Popularity: 9% [?]

She was born today at 12:02 PM MDT, 21 inches long and weighing 10 and a half pounds (no, that is not a typo. 4,767 grams of baby). Beth is fine but sore (obviously!) and Lily is absolutely the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. I’m a touch tired after “sleeping” in a recliner last night, so off to shower and celebrate with an 8 dollar, 40 proof (also not a typo. 20% alcohol) beer.

Pictures will be posted soon.

Popularity: 11% [?]

When I first saw the story about the 1860 audio recording on Reddit I thought it was kinda silly… why would someone build a recording device when there was no complimentary gadget to play back the sound? But after I thought about it it seemed like a pretty difficult chicken and egg problem: How do you either invent a recording device without first knowing how to read the output or build a phonograph without knowing what the input looks like?

Turns out that wasn’t the issue. The phonautograph was never meant to be played back at all, it was just supposed to create visual interpretation of sounds. That makes the work these researchers did even more remarkable.

It also reminded me of an episode of MythBusters I recently saw. In it they busted a myth that sound could have been inadvertently recorded onto pottery that was decorated by dragging a piece of straw across it’s surface (the theory was that the straw could act like a recording stylus, vibrating to the sound and leaving the audio info in the groove). They were unable to recover any sounds using professional audio recovery tools; I’d be interested in seeing if the phonauthograph scientists could find anything. They had to develop some sophisticated new tools to extract audio from visual images and I wonder if those would work better than the Mythbuster’s glass stylus.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Wow, we were only one brown person away from really pissing off Elton John.

Perhaps racist America was confused by the dreads? I thought for sure that the bright blue eyes would make a game of spot-the-white-guy fairly simple.

Popularity: 10% [?]

At least now he’s announcing his rip-offs homages beforehand. I guess the pressure from the Doxology PR blitz has him and the Idol producers on their toes.

But Christ he’s riding this ironic rock cover thing hard, with the judges praising him for originality and bravery the whole way.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Obviously something has happened to TBOTCOTW. I’ve finally switched from MovableType to WordPress. I had a lot of time invested in MovableType, but an upgrade to MT4.1 made most of that moot… many of my hacks didn’t work anymore because none of the more arcane plugins (simple comments, regex, getXML, etc.) were ever updated to work with MT4.

So I realized that the golden days for MovableType were over. There were just too many internal changes from version 2.5 to 3.0, and then again from 3.4 to 4.0, for plugin developers to keep up. Even some of the most dedicated, like Arvind Satyanarayan, had given up on immensely popular plugins like MT BlogRoll. In the comments he got request after request for a new version, and he promised it in a week or two a couple of times, but it’s never happened.

This isn’t Arvind’s fault, of course. He’s a busy young man who just started college. This also isn’t really the fault of MovableType’s developers. The upgrades they did that made plugins break were probably necessary, and I think their vision was (unavoidably) a bit blinkered because they’re developers, not plugin writers (much less plugin users). So they have different priorities than me (and other end-users like me who like to make everything work just so).

WordPress, on the other hand, is purely open source, and always has been. So there seems to be a lot more of the community’s requirements taken into account in new versions. Plus the plugin community feels like MovableType’s did three or four years ago… it’s vibrant and alive, with new plugins released daily and old plugins updated frequently.

The migration was not especially difficult, but I did have to follow these directions to make MT print the EntryIDs in the export file, and to make WP read and use them when importing. This was only because I still get hits with the old entryid format of /archives/001178.html and I have a redirection scheme that sends those hits to the correct entry (basically an extra archive template that’s just a redirect header and a series of archive mappings to each old format). That redirection scheme was very difficult to come up with in MT, but there were a couple of plugins (Advanced Permalinks and Redirection) that made it very, very easy in WP. WP also, out of the box, automatically converts from the underscore format of MT to dashes, which is nice, since I just learned that dashes are preferred by search engines.

Since the upgrade I’ve noticed several things are better. WordPress is noticeably faster than MovableType since it does everything dynamically rather than publishing static html files (it’s even faster than an MT installation with every template set to dynamic publishing). And, like I said before, the plugin selection is pretty incredible. There are several plugins that just do stats reports on visitors, pageviews, and the like. Plus the akismet plugin (which did have a MT version) is native to WP, and it works very well at stopping comment spam. And WP has several features built-in that need plugins or new templates in MT, like a comments feed per post and a blogroll management system.

All in all, I’m extremely happy with WordPress, and not just because I like having new toys to play with.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Apple just recently released firmware version 1.3 for the 5G iPods. Of course, since it is Apple, the release notes just say “bug fixes” without bothering to say which bugs were fixed. Well, one of the bugs they fixed is pretty damn cool.

One annoying thing about the iPod (and, for a long time, iTunes did the same thing) is that albums are sorted alphabetically under the artist name. So for the Beatles you end up seeing Abbey Road before Please Please Me. That just doesn’t make any sense. Some people fixed this by putting the year in front of the album name on every album, but then you end up with albums like “1969 - Abbey Road,” and that just looks lame.

So Apple eventually added “Sort Album” and “Sort Artist” tags to iTunes. With these you could see Abbey Road but sort via “1969 - Abbey Road,” and show “Elvis Costello” but sort via “Costello, Elvis.” But, since this is Apple, they didn’t implement it very smoothly. The “Sort Artist” tag worked on the iPod from day one, and when the iPhone and the iPod Touch and Classic came out all of them supported both tags. But us 5G owners were stuck with alphabetically sorted albums (I know, horror, right?).

But now, with version 1.3, the original iPod can do the same thing. Here’s a bit of a tutorial (scroll to the last message) on how to update your “Sort Album” fields using Mp3tag (for some reason iTunes won’t let you update a bunch of songs sort fields at once without going through a bunch of rigamarole). Note that I couldn’t get the Mp3tag directions to work in version 2.4, but I did get it to work in one of the 2.39alpha versions a while back… perhaps I’m just doing something wrong or maybe there’s a bug they’ll fix soon.

Popularity: 16% [?]

All the ads for the new movie Horton Hears a Who (which I’m looking forward too, never mind the Grinches over at Dave’s) has reminded me of a minor problem I have with Horton’s behavior in the original book.

After the Wickersham brothers take the clover they give it to the black-bottomed eagle Vlad Vladikoff, who drops it in a field of clovers (of course I remember the whole book, I handle story time for a seven year old every night, so I’ve only read this book about once a week for the last five years). I’ve always felt that the story should have ended right there… at that point, what good does it do for Horton to search through three million flowers to find the one with the speck? If he’d just well enough alone the Whos would have remained hidden in that field for the rest of their short, tiny lives, never again to be threatened by killjoy kangaroos with beezlenut oil.

(Topic for another post: What the fuck is the kangaroo’s problem? Horton ain’t hurting nobody, but that jackass marsupial just can’t let it go. Is Dr. Seuss a libertarian? Cause everyone in the book but Horton and the Whos sure act like nanny statists engaged in a metaphor for the War on Drugs.)

Popularity: 10% [?]

Last week, everyone’s favorite emo-esque (at least in the hair department) American Idol contestant David Cook totally ripped off Me First and the Gimme Gimmes (or did he rip off Incubus? Hmmm…). So does anyone know if Dashboard Confessional does a version of “Eleanor Rigby” on tour?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Of course, xkcd gets it perfect.

Popularity: 9% [?]