The Stuffed Dog

One doesn't normally think of Amazon as a web services kind of company. Sure, they have a web service interface to their online store, but that's just facilitating the primary purpose of Amazon which has primarily been retail sales. Their A9 web search is interesting, but I haven't followed it very much. Cloning Google, Yahoo, and MSN is fine, but not very interesting.

But as sure as Yahoo is into retailing and Google is trying to get into retailing, Amazon is serious about pushing web services. Witness the new S3 web storage service. Full REST and SOAP interfaces, a relatively cheap charge model for storage space and bandwidth. Not only can you host anything you want, but wonder of wonders, they include automatic BitTorrent support for distributing your files and at the same time minimizing your bandwidth. This is an area that Google at least definitely wants to go into. That Amazon of all people has beaten them to the punch with a simple, well documented storage service and API has got to be embarrassing.

But it's a fantastic thing for the Web. It's not going to be long before we see some truly innovative uses of this service.

Posted by Dave Adams at 01:25 PM | Permalink

Highest Paying AdWords
John Batelle found a very revealing list of the top valued Google AdWords. I'll give you a hint: if lawyers or mortgages are involved, it's worth a lot of money.

Ars reviews The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
I'd heard a lot of buzz about this game, but I didn't know anything about it till I clicked through to this review. I've never played Morrowind, but I really enjoyed Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon Siege, so this game sounds right up my alley. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to play this sort of game anymore. Maybe when I retire.

Phalanger - the PHP Compiler for .NET
This is... interesting. It's some crazy combination of PHP and .NET. And you aren't limited to web applications. PHP console apps are possible. You'd have to be pretty in love with PHP to even consider this, seems to me.

Bug Reports Gone Wild
A Firefox bug report tells of a dramatic breakup, and the comments give lessons in love and proper bug reporting. (via Bruce Schneier)

Posted by Dave Adams at 01:24 AM | Permalink

John Adams is my favorite living composer, and so when it was announced he was writing a new opera, I was thrilled. I love Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and although it's not an opera, El Niño is Adams's greatest major work, I think. Anyway, Doctor Atomic premiered last fall in San Francisco. I entertained the idea of flying out to see it, but the cost and hassle of doing so were prohibitive. It will be playing in other venues soon, but I figure it's unlikely I'll get to see it, so I'm waiting not-so-patiently for an announcement about when a recording will be available. I figure they'll wait at least two years, to give the live productions time to make money.

But while I wait, this writeup by John Adams about his reactions to the rehearsals of the opera and his philosophy on sound design and vocal amplification in opera is very interesting stuff.

Posted by Dave Adams at 11:17 PM | Permalink

Print Ads aren't going so well for Google
Googles recent toe-dip into reselling print ad space hasn't gone very well, but you can be sure they are not done with the idea yet.

Does the death penalty really provide closure?
Dahlia tackles a tough topic: does the death penalty provide closure to victims' families as is so often stated? Or is closure even possible when a loved one has been killed? And what about the family members who don't want the person to be killed?

Posted by Dave Adams at 11:06 AM | Permalink

I really don't like Windows Media Player--or any other fancy player either, for that matter. But I had no idea this could happen:

C00D0BB8: Cannot play the file
Windows Media Player cannot play the file. You might encounter this error message for the following reason:

You are trying to play an MP3 file that contains compressed ID3 headers. The ID3 header is a portion of the file that stores the song's album information (for example, the song name, artist name, album name, and genre). This information is sometimes called a "tag."

To fix the problem, make a copy of the file and then use a non-Microsoft ID3 tag editing program to remove or reset the file's ID3 headers. After you remove the ID3 headers, Windows Media Player should be able to play the MP3 file.

Viva Winamp!

Posted by Dave Adams at 10:56 AM | Permalink

Mike's FireWire Information
Everything you could possibly want to know and more--much more--about the details and history of the FireWire/IEEE1394 spec.

Tomcat Configuration Tutorial
For setting up a Tomcat development environment on your workstation. This is an insanely detailed step-by-step walkthrough. If only they could make it as simple as Rails...

Introducing ajaxWrite
Michael Robertson is on a mission to provide Ajaxified versions of all your favorite desktop office apps. Starting with ajaxWrite, a word processor. Supposedly each Wednesday for the next several weeks new applications in the same vein will be released. I wish I could say it was great, but I can't get it to load at the moment.

Posted by Dave Adams at 01:47 PM | Permalink

So Iwata's keynote is going on now at the GDC; he's just now getting to the Revolution stuff, but you can follow what's going on with this live coverage from Revolution Report. It appears the Virtual Console is going to include Genesis and Turbografx games as well as Nintendo console games. That's amazing news. This pre-speech interview is interesting as well.

Posted by Dave Adams at 01:44 PM | Permalink

Every so often I get a little crazy about video games. Now is one of those times. The Nintendo "Revolution" is certainly on my list, but between Tetris DS, New Super Mario Bros, and a just-announced DS Zelda game, not to mention Mario Kart DS, the Nintendo DS is looking very very tempting. I think I will wait for the new model, though.

I got a GameBoy Micro for myself for Christmas, and I've been loving revisiting my favorite games from the SNES era like Street Fighter 2, Final Fantasy IV, and Super Mario World; and the original games like WarioWare and Mega Man Zero are massively addictive as well. I still have WarioWare: Twisted on my wishlist as well as the Zelda and Metroid GBA games I've yet to play.

Then there's the old-school Xbox we bought so we could rip our DVDs to my PC's hard drive and play back anything directly without the hassle of dealing with the discs and waiting through all the copyright notices and menus. As it happens, there are some great games for Xbox that I've been able to sample. Halo, Burnout Revenge, Forza. And of course I'd love to play Katamari Damacy someday, but you need a PS2 for that. The Xbox 360 even looks appealing thanks to the amazing Xbox Live service. And thank goodness my PC is hopelessly slow or I'd have to wade through those options as well. About the only game machine that hasn't captured my fancy is the PSP, but I don't know if I expect that to remain the case for long.

Now where am I gonna get the money?

Posted by Dave Adams at 01:39 PM | Permalink

I sadly haven't been to The Moxie in months, but I finally found the will to drop in on Dan and Nicole last night to see Darwin's Nightmare. What a fantastic and utterly depressing movie. When the lights came up everyone in the audience was just sitting there in absolute silence staring at the screen, not wanting to disturb the reverent atmosphere.

The film is set in a village on the edge of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. The local economy, such that it is, is totally driven by catching and processing Nile perch, an alien species that was introduced into the lake 50 years ago and has since totally devestated the native ecosystem of cichlids and algae. Now the lake is losing its oxygen and the perch are cannibalizing themselves. All the good meat from the fish goes to Europe, but although demand is down, the fish are still far too expensive for the locals to afford. So they subsist on famine-threatened local rice and what's left of the fish carcasses after the good meat has been stripped. AIDS has devestated much of the population, and poverty and prostitution are rampant, while European capitalists and African politicians think the solution is more fishing and better sales videos, and Christian missionaries promise Jesus can bring miraculous catches and warn against using condoms. Homeless children sniff fumes from melted down trashed fish packaging to help them sleep on the streets. Meanwhile the planes that take the fish to Europe also bring guns and tanks to fuel the local wars, which some residents see as the only real prospect of a strong economy.

The filmmakers do a masterful job of presenting the situation and the problems, starting simply with all of the characters--from Russian pilots to street children to the candid security guard to the singing prostitute and the one-eyed fish-carcass processor--and revealing more and more complexity and contradiction with each iteration, each peeled-away layer. Everyone sees the problems, but no one knows how to solve them, so denial is in everyone's stories. It's truly a fascinating film, well worth seeing.

Posted by Dave Adams at 10:27 AM | Permalink

Rafe has a good entry on implementing a REST-based web service and how that name doesn't really communicate everything it could about what the implementation of such a service must involve. Of course, part of the philosophy of REST is avoiding trying to come up with an ubergeneric and hard-to-implement spec (like, say, SOAP) that defines all the conditions ahead of time, and instead letting the API's details be application specific. So a little vagueness is not such a bad thing.

Posted by Dave Adams at 10:07 AM | Permalink

Nintendo's upcoming game console is getting a lot of attention from the gaming media who are eating up the hype about the new controller and the new games it will enable. It's true that Nintendo of late has been opening gaming to new audiences with the DS and the new console will definitely be one to watch.

You can believe I'll get one. I've had every Nintendo console yet made. Still, I'm not sure Nintendo will be able to fight their way out of their slump. The Xbox 360 and PS3 are going all out in the media convergence space, and I think that is where the non-hardcore gamer growth is most likely to come from. Still, Nintendo makes a good argument that by focusing on just games and giving developers a low cost platform, they can provide a unique experience that Microsoft and Sony are just overkill for.

Anyway, lots of new information is due to come out tomorrow at the Game Developer's Conference including the as-yet-unknown name of the console. The code name, Revolution, is so evocative and has been so much discussed that I'm having trouble adjusting to the idea there will be a different name. There's also rumors the machine will ship this summer to beat Sony to the punch, but I'll believe that when I hear it. RevolutionReport.com has pictures of the real thing, supposedly.

Posted by Dave Adams at 07:47 PM | Permalink

My tech interests are all over the map, but my current job is Windows system administration. That's why I find Microsoft's MSH project so interesting. Also known as Monad, it's Microsoft's attempt to provide a robust command shell that can be used for all system administration, not just what Microsoft has deigned to write a command-line tool for or what you've written a hideous VBScript or JScript for.

I haven't tried it out myself yet, but just browsing through some of the examples, I'm worried they've gone way overboard in trying to create an entirely new paradigm for command shells while at the same time munging in a bunch of half-complete syntax appropriations from Unix script languages. On the other hand, maybe it's time to try something new in the command line world. If I get around to really experimenting with it, I'll report back.

Posted by Dave Adams at 11:40 AM | Permalink

Well, the big news for my family is that we'll be moving to Blacksburg, Virginia this summer. Mollie got accepted to the accounting PhD program at Virginia Tech for this fall, and so we're having to abandon Springfield, which we've grown to love over the last 11 years. But I'm excited about the move. Blacksburg is a lot smaller than Springfield, but it sounds like a nice little college town. I think it will be good to shake things up, and of course I would never let Mollie pass up this opportunity. She's wanted to be a professor for years, but once you've been out in the working world it takes a lot of courage to jump back into academia and commit to moving your family hundreds of miles for five years. But I'm insanely proud of her, and I can't wait for us all to begin our new life.

Posted by Dave Adams at 09:11 AM | Permalink

Oh yeah, the design is MT's default template. I'll probably be trying to switch my old template over here soon with a few tweaks.

Posted by Dave Adams at 04:17 PM | Permalink

It's hard to believe, but on March 30, The Stuffed Dog will be seven years old. Posts have been sparse for several of those years, and lately more and more of the rare posts have turned into political screeds rather than interesting writing--not that my writing was ever that interesting. I've moved blogging platforms from a custom Frontier-based system to a custom PHP-based system to Movable Type to TypePad. But as Spring sproings here in 2006, I've gotten the urge to give the blogging thing another go, and I'm moving things back to Movable Type.

So, I'm hoping to avoid roping myself into writing longer pieces that suck up my energy and make it a chore to blog. I'm going to try for posting far more often about things that interest me, projects I'm working on, and cool things I've found online. We'll see how it goes.

Posted by Dave Adams at 03:29 PM | Permalink