Coachella

A friend of mine told me about the Coachella music festival a few days ago. Absolutely unbelievable lineup. I seriously started drooling as I was reading through it — I haven’t seen anything like this since Woodstock ‘94. A few personal favorites that will be there: Radiohead, The Cure, The Flaming Lips, Wilco, The Pixies, Paul van Dyk, The Future Sound of London, Ferry Corsten, and on and on and on. There is one small problem though: it’s right around the time of my first-year law school finals! It’s almost as if the organizers called me up and said, “Justin, what would be the absolute worst time for us to hold this once-in-a-lifetime concert?” To which I responded, “You know what, I don’t want to seem pushy, but would it be possible to hold it in the middle of my law school finals?”

Open arms

The steps of San Francisco’s City Hall the day after Valentine’s Day and during the first week that San Francisco started issuing same-sex marriage licenses — what a beautiful picture (from Ephemera).

12 Reasons Same-Sex Marriage will Ruin Society — a facetious and rather funny take on the ridiculousness of amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriages (from GatorGSA).

1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control are not natural.
2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people cannot get legally married because the world needs more children.
3. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children because straight parents only raise straight children.
4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful, since Britney Spears’s 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
5. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and it hasn’t changed at all: women are property, Blacks can’t marry Whites, and divorce is illegal.
6. Gay marriage should be decided by the people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of minorities.
7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are always imposed on the entire country. That’s why we only have one religion in America.
8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people makes you tall.
9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage license.
10. Children can never succeed without both male and female role models at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to cars or longer lifespans.
12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages will for gays & lesbians.

Minimal

Hopefully it’s quite obvious that I’m going for a very minimalist look with this latest redesign (aren’t I always?). I don’t think I can get much barer (more elegant?) than this, but rest assured, if it’s possible I’ll do it. The title of each post now links to its individual archive (instead of the ∞ symbol that I used to use for this purpose). As always, if you notice anything funky, let me know.

Referrer spam

I’ve noticed a significant amount of spam come through my referrers in the past couple of weeks. The HTTP referrer variable is spoofed with things like “nude4u.com” and “paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com” — the idea being that some people will actually click on these links — unbelievable. Then again, spammers are nothing if not opportunists, so I guess this isn’t too surprising. Fortunately, I can [publicly] block most of this because there is a quick patch for Refer, which I started using a few days ago.

Referrers

After spending some time hacking away at Dean Allen’s Refer, I now have a public referrer page. While the initial setup of the script was trivial, it took a while to get the row elements in the order that I wanted and to remove the stuff I didn’t want presented. After I was satisfied with how the table looked, I put the relevant PHP call into an MT template and was ready to go.

I have to say that while the Refer package is very well done, I would have liked to see more configuration options so that I could have spent less time getting things the way I wanted them. Also, Dean, if you’re reading, in the next version could you please include the option to show search terms on the main index page as is done on the “queries” page (i.e., the search terms are filtered from the URI and presented separately from it)? I’ll probably just go ahead and make the changes myself at some point, but I think it’s something that should be included in future versions of Refer. That said, I can’t find anything else I would change/add to this package and recommend it to anyone looking to create a public (or private) referrers page.

The syndication juggernaut

In a previous post I linked to an RSS feed generator from Apple for its iTunes Music Store. Apple has since gone one step further and added feeds for many other sections of its site. It’s so great to see syndication like this on a site of Apple’s magnitude, just one of many big-name sites in the past few months to add RSS/Atom feeds.

Speaking of syndication, a couple of days ago Yahoo! publicly moved away from Google’s search technology and went back to using its own in-house engine; what’s neat about the search results is that they include both a link for the site’s RSS feed (if available) and a link to add the feed to your My Yahoo! account, which now includes an RSS reader (beta).

Hopefully all of this exposure from big, well-known companies, will start to convince the public that they need syndication, thereby causing a greater demand for other sites to offer feeds.

Data Archiving Services

For the past year I’ve been using Data Archiving Services alongside the statistical logs provided by my host. While I have found the service useful, I’ve decied to drop it as it sometimes makes my website slow to load. Each time I get a hit, DAS is pinged with information about the visitor — this ping sometimes takes a few very noticeable seconds. The truth is, DAS really didn’t offer anything beyond what I already had available to me. However, it does present the information that I care most about in a much more readable and ‘pretty’ way than http-analyze, the logging software provided with my hosting account. There are two things that I need when it comes to website statistics: 1.) the number of hits a day [week, month, etc] with the ability to have it not count hits to certain URIs (e.g., hits on my syndication feed) and 2.) referrer statistics — I like to know where my readers are coming from. Both of these are handled nicely in DAS and horribly in http-analyzer, not to mention that the latter’s inferface is ugly and gives you no configuration options. The entire http-analyzer suite is quite powerful and offers statistics on a wide range of traffic data, but gives you absolutely no way to specify how you want this data presented or grouped — it makes me nuts.

That said, I don’t have much choice but to use it as it is all my provider offers. Because of the wretched way in which it handles referrers, sometime in the near future I plan to add a “referrers” page to the site so that myself and others can see this information in a way that I find useful. I’ll probably use either Dean Allen’s Refer or Stephen Downes’ Referrer System. Truth be told, I’d rather use Apache directly for this sort of thing, but I don’t have access to httpd.conf on the server.

God made Louisiana

I was doing the reading for my property class earlier today and stumbled across a rather funny story (you’ll have to bear with me, this is as good as it gets in law school). The current reading discusses the system for recording land titles in America. Federal agencies generally require land title searches go back to the original source. A New Orleans lawyer, working for a government agency, researched the land title back to 1803, and when asked who owned the land prior to that, he replied:

Please be advised that in the year 1803 the United States of America acquired the Territory of Louisiana from the Republic of France by purchase. The Republic of France previously acquired title from the Spanish Crown by conquest. Spain acquired title by virtue of the discoveries of one Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor who had been duly authorized to embark upon his voyage of discovery by Isabella, Queen of Spain. Before granting such authority, Isabella, a pious and cautious woman, obtained the sanction of His Holiness, the Pope. The Pope is the Vicar on earth of Jesus Christ, the only son and heir apparent of God. God made Louisiana.

The Grey Album

The Grey Album, from Danger Mouse, is a unique blend of old and new: a collection of songs from Jay-Z’s latest (and final) effort, The Black Album, put to new beats created entirely from The Beatle’s White Album. I’ve been listening to this record for a couple of weeks now, but felt compelled to write about it today after reading that it was receiving a lot of understandable heat. Danger Mouse was not given permission by Jay-Z or the Beatles to make the record, and as a result, was served with cease-and-desist letters from EMI last week.

I usually don’t post about music because, as those that know me are well aware, I’m a music nut and if I were to write about all of my musical interests I would be forced to drop out of law school. Literally. Couple that with the fact that I essentially ‘gave up’ on hip-hop a few years ago (admit it, most of it is incredibly boring and repetitive any more, though there are some exceptions) and it’s a wonder that I posted at all. Notwithstanding the fact that hip-hop (at least as an honest story-telling medium) fell from grace years ago (though sales charts and the Grammys would have you believe differently), this is the first record of its kind and I felt that it deserved some mention here. You can find this album in its entirety (192kbps, 44.1kHz, true stereo), here, here and here, among many other places across the net.

While I’m talking about music in this post, I have to make mention of two records that I’ve been listening to constantly: The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002 top ten) and The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow (2003 top ten). Get them. Love them.  :)

Note to RSS feed maintainers

When you change the address of your RSS feed, be sure to tell your subscribed public — a simple message left on the old feed telling us where we should now point our aggregator. I’m only mentioning this because I’ve noticed the stale-feed problem three times in the last month on sites that I read.

The Digital Challenge to Copyright Law

Yesterday I attended a symposium entitled The Digital Challenge to Copyright Law, which was put on by my law schools’ Computer and High-Tech Law Journal. While the presentation was incredibly long (around 9 hours), I have to say that I walked away from it with a much deeper appreciation for, and understanding of, many aspects of intellectual property law. Each of the panels included serious industry and legal heavyweights (you can find their names and occupations in the event brochure). Most of the panelists were lively and engaging and made themselves readily available between discussions to talk one-on-one with audience members. For instance, I was able to talk to, among others, Michael Ramsay, the founder, Chairman, and CEO of TiVo. I can’t deny the fact that being in a room full of so many successful, powerful, and learned individuals is both exciting and intimidating to a first-year law student.

Mail.appetizer

A few days ago I came across Mail.appetizer, an excellent plug-in for Mail.app.

When new messages arrive, Mail.appetizer displays a transparent notification on top of your screen. It shows only sender, subject and the first plain-text lines of the message, so you can determine whether the message requires your immediate attention. The prominence of the notification can be defined by adjusting transparency and display time.

The idea is nothing new, and in fact, is one that I’m usually turned off by, but this little plug-in pulls it off quite well and I have found myself really enjoying it. The main reason I tend to shy away from this sort of functionality is because it requires me to tell my e-mail client to check for new mail every X minutes, thereby conflicting with my desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone when I’m away from my computer; there would never be any e-mail on the server because I would constantly suck it down from my computer, and no, leaving the messages on the server is not an option.

Because I like the plug-in so much and plan to keep using it, I’ve had to get into the habit of putting my machine to sleep when I leave the apartment so that it stops checking for e-mail while I’m out. The problem with this is that I almost always have something downloading in the background and putting the machine to sleep obviously breaks it (yes, I realize that I could tell the e-mail client to stop checking every X minutes, but to do this every time I leave my apartment would be ridiculous).

What I really need to do is whip up some AppleScript to tell Mail.app to stop fetching mail when my PowerBook no longer sees my Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone. What I wouldn’t give for more time in the day.

If you are looking for more Mail.app plug-ins, be sure to check out Mail.app plugs and suggestions, a pretty good repository.