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CMOS. CMOS run. Run, CMOS, run!

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I seem to be out of the hardware woods, at last. After my old box died, I thought carefully about its replacement. My computer has, among other things, become my chief music library and source; it’s also where I edit family videos. The old computer, an Athlon system I’d rebuilt twice and extended with far too many expansion boards and IDE devices, whirred and hummed like a dilapidated helicopter. This time, I thought, let’s get something quiet. (I know, ye Mac fans, Steve Jobs has promoted silent computing for decades! If it didn’t mean moving 8 years of data and investing in an entire new set of software applications, I’d have switched.)

So I ordered a system from EndPCNoise.com, whose site impressed me as a source of reasonably honest and detailed information about “silent PC” products. I paid a little more money than I’d have spent on a vanilla box, but after my experience with the slow decay of my Athlon system, that seemed a reasonable trade-off for higher-quality components.

I had only one problem: after I installed my old sound card, an M-Audio Delta, the new system seized up with the fast-four-beep distress signal on boot. I did what I knew how to do, which was to roll the system back by removing everything I’d added; no good. I knew enough to pop out the CMOS battery, which should have allowed the motherboard to return to its default settings; no good. I began to fear that I needed to return the system, but a brief conversation with the folks at EndPCNoise solved the problem: to reset the CMOS on my particular motherboard, you have to move a jumper. That, along with a few reboots and trips into the BIOS configuration, did it — everything worked again. (It turns out that this particular kind of professional sound card is highly picky about which of the five PCI slots you put it in. Or I guess it’s the motherboard that is picky. Or the software that configures the interrupts. Anyway, it’s a bit of a Russian roulette game with your system until you find a slot that works.)

I find it highly amusing that, almost 25 years since I first messed with jumpers on a PC motherboard, I’m still at it. Plus ca change… On the other hand, for under $1000 today, I have a system with a gigabyte of RAM, hundreds of gigs of disk space, and more processor speed than most of my applications know what to do with. Now I can get back to work!

Friends like these…

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Some of my friends are up to good things.

Chad Dickerson, who was the chief force behind moving Salon into the modern age of computing back in 1998-99, and from whom I learned a great deal about technology and its management, is leaving his gig as InfoWorld’s CTO to take up a position at Yahoo, which is apparently opening a new research enterprise of some kind right here in Berkeley. Many congratulations to him.

Greg Costikyan, who I knew long before there was a Web, has posted the slides to a recent talk he gave titled “Death to the Games Industry. (Long Live Games.)” It’s a tour of the debased state of game development in an era of ballooning production budgets and distribution chokeholds, along with a call for a new model for developing games and a new “Indie Gaming” aesthetic. I have zilch time these days to keep up with the world of gaming, but reading Greg keeps me feeling at least a little clued in.

David Edelstein, a movie critic whose work has dazzled, provoked and enlightened me since we hung out together in the (long since renovated but then delightfully dingy) halls of the Harvard Crimson, is interviewed here on rockcritics.com. You can read David’s stuff all the time in Slate, and you can hear him every week on Fresh Air, but this is a more rambling personal conversation that feels a little like having a beer with David, something I don’t get to do often enough now that we live on opposite ends of the continent.

And, finally, Josh Kornbluth — hilarious monologist, oboist, mathematician manque and my former bandmate — will be hosting his very own interview show on KQED public television here in San Francisco starting this September 12. I might actually need to turn on the TV. (One of these years I will actually need to buy a new set; the one I’m using now was purchased 20 years ago with “scrip” from my job at the Boston Phoenix, which was an odd program the little paper had of letting employees take their pay in the form of heavy discounts on advertisers’ merchandise. Something tells me the technology has advanced since then.)

The black screen of death

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My blog silence has many parents. There’s the book. And we did take a week off, off to the north coast of California, off the grid, off by ourselves. But there is also — signal the “Taps” bugle — the death of hardware.

Upon our return from Sea Ranch, I was catching up on my RSS feeds, wandering the Web aimlessly, and listening to some music. My gaze landed somehow on an URL I’d filed away to check out — the music of Mountain Goats producer John Vanderslice. And I found this page describing the amusing hoax he perpetrated in 1999, pretending that the minions of Microsoft had come after him for penning a song titled “Bill Gates Must Die.” (No, it’s not the rant of a crazed Linux hacker, or a cry from Gary Kildall beyond the grave — it’s sung from the perspective of a paranoid Net porn addict who blames the wizard of Redmond for his fallen state.)

Anyway, I fired up Vanderslice’s “Bill Gates Must Die” MP3 and started enjoying the fine distorted crunch of the guitar, when, with a sickening, decaying “whirr” of fans cycling down, my box died. Not the Blue Screen of Death, indicating massive software failure, but the Black Screen of Death — instantaneous cessation of all output, followed by permanent inability to reboot. Did my venerable Athlon XP chip, having served faithfully these three-plus years, simply fry a stray register? Did my North Bridge go south, or South Bridge go north? Did my system hit Mean Time Before Failure before its time? Or did the indomitable spirit of Bill himself reach a dark hand into my system’s innards and, seeking revenge on my choice of musical diversion, short out a random slot on my motherboard? I will never know.

I have learned a handful of lessons in 30 years of tinkering with computers; all my data (including every last bit of book work) is safe. But I’ve had to reconstruct a makeshift working system on an old box, swapping out hard drives and PCI cards in the dust of aged system cases, while waiting for a new system to arrive. Radio Userland, being a client-side tool, got swept up in the vortex of this system failure. If you’re reading this now, it means I’ve sufficiently recovered my system configuration to reestablish this small link with my former life, and you, dear reader. A resumption of normal life waits on the UPS person.

Random links

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## I can’t go to Blogher on July 30 because I’ll be away that week with my family — it’s the break week between two summer-camp sessions for the kids — but hey, it sounds great. The registration’s full but there’s a waiting list. The focus is on women bloggers and blogging; men, it seems, are welcome, too.

## Here’s a fun experiment in designing an interface that’s all rollovers, no clicks. Kinda limited, but makes you think. [Link via John Battelle]

## Kudos to Wired editor Chris Anderson for handling a messy little business — involving collection agencies pursuing auto-renewed subscribers — with transparency and grace. This sort of situation often provides executives with a chance to make excuses, point fingers or blame the customer. Chris just explained what happened, tells how he’s set out to fix it, and invites people to contact him with their problems. And instead of complaining about the S.F. Chronicle article that raised the issue, he thanks them. This is an example of how good customer service and smart PR-crisis handling (OK, it was a tiny crisis) can be one and the same thing.

## These examples of Nigerian Spam Poetry over at Making Light are hilarious. (They reminded me of one of my former colleague Doug Cruickshank’s funniest pieces for Salon, a literary analysis of the Nigerian spam — a rigorous form indeed.)

Of maps and Mountain Goats

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Before our holiday weekend begins, a tip of the hat to two recent good experiences:

(1) On Wednesday morning I went off to the O’Reilly “Where 2.0″ conference, which was all about the new world of digital mapping and the mobile technologies and applications built upon them. That stuff is all well and good, but as a map geek from early childhood I was most excited by hearing the keynote from David Rumsey, a cartographic historian and collector of historical maps whose talks I’d heard superlative things about in the past. Rumsey did not disappoint. He put the current frenzy of excitement in stuff like Google Maps into a four-century perspective of the human quest to create maps that are not only useful and accurate but beautiful and meaningful. Then he showed us some simply astonishing techniques by which old maps can first be precisely positioned as overlays to contemporary digital satellite imagery, then transformed into 3D screenscapes — allowing, for instance, a fly-through of San Francisco as it looked a century ago.

As soon as I am off my authorial treadmill (only, aagh, two dozen more books about software to read!) I am sitting down with Rumsey’s book, Cartographica Extraordinaire, for a nice, long journey through time. (If you haven’t visited it already, Rumsey’s Web site is a jaw-droppingly amazing collection of historical maps.)

(2) Last Friday, fresh off the plane from New York, I high-tailed it over to the Bottom of the Hill for my second-ever experience of a Mountain Goats show. I’ve already logged my enthusiasm for the new Sunset Tree album from John Darnielle and his collaborators. It takes a lot, at my advanced mid-40s age, to get me to stand in a dim club until midnight to listen to somebody else’s music. (My five-year-olds will wake me at 6 a.m. regardless, so it’s a self-sentence of sleep deficit.) It was, in this case, utterly worthwhile.

What amazed me was that the set of maybe two dozen plus songs, which featured one catchy, clever, moving song after another, barely overlapped with the equally great set I heard from the Mountain Goats last year at the same venue. The two shows shared, at most, three songs. I can’t think of another artist (except for, you know, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, guys who are, uh, way older than Darnielle) who’s got both the back-catalog depth to pull that off and the will to actually do it, instead of playing the same handful of fan favorites over and over until both band and audience are bored with them. And I got to hear Darnielle play the song that first turned me on to his music, the rollicking downer “Palmcorder Yajna,” with a drummer borrowed from the band that preceded the Goats, and their producer, John Vanderslice, adding a second guitar and harmonizing at the mike on the chorus.

Darnielle established his reputation by recording songs solo on a boombox, accompanied only by a persistent capstan hiss. More often, these days, the Goats play as a duo (Darnielle and bassist Peter Hughes). But for a couple minutes last Friday, they looked like a rock ‘n’ roll band — and like, for those couple minutes, nothing else in the world was quite as much fun.

Wiki whacking

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I have been away and offline, and so I missed the excitement around the LA Times wikitorial experiment imploding. I’m sorry to see it; I think newspapers need to be bolder about figuring out how the Web works, and good for Michael Kinsley for giving this a try. It’s too bad that a little bout of inevitable pranking (someone apparently incorporated an indecent image on the page) persuaded the Times to pull the plug. Sheesh, you’d think it would’ve taken a software developer (the LA Times must have a few, right?) just a little bit of work to block image tags in whichever open-source wiki software the paper had adopted.

I didn’t get to see the editorial in either its pre- or post-defacement state, so I can’t really comment on how the project evolved in its brief life. But I think that Kinsley & co. may have picked the wrong tool for the job. I’ve had the pleasure of exploring the origins of the wiki phenomenon as part of my book research; one of the things made clear by Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki a decade ago (with the Portland Pattern Repository) because he wanted to help programmers share experiences and tell stories, is that wikis work best when they present contributors with a half-finished canvas and an open invitation to fill in the blanks by adding new pages. So putting up a finished piece of writing in the form of a single editorial and then asking readers to edit it is a stiflingly constricted application of the format.

The other point is that wikis work by forming communities that care about what’s in them, and that serve as stewards or gardeners of the content. You can’t go from zero to 60 in a day; building such a community takes time, care and love. You can’t just throw up a text and expect it to stand on its own — if you want to tap into the collective ideas and energy of an online crowd, you’d better have built some personal relationships with some of its members. Otherwise, that crowd will turn into a mob before you know it.

Ergo gnomic

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Two only vaguely related gripes:

(1) I’m left-handed, and I’m proud to be part of the sinister 10 percent, but I’m still waiting for my left-handed digital camera. I’m tired of either holding the camera in my unsteady right hand or having to shoot two-handed. There appears to be a left-handed film camera available, here, but I’m not looking for a retro novelty. In this discussion, somebody suggests holding the camera upside down. Maybe. But look, you manufacturers, there’s a market here! We’re ten percent of the population! That’s millions of potential customers — a big fat bulge near the front of the Long Tail, waiting to be served.

(2) I’ve always bought Thinkpad laptops, in part because they’ve been hugely reliable in the years I’ve had them, but also because I vastly prefer the Trackpoint device to the much more common — and, to me, clumsy — trackpad. Recently I realized that I actually think the Trackpoint is far superior to the mouse as well. As usability experts have long maintained, the big problem with mousing is that you’re constantly switching modes and losing efficiency as you move the hand from the keyboard to the mouse and back. Wasted energy, wasted concentration. With the Trackpoint, you don’t have to do that at all — the “mouse” (pointer control) is right where your typing fingers already are. (Keyboard shortcuts are even better for those apps that support them, but they never give you 100 percent of what you need — unless, I guess, you’re a programming ace who lives and breathes emacs.)

So why aren’t desktop keyboards with integrated Trackpoint more common? I know IBM has made them over the years — I bought an old used one on Ebay — but they seem to be a hugely neglected market niche. Or is my Trackpoint preference even more of an eccentricity than my left-handedness?

Cuecat redux

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Once upon a time there was a tech-industry boom. And the boom begat many follies. And among the most insane of those follies was a thing called the Cuecat. The idea was that actually typing in a URL from a print magazine ad was so laborious that, instead, you’d happily plug in a free (but ridiculously complicated to install) bar-code scanner to your PC and run that scanner over the magazine page to take you to a URL. (Of course this would limit your magazine reading to within a yard of your computer, but…never mind.) Absurd as this scheme was, its promoter somehow managed to raise tens of millions of dollars from respectable corporations that should have known much better.

I reviewed this misbegotten gizmo back in fall of 2000 when Wired magazine sent one to each of its subscribers. I predicted a future of filling landfills for the ill-fated devices, and assumed that they had long ago added their mass to some forlorn waste zone. But it seems that even the dumps would not take the Cuecats, and now two million of them are being auctioned off by a surplus house.

Help save the abandoned Cuecats! It wasn’t their fault that their creators were digital con artists. Don’t abandon them to a fate of disuse! You can help save these Cuecats — or you can turn the page. Why, they’re only 30 cents each!

Oops, there’s a 500K minimum order. Forget it.

Jobs: Podcasting via ITunes

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Here at the “D” conference, Steve Jobs announced the impending addition of a podcast aggregation feature to the Itunes music store — to go live in “the next 60 days.” The idea is, you won’t need to use a separate application to make sure the podcast content you want will sync with your Ipod — you can do it all through your Itunes interface.

“Podcasting is like Wayne’s World for radio,” Jobs said, and the new ITunes functionality is “sort of like Tivo for your radio for your Ipod.”

Jobs promised that the ITunes podcasting platform would be open to all comers; there’d be a simple automated system to get your content included, he said. But it wasn’t clear from his demo — which featured material from professional outlets like public radio stations — just how grassroots-y the Apple model is going to be.

There was a moment of amusement when Jobs clicked on an Adam Curry podcast that began with Curry complaining, “I’ve had to restart the show 3 times, my Mac has been acting up like a motherfucker.” Jobs just smiled. You have to figure that he knew just what he was playing; it was funny nonetheless.

Some other notable bits from Jobs’ Q&A with Mossberg and Swisher:

He defended Apple’s suit against Web sites that had published confidential info about forthcoming Apple products, saying that the law was clear here, and the First Amendment ends where breaking the law (in revealing confidential trade secrets) begins.

Pressed to talk about whether Apple would pursue a video Ipod product, he talked about the hardware limits in delivering good video via small devices: “Headphones are a miraculous thing. There’s no such thing as headphones for video.”

The much rumored Ipod phone? “It’s a hard problem.” Swisher countered, “You’re a smart guy.” Mossberg asked why it wasn’t reasonable to assume that all portable-device functions — music, email, voice — would converge on the cellphone. Jobs’ cagy reply: “I thoroughly understand the question, and I’ll have to leave the answer to our actions inthe future.”

Finally, it seems there’s a betting pool inside Apple about how soon Yahoo will raise the prices on their (rock-bottom-priced) new music-rental service ($5 a month when you buy a year). Jobs’ bet? Five months.

D3 and all that

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I have been on a strict diet when it comes to attending conferences this year — I must hunker down and write! I allowed myself one exception this season, so here I am at Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher’s third “D” conference, the Wall Street Journal’s technology-and-media extravaganza.

Last year’s event kicked off with Bill Gates tantalizing us with the wonders that were to be Longhorn, and how the new version of Windows would transcend the whole notion of “search.” Google? We won’t need no stinking Google, Gates all but declared: “Longhorn’s about structured information. The world’s not just about text lookup… Longhorn brings the notion of an object-oriented database to the way information is stored…”

Well, in the intervening year those exciting features of Longhorn’s much-touted new file system seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, as Microsoft labors mightily to move this massive project forward so that it might conceivably see the light of day before 2006 winds down.

This year, then, while I’ll pay close attention to what Gates — and every other technology executive here (tonight’s event kicks off with Steve Jobs) — has to say, I’ll also remember that it’s much easier to talk about great technology than to make it work and get it into people’s hands.