name:	Jason McArthur
email:	`<jason AT personaltelco DOT NOOCH net>`
groups:	PTPOps
projects:	ArborLodge RcBot
me:	http://blog.denied.to
radio:	http://radio.denied.to

Jason's shared items in Google Reader

Smoke Bombs

2008-07-04T16:53:52Z http://www.unitednuclear.com/smoke.htm

Big cheese carving celebrates U.S. Independence Day | U.S. | Reuters

2008-07-04T04:16:23Z

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A sculpture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence made from a one-tonne block of cheddar cheese glistened on the sidewalk of Times Square in New York on Thursday as an http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0336156920080703?rpc=92

YouTube - Breakin' and Poppin'

2008-07-04T03:08:23Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd4C8_FMdjA

Animal Friendship Between Different Species

2008-07-04T01:09:53Z

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jcMqBqkrBMw

Fattest States 2008: The CalorieLab United States of Obesity Rankings

2008-07-04T00:09:30Z

A diet, weight loss, nutrition, and food news blog with daily news roundups and diet tips, obesity http://calorielab.com/news/2008/07/02/fattest-states-2008/

Viacom Wanted the Source Code for Google's Search Engine, But Obtained YouTube's Server Logs

2008-07-03T23:37:20Z

In the ongoing trial between Viacom and Google, regarding the videos uploaded to YouTube that infringe Viacom's copyright, Viacom really wants to prove that the most popular videos watched at YouTube were from its programs. Viacom even claimed that Google's search results are biased to give better ranking to the infringing YouTube videos, so it asked for... Google's source code (and YouTube's source code too). Here are some excerpts from the rulings:

Plaintiffs move jointly pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 37 to compel YouTube and Google to produce certain electronically stored information and documents, including a critical trade secret: the computer source code which controls both the YouTube.com search function and Google's internet search tool "Google.com". YouTube and Google cross-move pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 26(c) for a protective order barring disclosure of that search code, which they contend is responsible for Google's growth "from its founding in 1998 to a multi-national presence with more than 16,000 employees and a market valuation of roughly $150 billion" and cannot be disclosed without risking the loss of the business.

The search code is the product of over a thousand person-years of work. There is no dispute that its secrecy is of enormous commercial value. Someone with access to it could readily perceive its basic design principles, and cause catastrophic competitive harm to Google by sharing them with others who might create their own programs without making the same investment. Plaintiffs seek production of the search code to support their claim that "Defendants have purposefully designed or modified the tool to facilitate the location of infringing content." (...) YouTube and Google maintain that "no source code in existence today can distinguish between infringing and non- infringing video clips -- certainly not without the active participation of rights holders".

Unfortunately for Viacom and Google's competitors, the request to provide the source code has been rejected. But another request, this time for YouTube's server logs, has been approved.

Defendants' "Logging" database contains, for each instance a video is watched, the unique "login ID" of the user who watched it, the time when the user started to watch the video, the internet protocol address other devices connected to the internet use to identify the user’s computer ("IP address"), and the identifier for the video. That database (which is stored on live computer hard drives) is the only existing record of how often each video has been viewed during various time periods. Its data can "recreate the number of views for any particular day of a video." Plaintiffs seek all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website. They need the data to compare the attractiveness of allegedly infringing videos with that of non-infringing videos.

Google argued that the task requires a lot of resources, since the logging database has 12 TB, and it violates users' privacy. Google has previously stated in a blog post that an IP address without additional information cannot identify people, so it's not personal information. "Therefore, the motion to compel production of all data from the Logging database concerning each time a YouTube video has been viewed on the YouTube website or through embedding on a third-party website is granted."

Viacom wanted other things: the schema for Google's advertising database and for Google Video's database, data about private YouTube videos etc. You can read the entire document as it's pretty entertaining.

Salon thinks that "all's not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request." After all, getting YouTube's server logs just to determine the popularity of the infringing videos is an abuse: YouTube could have offered aggregated data about those videos.

Update: According to Search Engine Land, Google sent a letter to Viacom regarding the removal of personal data.

Given Plaintiffs' stated reasons for seeking information from the logging database -- to conduct proportionality analyses -- potentially personally identifiable information should be irrelevant. Indeed, Plaintiffs have previously represented that they do not desire to investigate users' viewing activities, and Viacom's general counsel is on record today stating that Viacom does not want to receive individuals' usernames and IP addresses. Accordingly, we request that Plantiffs agree that YouTube may redact usernames and IP addresses from the viewing data in the interests of protecting user privacy.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/viacom-wanted-source-code-for-googles.html

Portland Mercury | Books | Stuff White People Like

2008-07-03T19:40:41Z

An Interview with Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like. http://www.portlandmercury.com/books/stuff_white_people_like/Content?oid=831712

XRobots.co.uk - Android 10

2008-07-03T18:56:21Z http://www.xrobots.co.uk/android10.htm

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom | Threat Level from Wired.com

2008-07-03T17:53:30Z

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/judge-orders-yo.html

Hydraulophone: Water pipe organ

2008-07-03T11:00:00Z

This Hydraulophone is located outside the Ontario Science Centre. I would love to know more about how it works because it sure looks, and sounds, great. I wonder how they play it during those long Canadian winters? Hydraulophone video

Presently the world's largest hydraulophone is the main architectural centerpiece out in front of the Ontario Science Centre, one of Canada's landmark architecture sites. It is also Toronto's only freely accessible aquatic play facility that runs 24 hours a day. (Wikipedia)

Learn more about the Ontario Science Centre

Update:
Check out Matthew's comments below for a lot more information. (PDF links)

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/hydraulophone_water_pipeo.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Portland, Oregon July 3, 2008 3 AM Thunderstorm

2008-07-03T14:56:47Z http://chuckcurrie.blogs.com/chuck_currie/2008/07/portland-oregon.html

Google Street View in France

2008-07-03T10:31:54Z

As a special present for the upcoming Tour de France, Google added Street View imagery for Tour de France's routes. The coverage is really limited, but Google will extend it in the next months, when Street View will be available in many European countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and others).

Wikipedia has some details about this year's edition of the largest cycling race in the world. "The event will take place from July 5 to July 27, 2008. Starting in the French city of Brest, France, the tour will enter Italy on the 15th stage and return to France during the 16th, heading for Paris, its regular final destination, which will be reached in the 21st stage."

{ via Zorgloob, a French blog about Google }

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/07/google-street-view-in-france.html

Bonneville Fish Cam

2008-07-01T23:57:15Z

I would like to confess a weird obsession. When I’m feeling a little glum, I don’t cry. I don’t call a friend. I don’t go on a walk.

I check the fish cam.

(Note: They haven’t renewed their ssl, so you have to click through the security warning to view the fish cam. That’s a little odd on a .mil domain site, but there you go.) They have a Web cam out at the dam and it snaps a photo of the viewing window every 30 seconds or so. There are different lines painted 18 and 22 inches apart, so you can distinguish between the monster fishies and the tiny ones. You catch glimpses of salmon, steelhead, walleye, carp, lampreys, and even of the broom they use to sweep algae off the window.

My little habit just kicked up a notch or two with the new Fish Cam Gallery. It stores the last 200 images and puts them up in a convenient fishy gallery. There are some big salmon going through right now. And about a bajillion shad. And the summer steelhead are starting to show up in decent numbers.

Lots of other good information is available from the Fish Passage Center on fish counts, water temperature, and flow rates. It’s a good way to learn about the health of the environment and to learn more about the wonderful creatures that we share this beautiful state with.

I haven’t seen one yet, but in anticipation of the day when I see one swim by the window, I even made up words to go along with Foreigner’s 1981 classic, Urgent. You can sing along too:

Sturgeon . . . Emergency
Sturgeon sturgeon sturgeon sturgeon . . . Emergency
So sturgeon! Little fish

I got whiskers - In the mud
I swim along - Eating bugs
I got an earthworm - In my mouth
Someone sets the hook - I start freaking out

(Chorus)

Sorry, we do not have any related posts for this.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OurPdxNetwork/~3/324442729/

#42 Air Conditioning

2008-07-02T00:42:48Z

It happens every year. We spend all of our time complaining about rainy weather and how we just “Need some sun”. The clouds are causing depression in every Portlander and unless some serious ecological change occurs, we’re moving to California. Then… out of the blue… the first heat wave hits. Our entire city changes from wet-frowning hipsters to heat-exhausted zombies. Walk the streets after the first wave and you’ll find the living dead aimlessly shuffling around. They have just spent the pa http://thingsaboutportlandthatsuck.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/42-air-conditioning/

Bizarre car accidents

2008-07-01T22:00:00Z

Dark Roasted Blend has a gallery of seriously strange and guiltily entertaining car accidents.

Oops! - Weirdest Accidents

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/bizarre_car_accidents.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Mount Tabor skinnydippers revealed!

2008-07-01T22:57:26Z

http://bojack.org/2008/07/mount_tabor_skinnydippers_reve.html

Hey, Man, Shrooms Are <em>Good</em> for You

2008-07-01T04:40:00Z

Science is catching up to what devotees have known for years: the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms can be positive and far reaching. But the researchers also include a caveat: Don't try this at home.

http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/324181727/SCI_PSYCHEDELIC_STUDY

Robotic saxophone player will hit the notes

2008-07-01T14:00:00Z

This Saxophone playing robot from Japan is pretty adept at its craft. Check out the video at the link below of it tearing up John Coltrane's "Giant Steps." Also there are some nice close-up photos of the onboard gears and motors.

Japanese saxophone-playing robot proves we have come a long way

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/07/robotic_saxophone_player.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Cop Holds Up Streetcar For Pita Pit Sandwich

2008-06-30T22:08:41Z

Yes, I AM obsessed with suburban cops on our public transit today. From Transit Sleuth:

So when I was strolling down into town last weekend I stumbled upon this absolutely ridiculous disrespect the Beaverton Police paid to downtown Portlanders waiting for the Streetcar. This police officer, who probably didn't need to be downtown in the first place - who knows - parked right in the tracks in a completely illegal way. You might ask why did he park this way? Well I'll tell you, it was because he parked here and strolled happily into the Pita Pit across the street. Meanwhile the streetcar operator like a good little citizen sat there, not running the whistle and waited.

I don't suppose anyone fancies filing a Citizen-initiated citation against this chap, do they?

COP ON THE STREETCAR: NO RESPECT FOR OUR URBAN WAYS...OR TRAFFIC LAWS

http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Blog?blog=41935&oid=828583

Race Is Not A Card Because This Is Not A Game

2008-07-05T17:27:00Z

An article about the PDC's work on MLK in the Oregonian the other day bugged me, though not just because it details yet another failure of foresight. There's something else in here that needs to be discussed. But first, the meat of the matter:

Portland's drive to remedy years of neglect along Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard hit another bump Wednesday.
The Portland Development Commission, the city's urban renewal agency, had to further delay a developer's loan repayment to halt a possible foreclosure on a key MLK project.
The Heritage Building's developers couldn't find enough tenants to satisfy their first lender, so the PDC acted to clear the way for a new bank loan. Nearby, another PDC-subsidized building, King's Crossing, also has been slow to attract tenants.
The fact that retail and office tenants haven't jumped into the new buildings raises questions about whether the PDC and developers have missed the market.
http://www.oregonlive.com/business...320150.xml&coll=7&thispage=1

Pictured above is the Heritage Building, before. Anyway, this isn't exactly surprising - the idea that we can simply spruce up a low rent area by sticking in a bunch of higher-rent (oops, I mean "market rate") buildings always seems a bit light on the adult-style forecasting and heavy on the childish "build it and they will come" sort of faith-based economics that has been driving our nation since we decided movie stars and presidents were ultimately the same thing (meaning 1980, for anyone taking notes). "Missed the market" indeed. What BS - as if MLK's failure to thirst for higher-priced storefronts and offices all along can be thought of as merely a sudden eruption of anomalous frugality. Darn it, we thought prices didn't matter! Who knew?

Now, the idea that bigtime, PDC-anointed developers - unlike the rest of us schmucks - mustn't ever be foreclosed on, even if they default on their mortgage payments, is pretty unfair. The possibility of paying the price for an unwise speculation is, after all, what makes it speculation in the first place -- but clearly only for some. The ability to game the political system to make the public responsible for the risks of private investment is after all the province of "the elite." In fact a pretty good definition of "elite" -- which we're short on lately -- would be exactly this: people who are powerful enough to make the public bear responsibility for the risks they take in pursuit of profit, or more power, or both.

The Oregonian's article ends with Michelle Reeves of Windemere explaining, as though to a child, that it's common "for pioneering developers with speculative buildings to struggle until the private market sees the potential and is willing to pay higher rents," which evidently means that the public, via the agency of the PDC, is obliged to make those struggles go away by re-sweetening the sweetheartery as many times as needed. Pictured right is the Heritage Building, after. It's important to look good, even if people can't afford to move in.

This is business as usual, and larger predations of this variety are frequently roared about on certain local blogs and comment boards; though usually in the tone of "look what they're doing with our taxes which are too high." Too seldom is our focus on the point that in the context of its far-too-numerous public/private "leveraging" deals, the PDC again and again makes certain that its private partners are assured, I guess out of gratitude for multiplying public monies, of a risk-free "speculation."

No, I reserve my outrage today -- maybe it's this heat -- for an Oregonian paragraph which rankles above and beyond the facts of the above matter, in which the history of the area is summed up, no doubt copied, in the manner of about a thousand news articles about Pearl district developments, from some commercial third source. It is the sort of shorthand that says, here's all you need to think about this:

Between Broadway and Rosa Parks Way, MLK has struggled for decades with crime, plywood-covered windows and grassy lots. The problems have been most acute between Fremont and Alberta streets, where the boulevard has never recovered from damage done during 1960s-era race riots.

"Race riots?" That's interesting, Oregonian. I thought the usual villain in the North Portland saga was the 80s crack epidemic. Wondering where I might find some detail on these "race riots," I looked through the entirety of the Internet (or at least as much of it as seemed necessary), to find some history of race rioting in North Portland. If I'm going to be told that our choice is between gentrification and crack houses, well, I've got some things to say about that. Obviously there were, and still are here or there, crack houses up there. But race riots? That's kind of a new one. I'd never known that Portland -- like Watts, Detroit and elsewhere -- actually erupted into major flames during the mania of the 1960s. I immediately logged on to the Oregon Historical Society's website and began searching. Unsurprisingly, my research yielded next to nothing, unless what this refers to is the Albina Riot of 1967:

What began as a political rally to stir the African American community to “revolution” in Irving Park on Sunday, August 30, 1967 turned into two-nights of disturbances. Two to three hundred people threw bottles and rocks at automobiles and through store windows, while a few hurled firebombs through store windows causing $20,000 in damage at one grocery store and damaging dozens of others.

So, a grocery store was damaged in 1967 for 20 grand. That was a lot of money in those days. That grocery store might have gone out of business because of it. If not, a chronic shortage of decent jobs for their customers might have done it ten years later, too. The governor at the time, Tom McCall, a thinking politician the likes of which we'll probably never see again, put it into a context that's hard to argue with, unless you can't believe that a Republican could talk this way, which I admit is hard to imagine today:

McCall placed some of the blame for the incident on Portland’s lack of inclination to finance educational programs that would get to the root of the sociological dilemma that caused poverty. The incident left some businesses boarded up, but communication between Albina residents and the City of Portland was somewhat improved afterward.

Hm. I thought the narrative we're all supposed to think about (for three seconds) before deciding that gentrification is "awesome," was that forty years of race riots and crack houses (gentrifier shorthand for black stupidity and laziness) ruined North Portland so much that only Starbucks and 500K bungalow prices can heal it. Wow, "race riots?" Doesn't that sound awful - too horrible to allow us to contemplate the degree to which deliberate and systematic disinvestment to let values degrade in historically black neighborhoods might just be whitey's plan here the same way every other black person in Baltimore, LA, DC, Chicago, etc. will tell you it is there?

Except the race riot thing is kind of mythological, though reported as fact in our daily paper. While there was unrest, protest and anger (pictured, a 1973 protest in Albina) the truth, by contrast, is that the black community in Portland was neither large enough nor violent enough to destroy their neighborhoods more capably than the institutionalized municipal neglect of a highly segregated town with a racist streak as wide as I-5 (literally) could do given forty years or so.

So hey, Oregon Historical Society, anything to add on the subject of race riots that involve a grocery store, a couple guys throwing bottles, and $20,000? Since this is the kind of thing we blame for a neighborhood being turned into a desert that only the springs of urban renewal-goaded developers can ever make arable?

On the first day of Portland’s Albina riot, Detroit, Michigan also experienced devastating race riots that claimed 41 lives and caused damage estimated at more than $500 million.
http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/....0A7

My feeling is that we'll continue, nauseatingly, to be compelled to discuss North Portland as though it is something it's not, and wasn't. "Those people didn't keep it up anyway" seems to me is what the prevalent view boils down to; though always left unsaid, this is what's being talked around, translated into PC terminology, and coded within the pioneerist language of urban renewal and community development. This is how people are thinking, and that's the filthy truth whether you like it or not.

http://portlandgentro.typepad.com/portland_gentrification_a/2008/06/race-is-not-a-card-because-this-is-not-a-game.html