Les Miserable looks Les Fabulous!

This is a movie that I am going to have to see. The trailer is superb!

A Conservative History of the United States : The New Yorker

A hilarious - if somewhat disturbing - look at how American conservatives view their own history. Perhaps they haven't heard about the Internet or Wikipedia…or perhaps they'll create their own once they get control.

A Conservative History of the United States : The New Yorker

Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source

I love Wikipedia. I use it every day, often many times a day. And when I have some time to kill, I often search it for interesting stories.

It is perhaps the best example of what some would call the "true" web - or the kind of web that was envisioned by those who created it. It's open source for information.

Last week, there was an interesting story in the Guardian about Phillip Roth's frustration with Wikipedia because the editors wouldn't make a change to an article about him on the site that he felt was wrong. Simply put, they said that Phillip Roth wasn't credible enough to make changes to an article about Phillip Roth.

So he wrote a letter, which was published in the New Yorker about the correction. And lo and behold, that letter was accepted by Wikipedia as credible proof of his identity and the change was allowed.

That incident is being used by some as an example of why Wikipedia is not a credible source. But in his own Guardian article, Cory Doctorow puts the issue into perspective and tells us why Roth needs a secondary source.

Great stuff.

Link: Why Philip Roth needs a secondary source

Jason Alexander calls it in the Aurora aftermath

I'm late to this particular item, but in the wake of the horrific shootings in Aurora, Colorado, Jason Alexander has written an exceptional, common-sense essay in response to those who say that there can be no compromise on gun control.

As others have said, this is the best thing I've read since the shootings.

Jason Alexander:

(Via Daring Fireball)

Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?

This is a wonderful essay, written by Amanda Katz, commentator for NPR Books and the deputy editor of the Boston Globe Ideas section. While I don't usually quote from the end of a piece, her concluding paragraph is wonderful and I can't resist putting it up here, for those of you who might not read that far into her piece. But you really should read the whole thing.

But what do we lose as we bid farewell to what may turn out to have been a brief period in which common people owned physical books? I think of my own already excessive book collection, with its books that I have loved and worked on (as an editor and translator) and received as presents. Though I hope someone in the generation after mine will love living with them too, it doesn't really matter to me: I won't be there to see it.

But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother's books — even the ones we couldn't keep, or didn't want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone.

Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books?: ""

A problem with Evernote upgrade

I just upgraded my edition of Evernote to Premium, which seems like a pretty good idea.

I use Evernote a lot as a note capturing tool, because I can easily format the notes to work as a mini-outliner, as well as capture pictures, pdfs, screen-shots, etc. I have plenty of other alternatives on my iPad and Mac, but I do like the convenience of Evernote and the fact it synchs all of my various devices effortlessly.

So I was surprised when I upgraded and discovered that something had caused all of my notes to duplicate themselves during the upgrade. I ended up with a lot of duplicates. I searched around for someone else who had run into a similar problem but I didn't find anything.

I ended up manually sorting through and deleting all the duplicates. But the job was tedious and annoying because you can't highlight multiple notes for deletion. You have to highlight the note, choose delete, then confirm, for each note. It took awhile.

There might be an easier way, (there probably is) but I didn't have time to look for it and it wasn't obvious anywhere in the documentation. But it also shouldn't have been necessary - unless I did something wrong to cause the duplication.

Oh well. It's done now. But I thought I'd write this up in case someone else has the same problem and finds this blog post in their search. Please add a fix in the comments, if you happen to come across one.

How Pixar very nearly lost Toy Story

Last weekend, I had a near-death experience (at least it felt like that to me) when I accidentally wiped out the database for a website I manage.

With one click, I suddenly realized that I had deleted almost every page and post that had been published over the past year. Yikes!

Fortunately, I have a back-up plan. So imagine my horror when I realized that my automated backup system hadn't actually been working properly for the last few weeks!

Long story short, after spending a lot of hours sweating like crazy, I did figure out how to restore the database, and everything is working just fine.

So I can relate to this nicely told tale, about how Pixar very nearly lost all of Toy Story. The parallels with my own experience are pretty close.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, my new, improved backup regime is working nicely, thanks for asking.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?

This is great fun. It makes you kind of like American politics, doesn't it?

Kudos to Hugh Atkin



Hugh Atkin's "Will The Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up"

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

When Wikipedia went dark earlier this week, it grabbed the attention of many people who don't spend much time worrying about piracy or copyright issues. But in conversations about the problems with SOPA, I noticed outright skepticism from some folks about the worries raised by opponents of the legislation.

Fortunately, the opposition appears to have forced legislators to shelve their bills. But the claim that Internet piracy is threatening the economy continues to have legs - despite a lack of credible evidence to support it.

This article, by Julian Barnes, from Arstechnica.com, looks at some of the claims made by those supporting the bill and challenges many of their assumptions, such as the financial harm copyright holders are suffering.

. . . I remain a bit amazed that it's become an indisputable premise in Washington that there's an enormous piracy problem, that it's having a devastating impact on US content industries, and that some kind of aggressive new legislation is needed tout suite to stanch the bleeding. Despite the fact that the Government Accountability Office recently concluded that it is "difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the net effect of counterfeiting and piracy on the economy as a whole," our legislative class has somehow determined that—among all the dire challenges now facing the United States—this is an urgent priority. Obviously, there's quite a lot of copyrighted material circulating on the Internet without authorization, and other things equal, one would like to see less of it. But does the best available evidence show that this is inflicting such catastrophic economic harm—that it is depressing so much output, and destroying so many jobs—that Congress has no option but to Do Something immediately? Bearing the GAO's warning in mind, the data we do have doesn't remotely seem to justify the DEFCON One rhetoric that now appears to be obligatory on the Hill.

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

(Via Boing Boing.)

Is it just me or is time passing quicker?

"Was that two years ago or 20 years ago?"

That's what my cousin asked me when I was raising an anecdote of some kind that had happened to "just a couple of years ago."

When I thought about it, I realized that in fact, the event was a lot closer to 20 years ago than two.

I'm sure it's a function of getting older. After all, the scope of our memories has grown a lot, and what used to take up a big chunk of our life (like a school year, for example) now passes by in the blink of an eye.

I've come to think of my brain as a vessel that can only hold so much memory. And my long-term memory is pushing my short-term memory right out. That's a good an explanation as anything else I can come up with for why I can remember what happened to me during my trip to Europe in 1978, but I struggle to remember why I walked into the kitchen just now.

All of the above is a long-winded way to admit that while its been a long, long time since this blog was updated, I hadn't actually noticed.

Today, I'm attending WordCamp Victoria 2012 and it's been fun to listen to lots of people talk about why Wordpress is important to them and along the way, there's been a lot of talk about blogging.

Ironically, The Daily Upload is not a WordPress blog. It's on Blogger, where I started it almost eight years ago.

But I've been doing a lot of work with WordPress over the last year or two and I like it a lot. In fact, I've got a new version of davetraynor.com in the works. And that's a good thing, because I first built that site almost 12 years ago - and a lot of the copy there dates from then. Well overdue for an overhaul.

I started building websites years ago, long before we had content management systems like WordPress, or Drupal, or others. I learned HTML and I still build, maintain and work on old-fashioned "static" sites, like this one or this one. But now I've switched to WordPress builds, like this.

OK…I think I've purged enough for today. It feels good to put a post together, and now that I've told you about the new website that's coming, it's time to stop procrastinating and get it done.

Thanks for listening.