The Tunnel to the Singularity

License: Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike

Trey is about as talented, generous, and classy a person as I've found on the Internet. And funny -- I loved this post where he gives a dramatic reading of negative Amazon reviews of his HDR book:

I'm very excited about a new Martin Sexton album (Sugarcoating) and a new tour. And as an added bonus, the Ryan Montbleau Band will be opening for Martin and performing as his backing band. Congratulations, RMB, you guys deserve this.

I have tickets for a Saturday night show in Madison, Wisconsin, and the next night in St. Paul, Minnesota. It's going to be so freaking awesome. Maybe after that I'll follow them down to New Orleans. We'll just see how it goes...

Now we’ve released a new album and a couple of new videos. But the fans and bloggers who helped spread “Here It Goes Again” across the Internet can no longer do what they did before, because our record company has blocked them from embedding our video on their sites. Believe it or not, in the four years since our treadmill dance got such attention, YouTube and EMI have actually made it harder to share our videos.

[...]

But this isn’t how the Internet works. Viral content doesn’t spread just from primary sources like YouTube or Flickr. Blogs, Web sites and video aggregators serve as cultural curators, daily collecting the items that will interest their audiences the most. By ignoring the power of these tastemakers, our record company is cutting off its nose to spite its face.

The numbers are shocking: When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.

And there is much more good stuff in the article, but I don't want to "take" more than my fair use quote from the NYT, so you can read the whole thing there.

The Bird Song

Which leads me to the "Bird Song." This is what my daughter calls the music video for "Bathtime in Clerkenwell," by The Real Tuesday Weld.

I first encountered this band and video in late 2008 at the web site of Dave Winer. (More accurately -- and aptly for Dave, "the father of RSS" -- I would have found this in my feed reader.) He gave it no introduction other than the post title of "Bathtime in Clerkenwell." There was just an embedded YouTube video. The black and white still image of a cartoon bird caught my eye, I clicked on the play button, and I instantly loved the wonderful absurdity of the animation and the nonsense vocals. I followed the trail back to The Real Tuesday Weld's official YouTube channel and found other great videos there, including "Kix."

In turn, I published a couple of posts embedding the Clerkenwell video and others, to which at least one person enjoyed them enough to comment on, and I hope I might have spread the word to a few others as well.

Fast forward to November of 2009 when I was doing some maintenance on my site and noticed that embedding had been disabled for both the Clerkenwell video and for Kix. Not that my old posts were getting traffic anymore, but I like things to be current and functional, so it was an annoyance.

And it was perplexing. Why make it harder to share this stuff? It's out on the Internet already, why not make it as convenient as possible for people to view it? Had Dave not embedded the video on his site, there is a good chance I wouldn't have followed a link back to YouTube to see it there. But since I was already scanning his feed, it was easy to try.

I updated my posts with notes about the dis-embedding and encouraged people to make the trip to YouTube to check out the videos. It was worth all that effort of clicking on the link, I figured.

Get Off My Lawn

Now fast forward to this month, and when I visit the official YouTube page for "Bathtime in Clerkenwell," I get: "This video contains content from UMG. It is no longer available in your country."

I guess one promotional theory is that it's a good idea to hide things under a rock.

Or, maybe it would be better to see the videos as advertisements. As seeds. Planted out there on the Internet and eventually bearing fruit. For example: Despite this foolishness, I've recently purchased three albums by these guys. I love the music. But I might not ever have found it without embedding and easy sharing.

Thank you, Stephen Coates. I'm enjoying your art. I would have embedded at least one video with this post to try sharing the love forward, but your business partners don't want me to do that.

But then I received this in my inbox:

Bigger: 4288 x 2848

A winter wonderland. I like the lone deer in the foreground.

This was sent to me by my sister, Lisa Pertile, who graciously agreed to let me post it here under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Thanks, Lisa -- excellent shot!

That's right. This is cat blogging at its finest.

I've been more aggressive lately about creating helper scripts and aliases for common tasks, and I liked this find helper enough to want to share it. I find that I often do filename searches like this:

find -iname "*some_word*"

That's not so bad to type, but why not make it even easier for my, and maybe your common usage? We might prefer to do something like this:

findr some_word

And assume that we're looking for a case-insensitive, substring match. And since we love regular expressions, we can work with find's regex options:

--regextype posix-egrep -iregex

Which is just begging for a helper to do the work for us in standard situations.

Before we look at the script and some examples, here are a few more considerations for our findr command:

• With the -iregex option, the match is against the whole path, so we'll wrap the supplied regex search term with dot-stars (.*) to loosen things up. We probably want to limit our match to the last item in the path: the filename or "leaf" dir, so it performs like a standard -name or -iname search. The second dot-star then becomes [^/]*, which says: don't let a slash follow our search term.
• For my find usage, I typically use the -mount option to not descend into directories on other file systems, so I'm making this the default, with a -a option to search "all" file systems. But of course your desires may differ.
• It may be useful to have a "preview" option -p to show the find command that our script generates.
• Our assumption will be that the last parameter is the regex search term.

findr.sh

(Use this code at your own risk, and use it however you like. To the extent possible, I'm putting this into the public domain.)

#!/bin/bash

 usage="\nfindr.sh: Helper to make regex find commands easier.\n\n"
usage+="  usage: findr.sh [-a] [-p preview mode] [find args] expression\n"
usage+="\t-a\tsearch all filesystems (default is -xdev/-mount)\n"
usage+="\t-p\tpreview mode; just show the resulting find command\n"
usage+="\n\t\t(can't combine params, e.g. -ap)\n"

preview=false
# use "nowarn" to avoid warning if -mount used after -type f, e.g.
xdev=" -nowarn -mount "

while [[ -n "$1" ]]; do
	if [[ $1 == "-h" || $1 == "--help" || $1 == "-help" ]]; then
		echo -e $usage
		exit 0
	elif [[ $1 == "-a" ]]; then
		xdev=""
	elif [[ $1 == "-p" ]]; then
		preview=true
	elif [[ $# -eq 1 ]]; then
		regex=$1
	else
		args+=" $1"
	fi
	shift
done

args+="${xdev}-regextype posix-egrep -iregex"
regex="^.*${regex}[^/]*$"

if [[ "$preview" == "true" ]]; then
	echo "find $args \"$regex\"" >&2
else
	find $args "$regex"
fi

I've created in ~/.bash_aliases:

• alias findr='findr.sh'
• alias findra='findr -a'

Thus:

findr secret-plans

Becomes:

find -nowarn -mount -regextype posix-egrep -iregex "^.*secret-plans[^/]*$"

You can add other "find" options, like the dir to search:

findr /home/scarpent secret-plans

Or specify the file type:

findr -type f secret-plans

Or whatever other option. The script includes the -nowarn option with -mount, because for example with this command:

find -type f -mount -regextype posix-egrep -iregex "^.*secret-plans[^/]*$"

find will complain about the order of options, and while I appreciate the good intentions and wisdom of the warning, it isn't a problem for me. (Not until I get burned by missing some other suppressed warning, I guess.)

And you can take advantage of regular expressions! For example, maybe you want to look for the song "Oh, Yeah," by Yello, and avoid matching on Elton John, Joni Mitchell, or Tony Orlando songs. You can use a word boundary:

findr "yello\b" or findr yello\\b

The find command is loaded with options and my understanding of it is only mildly nuanced, so this may (and will!) break down in many scenarios, but it's not meant to be a replacement for direct use of find.

It's just a helper, after all.

My Aunt Sharon is selling these super Soup Saver Scoops:

She is retired and has started up a business to sell these things. She came up with the idea based on an old utensil that is apparently nowhere to be found anymore. She worked with a firm to design it and have a mold made up, and is manufacturing them in China and selling them through her own web site. I think that's pretty cool.

I saw the prototype and knew it would be a decent kitchen helper, but after using it last night for the first time I really wanted to spread the word: this is a great scoop! We had Northwoods Wild Rice Soup and the ladle was a joy and a pleasure to use. The scooping, the scraping, the pouring... all wonderful. I got that geek/engineer thrill of having the right tool for the job.

I'm getting this posted too late for Christmas ordering, but Christmas gifts are mostly a bogus and forced thing anyway. You can buy some for yourself and the people you love anytime. It's an inexpensive gift that is sure to delight the special cook in your life, and January and February are still prime soup months, after all!

Possible definitions:

bytesore: A web site, service, or computer program that is unpleasant or ugly or offensive.

bytesore: A displeasing web site or computer program; one that is prominently ugly or unsightly.

Example usage: movingtofreedom.org is a disgusting, wretched bytesore.

Here's a short link for spreading the word: http://fwib.net/byte

Thank you for your assistance in meme propagation.

(Update: Now in the Urban Dictionary: bytesore.)

Little Boxes at Night, by Trey Ratcliff

License: Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike

I love Trey Ratcliff's HDR photography, and I'm grateful that he releases almost all of it with a Creative Commons license. While the non-commercial clause may not be ideal for free culture enthusiasts, I think it's still pretty cool to share so much high quality work this way. (Especially when you can get full-size versions from his Flickr account.) Thanks, Trey!

Jonathan Coulton, Chiron Beta Prime

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