009] p

Faces

I'm currently obsessed with face recognition because I've always thought tagging was way too much work. But letting a computer do it for me with a bit of training? That's both incredibly geeky and lazy!

iPhoto '09 does it but you're stuck with the face data all being in iPhoto. The underlying database is sqlite though, so there's a possibility of hacking the tags from there and either embedding them in the JPEGs as IPTC Keywords or now I'm looking at XMP. (Wait, can you do sidecar files for JPEGs? I'm too lazy and cheap to shoot RAW.)

Oh, there's face recognition in Picasa Web Albums, but alas, that data is not currently accessible via the API, even though plenty of people want it.

Recently I found a new site called Polar Rose that will import your Flickr photos, let you tag them (ideally with your Facebook contacts), and if the tagged parties join Polar Rose and consent (guuuuh, darned viral marketing), those names will get pushed back to Flickr as notes (guh, X-Y coordinates are cute, but IMHO, unnecessary. Just give me the names, please.) So... there's a lot of things that have to happen before your tags show up. Friends tagged must 1) have Facebook accounts 2) join Polar Rose, 3) consent to your tagging them. So uh, tagging your kids? Not going to work unless you're comfortable with your 5-year old having a Facebook account. Apparently Polar Rose is also flirted with Glowfoto.com, Jalbum.net, 23hq.com and Gallery but of course (duh) the big target would be Facebook with their ginormous userbase but there's some issue with a FB policy prohibiting storing their data for more than 24 hours.

Finally, a company called Face.com announced a FB app called Photo Finder that purportedly lets you run facial recognition across your FB galleries. It's still in alpha though, and frankly, I think facial recognition for Facebook is largely superfluous because 1) people are much more selective about what they upload to FB, so they are more likely to tag the photos right after uploading, 2) FB has made the tagging interface so easy, that it's almost hard not to tag, 3) FB has made tagging collaborative by letting your friends tag themselves and others.

Bottom line: Facebook photos usually get tagged by you and your friends -- you don't need a computer to do that work for you. What you need is for a computer to go through the piles of photos in your hard drive and tag all the old photos of your family/friends from the last 5 years so that you can post the embarrassing ones to Facebook.

Speaking of which, yet another reason Facebook sucks -- it ignores existing IPTC Captions or Keywords when uploading.

[Sun Nov 2 01:53:21 2008] p

Free Safari!
No, not the Mac web browser. Safari, O'Reilly's on-line archive of every book they've ever published (I think), is available to any resident of California, if you get a Sunnyvale Library Card.

Oh man. Nerd heaven.

(An annual subscription to the Safari Library with Unlimited Access would be $472.89!!)

(Now reading Perl Hacks, if you must know.)

Oh phooey. Not everything is available. Notably, Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook are absent. This must be some kind of lame "public library" version of Safari. Weak! Oooh, I see, it's something called "Safari Select", which is a subset of the full Safari collection. Again, weak. :-{

[Wed Oct 22 01:16:53 2008] p

Every day is exactly the same

Ok, so now that Dan has updated his layout to not include images (or like, line breaks), a reference to this blog entry doesn't make as much sense, but anyways, the point is, California sure can be boring sometimes:

[Thu Oct 2 17:49:45 2008] p

Shutterfly has an API?
That's weird, in light the fact that they're a "Photo Hostage Site." :-}

Not surprisingly, adding Shutterfly support to SmugMug's SmuggLr or Phanfare's import tool, might run afoul of the Shutterfly API Terms of Use which has some disturbing things like:

Without the express written consent of Shutterfly, you can't use the Shutterfly Open API for any commercial purposes or derive any revenues from your implementation or use of the Shutterfly Open API.
You can't use the Shutterfly Open API to create a service or application to replicate the user experience of, or the services and features available at, www.shutterfly.com or websites owned and operated by Shutterfly.
You can't use the Shutterfly Open API to enable printing of Content through photo print services other than Shutterfly.
You may not copy, cache, store or retain any Content without the consent of the Shutterfly member. Any Content retained by or through your App may only be retained for a limited period of time to provide the services available through your App.

I've sent them a note asking if download of originals is even possible with the API. If not, the concerns about their Terms are moot.

I suppose they added API support to jump on the bandwagon (albeit extremely late) and see if some sucker out there might write a Wordpress plug-in/Facebook App that'll let you include photos from your Shutterfly uploads.

Clearly they've overestimated the Web 2.0-savviness of their customer base, which is primarily scrapbookers, soccer moms, and other people > 45. :-}

[Sat Sep 20 18:44:30 2008] p

There's an anagramatically incorrect cut-and-paste graphic of the OBAMA/BIDEN sticker floating around the Internets (ok, the Facebook) that's been doctored to highlight BAD OMEN. But they've omitted letters A, B and I, because understandably, "A BI BAD OMEN" just isn't as catchy.

But if you add first names, you get:
BARACK OBAMA JOE BIDEN -> AIR JOCK? A BABE? BAD OMEN.

Heh.

*[It's a Semisonic song, ya know? It's not like my life is fascinating. i just had to put something up there.]
>:P
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Yeah, sorry, this is it. i know, i know, all that hype for this?
Well, i still have the geek page, but i won't be updating it. Sorry.
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Oh yeah, your feedback, as always, is welcome.