the tweney review

Holy cow, I have an entry in the Internet Movie Database: IMDB: Dylan Tweney

DailyCandy’s 1.2 million subscribers: Worth $100 million? DailyCandy Goes Shopping for a Sugar Daddy

Just a note for those of you who are family members or especially interested friends: I’ve been posting photos in two places lately, Smugmug and Flickr. Here are the links to see the latest pictures (along with corresponding feed links, in case you’re using a news reader).

Tweney photos on Smugmug — [RSS feed - Atom feed]

Tweney photos on Flickr — [RSS feed - Atom feed]

Stopped by the Maker Faire yesterday at the San Mateo Fairgrounds–right in our neighborhood–and checked out some of the amazing contraptions and creations hacked together by amateur inventors, tinkerers, and madmen. Highlights included two huge jets of flame that shot 20′ or so into the air, courtesy of the very cool-looking Oakland-based welding arts cooperative, The Crucible. And just down the way from the fire cannons, a bunch of minimalist, hacked-together bikes by a guy whose website, Woodenbikes.com, details the wheeled contraptions he’s made out of 2×4s, plywood, and old curtain rods. I’ve posted pictures of the Jensen Tweney clan riding these bikes on Flickr. And Shacker has even more cool pictures from the “Faire.”

Would have stayed longer–I was fascinated by the rocket-launching happening in the parking lot and I really wanted to learn more about Prius-hacking in “The Ultimate Garage” but Clara was getting tired and my feet were getting sore. Great event, hope it returns next year!

Technorati Tags: makerfaire

Fon founder Martin Varsavsky wants to create a Wi-Fi network with a million hotspots. (By contrast, iPass–currently the largest network–has about 43,500.) He’s got his work cut out for him. Read more in my article for Technology Review, appearing today on the TR home page.

Fon Hopes its Hotspots Will Rival Cellular

Sure, you can browse the Web from your local coffee shop, thanks to its Wi-Fi connection. But what about leaving your cell phone at home and using cafes and other Wi-Fi “hotspots” to place free or cheap Internet-based phone calls using a laptop or Wi-Fi phone? Not yet.
…
Spanish startup Fon wants to change that predilection for cellular, with a rapidly growing Wi-Fi network owned by its users, rather than a big telecommunications company, and based on shared access. In order to create a large network of hotspots, the company is encouraging network members — mostly, average consumers — to give away Wi-Fi access in exchange for getting free access at other Fon hotspots. Members can use that access, in turn, for Web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging — or Skype-like Internet phone calling.

“T-Mobile USA is expected to roll out UMA [wi-fi phone] services within the next six months.” Light Reading - UMA Services Near Reality

The daily haiku journal I publish, tinywords — which I like to refer to as “the world’s tiniest magazine” — has resumed publication. I’m working on some enhancements to the site which I hope to be able to announce in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve ended a short, ill-conceived flirtation with WordPress as the content management engine behind tinywords, and returned to the custom PHP-MySQL engine I built for the site. WordPress is a great blogging tool (I use it for the Tweney Review) but it wasn’t well-suited to the particular needs of my haiku zine. Unfortunately, I had about 6 months’ worth of haiku, along with their comments, that had been published on the WordPress site. I also really liked the design of the WP site, which was based on the lovely Manji by Khaled Abou Alfa.

So, I spent a few half-days last week porting the design, the haiku, and the comments from WP to my own system. Moving the haiku was easy; moving the comments, a little trickier. That’s because WP’s comments table was keyed to posts in its own table, which obviously have different ID codes than the haiku in my own database’s table. The process wasn’t pretty (export to CSV, import into OpenOffice Calc, munge data, clean up, rearrange columns, export back to CSV, then import into the new database) and took far longer than I thought it would. I hope I never have to do that kind of thing again.

Two lessons learned along the way:

1. Always test your SQL selection statements before using them in a “DELETE FROM” query.

2. Always make backups of your tables before running a “DELETE FROM” query that might, say, accidentally delete every last row in said table.

Many, many thanks to Scot Hacker at birdhouse hosting, which hosts tinywords, for restoring my accidentally emptied table from a regular nightly backup.

Way more significant than the Google subpoena. Think $27.5 billion significant (that’s how much goes through Paypal annually). IRS seeks PayPal’s aid finding hidden cash

Much as I lean to the left, I have to admit that lefties often make really stupid choices when choosing how to stage their protests. Too often these protests happen out of some vague sense of anger and outrage, with very little attention to the message they’re conveying. ie: Bad branding. Case in point: Burning American flags during Gulf War I did nothing except piss people off. Burning dollar bills, now that would have been more on point.

Similarly, Critical Mass riders clog the streets of San Francisco on Friday afternoons, aggravating people who just want to get home to their families. It would make much more sense to hold the protest on Monday mornings. That way, they’d be stopping people from getting to work. Many people would sympathize with them, and they’d also have an economic impact, not just a symbolic one. As it is, I hate Critical Mass. And I’m an avid bike rider (and I don’t even live in San Francisco)!

One of the biggest bonehead moves by the left happened in 1994 during the protests against Proposition 187, which denied many services to illegal immigrants. Millions of people massed in the streets of LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento, to show their opposition to the bill. Many of them were waving Mexican flags. In one photo opp, the Prop 187 supporters had won the battle. Their pro-immigrant opponents had made the case for them, making immigration look like a Mexican invasion rather than a struggle for civil rights. 59% of the voters went for Prop 187, many of them no doubt terrified by the thought of an army of flag-waving Mexicans overrunning the state.

So it was good to see American flags in the recent rallies supporting immigration rights. In fact, Cardinal Roger Mahoney even told protesters to put away non-US flags. It shows that somebody has been paying attention.

Forget wi-fi hackers–the really scary coffee-shop criminals stab you in the chest and then take your computer. Laptop thieves descend upon wireless cafes / Grab-and-run robbers find pricey computers easy to resell