Scripting News

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:11:52 GMT

Tonight's weblog meeting at Berkman is on.

Daniel Drezner is "offering a scholarly paper, during the draft process, for public comment, on the political impact of blogs, with a fellow named Henry Farrell," said Ryan Overbey. "It's very exciting stuff," he continued.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 22:04:03 GMT

Quotes from tonight's debate from the Democratic weblog.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 22:07:59 GMT

100 days of Dowbrigade. Natural Born Blogger.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 19:20:38 GMT

Checking in on the Wesley Clark campaign, it's been a week since he entered the race, and we don't have an official blogger. According to Daily Kos, the Clark campaign is trying to disband the grass roots blogs. Seems like a mistake to me, that was the most exciting thing about Clark. I was interviewed yesterday by one of the major TV networks, Newsweek is sending a senior political analyst. The NY Times is sending two people, one a reporter covering the event. We've got the venue for the presidential bloggers. Clark, if you can figure out who's doing your weblog, he or she would be totally welcome. Same with Bush, Kucinich, and any of the candidates who currently don't have blogs. We have confirmations from Dean and Graham. Turndowns from Kerry and Edwards (the door's still open). And if anyone is up for a road trip to see Clark tomorrow (see below) let me know.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:58:16 GMT

NHPolitics.Com: Wesley Clark is doing a Town Hall Meeting at Simon Hall, New England College, Henniker, 6:30PM tomorrow.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:32:46 GMT

Ed Cone: "Journalists were banned from today's annual meeting of Cone Mills."

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 20:50:29 GMT

Four years ago today: Dave's History of SOAP.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 21:01:00 GMT

Derek Willis disputes some of what I've said about public radio, agrees with some.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 18:48:35 GMT

Scoble is definitely full of shit today. I don't see evil, and my disk is full (of shit), so it seems like it's time to start cleaning out the temp files. And geez Louise, how would an ordinary user know these files even exist. So many Microsoft people take even the appearance of criticism as condemnation. Get a sense of perspective. My software has bugs too. Sheez.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 14:13:03 GMT

Replay Radio is an "incredibly easy way to record radio broadcasts. It's like a VCR for the radio." Sounds perfect.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 13:22:52 GMT

Essay: When someone close dies.

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 13:41:59 GMT

Today's song: "Some say my uncle, that he's a zero."

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 12:57:56 GMT

BBC: Net guru peers into web's future.

National Public Radio is not very public

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:28:10 GMT

They like to say "you own the station," it's one of the big marketing pitches, but it's not true. There's very little to distinguish a public radio station from commercial one. The major difference is the business model. NPR stations sell subscriptions and commercial stations don't. But the distinction is fading because public radio stations are running more commercial-like spots all the time. See the bit about conference sponsorships earlier this week. The NPR stations don't disclaim or disclose much, so it's reasonable to assume that they sell speaking spots too, stuff that sounds like editorial but is really commercial.

Streaming is a form of copy protection

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 11:32:05 GMT

There's very little talk-radio type stuff, BBC, or NPR programming, that's available in MP3 format. Yet there's this incredible growing installed base of players that can play MP3s. Time-shifting of audio, news and comment, click and clack, should be flowing out this way, and were it not for the fears of the broadcasters, it would. See item #1 for a clue why NPR stations aren't taking advantage of this. The BBC, if I correctly understand their model, should distribute through MP3 and the Internet, and RSS enclosures. I bet there are some good connections between Harvard and the BBC. I'll explore that after BloggerCon, unless someone from the BBC would care to participate in the conference? Anyway, Chris Lydon's stuff is far and away the best content flowing in MP3 that I found yesterday when I asked for pointers. He's more of a pioneer than I realized.

Nothing temporary about temporary files

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 12:04:00 GMT

While I was writing this the operating system informed me that I had run out of space on Drive C, my system drive. That was surprising because I had gone through a cleanup routine just a few days ago. I had no more obvious places to go to get back space, so it was time to run my Find Large Files script. This time it didn't find much that I could delete, but I watched as it ran, it showed me the names of thousands and thousands of files I couldn't find browsing around the file system. Then I realized -- they must be hidden files. In a deeply nested sub-folder of Documents and Settings called Temp. I flipped the bit and sure enough there they were. The thousands of one-pixel gif web bugs, and all the Shockwaves, gigabytes of them, that I had looked at since I bought this computer many months ago. In other words Windows just consumes disk space. I wonder if Microsoft bought some stock in one of the disk drive makers. This is just appalling. How is a regular user supposed to find these files? Why should they have to? As we use MP3 more and more, do we need to write some utilities for people that make their systems perform better? (BTW, I'm sure Scoble will say "That's fixed in Longhorn.")