Solipsism Gradient

Ernie the Attorney explains why filesharing is good for the music industry, inspired by an article in Salon:

Embrace file-sharing, or die

A record executive and his son make a formal case for freely downloading music. The gist: 50 million Americans can’t be wrong…

Time.com has comments on the possible cause of the accident. They say that most probably the International Space Station will be evacuated somehow and then abandoned for a few years at least. Dave Winer’s Scripting News pointed at that link and posted many others.

Ernie the Attorney quotes Richard Feynman‘s thoughts on the Challenger accident:

…For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Doc Searls‘ comments on Challenger are also worth rereading. Jim Flowers is yet another weblogger setting up a collection of links and comments on the accident.

Only days after the 17th anniversary of the Challenger accident, the Columbia breaks up while landing after an otherwise successful two-week mission. All 7 astronauts are presumed dead. There were reports of a piece of thermal tile or insulation breaking up during lift-off and hitting one of the wings, but technicians concluded that this didn’t do significant damage – seems to have been a mistake. But then, they couldn’t stay up indefinitely, either…

All principal news sources and weblogs are tracking the news. Scott Adams is building a list here.

By a coincidence, today I started rereading “Shuttle Down” written in 1980 by G. Harry Stine under his pen name “Lee Correy”. This book has the shuttle Atlantis making an emergency landing on Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Of course, in the book there’s a happy ending… Stine, who died in 1997, was active in the early US rocket experiments and was co-founder of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

BTW David Brin‘s “Earth”, one of my favorite books, also features a shuttle stranded on Rapa Nui.

Update: another coincidence: the third major disaster for NASA, the fire which killed three astronauts inside the Apollo-1 capsule (on the launch pad) happened Jan. 27, 1967. The Challenger accident was proven to be related to low launch temperatures… the Apollo accident seems to have no such connection. However, both showed a lethal combination of design failures, mechanical failures and administrative screw-ups. No doubt this happened again.

Grupo de interessados abriu um site para pedir um “recall” generalizado de iMacs G3 e displays da Apple, que aparentemente queimam a placa analógica com facilidade. Quem estiver afetado por este problema, deve ir lá ver como proceder.

Disclaimer pessoal: na minha família há dois iMacs G3, com 3 e 2 anos de uso, funcionando sem problemas…

Syndic8 indica os sites brasileiros que publicam via RSS. Hoje são só 4… o único de notícias é o do “Globo”, e parece que ou está desatualizado, ou os links estão quebrados.

Update: Um dos problemas é que poucos sites declaram sua localização. Pesquisando por sites em português aparecem mais de 60, mas muitos são de Portugal. Entre outros, o site do “Jornal do Brasil” também parece estar com problemas.

De blogs brasileiros, achei entre outros o Interney.net . Depois procuro mais…

Excellent essay on How to be a Programmer, written by Robert Read. Every programmer should read this!

Thanks to Matt Croydon’s postneo for the link.

I posted some more comments about the recent site update. A good excuse to learn lots of new stuff and buzzwords – PHP, MySQL, RSS, RDF, XML, XML-RPC, and so forth 😉

Matt Croydon’s postneo asks a profound question:

The effect of RSS On Design

Dane Carlson redesigned his weblog. (…) This begs the question:

If a redesign happens and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?

More or less simultaneously with my discovery of RSS, phpBB version 2.0.4 came out.

So this was a good excuse to simultaneously update and implement RSS. It turned out that this wasn’t as cut-and-dried as I first thought, since I had already modified the standard phpBB code quite a lot – mostly to force descending order for my main weblog topic and to do several cosmetic and functional enhancements. There are still several bugs in less-used areas, mostly related to administration and moderation, but I’m working on them…

In any event, BBEdit helped a lot with its “compare folders” feature. I even found some hidden bugs in my previous code. I was up and running in about 24 hours (not counting a week of learning details about RSS).

Nevertheless, there’s still lots of thing to do. My RSS code now runs OK through the RSS Validator, but most of my pages still fail the HTML Validator, and the CSS stylesheet still needs a few tweaks. Even so, everything seems to work fine in all major browsers…

Besides some added functionality for phpBB, the major next thing to do here is to implement trackbacks. Stay tuned…