Planet Andrew

Kate and Ruth(fullsize)

On Friday night after getting home from another day doing World Champs work at Mt Stromlo I had the rather enjoyable opportunity to see Kate and Ruth playing live at The Folkus Room. They do not often play in Canberra outside the folk festival and they really are a wonderful pair of performers. My housemate Matt who is also a fan of their work came along with me and we got to enjoy a spectacular evening of music. Early on they played Cindy Cindy which was wonderful. Kate played a cover of the Joni Mitchell song A Case of You which was really amazing, what an evening. I thought it was a little disappointing how few people were there as they are popular in Canberra. Though an amusing aspect of this is that most of the people in the audience were close friends of theirs and both there mothers were (eventually) at the gig and they had played in groups with some of the audience members. I have been taking photos while working out at Stromlo on the worlds, however have not had much time in front of a computer recently so have not had time to upload them and comment on them. It will happen at some point soon.

Today I drove a steam locomotive.

The day started with firing up the locomotive. It took about 4 hours from lighting the first firewood in the firebox until steam pressure was within operating range. Meanwhile, stoker ("Heizer") Christoph and engineer ("Lokomotivfuehrer") Thomas explained the very basics how a steam locomotive works, and we had the pleasure of oiling, cleaning, and polishing the locomotive. Yes, cleaning and polishing, too.

After lunch everyone got to move the locomotive within station limits to practice accelerating and braking. There are two mechanisms to control acceleration: Amount of steam sent to the cylinders and amount of steam expansion within the cylinders. The general effect is similar to gears in a car. High gear at high speed uses less gas, but barely has enough torque to get the car moving in the first place. Some steam with little expansion in the cylinders gets the locomotive moving. Relying more on steam expansion in the cylinders once the train is moving saves steam pressure and therefore fuel.

Braking is quite an art. The trains on the Selfkantbahn like most trains use an air brake system which uses air pressure to control brake cylinders in each car. The practical implication for a novice engineer is that contrary to a car,it will take a few seconds for braking to take effect, and the train will keep braking at the given pressure set in the main brake line. When the brake is released only slightly, it will fully release the brakes at each car, and on top of that it will take several seconds for the locomotive to re-pressurize the main brake line. We got to practice this on a demo system in the car hall.

There is also a direct brake system on the locomotive only, which is generally used when the locomotive is moving without a train, or, if we have a train, similarly to a hand brake in the car when going uphill from a full stop: Hold the train in place, while the brakes in the cars are already released.

During my practice run in the afternoon the main brake line overloaded (too much pressure). This caused quite a commotion since it was unclear why this had happened in the first place. I was standing in the locomotive twisting thumbs and making a stupid face, while both Christoph and Thomas got to figure out what happened, and decide whether it's safe to continue the trip. In the end the net effect was that we got to de-pressurize and re-pressurize the brake system.

All in all, I think I did O.K. Under direction from Thomas I brought the train up to speed, slowed down and stopped before railroad crossings, rang the bell, and, to my utmost delight, blew the whistle. The interaction between steam pressure and steam expansion is not yet quite clear to me so Thomas had to guide me a bit, but I think I managed to do a decent job.

It was a hot day, and being in the cab was even hotter with the fire burning like crazy 2 feet before you. The cab was very crowded with stoker, engineer, and two seminar participants, one driving, one trying not to be too much in the way, paying attention to instructions, shoveling coal, or refilling the boiler with water. We went through several liters of bottled water and "Apfelschorle" on each run. Replacing the empty bottles when we got back to Schierwaldenrath became an important chore.

The practice runs happened to be two specials with paying customers from Schierwaldenrath to Gillrath. Yup, the whole, whopping 5.5km of track all the way from one end to the other end of the line.
The first run was booked by a Mazda fan club. Quite a sight when 40 Mazda sports cars along with their owners and respective girl friends enter a railroad museum in their shiny, little cars passing "our" shiny little steam engine.
The other run was for the youth group of a local fire department, as well as a birthday party in one of the cars.

After we returned with the second run to Schierwaldenrath, we had coffee and cake, watched/helped set the fire for the night and left the locomotive in the engine shed for the next day. Later in the evening the group had dinner together, and we had a fun time. The fact that I'm living in California was drawing quite some attention and many questions about life and work especially in comparison to Germany.

Tomorrow I will drive the 13:45 train from Gillrath to Schierwaldenrath, which -- for extra fun -- runs with the locomotive backwards, and therefore the controls will be behind me when looking on the track ahead of the locomotive. I'm curious if Wolfram will be here in time for the 11:15 departure which will be driven by my dad.

04:00: Mikal shared: Air rifle fired into supermarket, cask wine hit - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Dear Americans coworkers -- you ask me how common gun crime is in Australia? Well, how about the fact that a cardboard_box_of_bad_wine was the innocent victim of a gun crime being news worthy... Does that sum it up for you?

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We arrived at the main station of the Selfkantbahn in Schierwaldenrath just in time for the start of the seminar. After a brief introduction in the Buffetwagen, we did a tour of the museum, and visited the engine shed where we saw "our" steam engine No. 20 for the first time. She looked a bit dead standing there in the shed with a cold firebox and cold boiler. And I couldn't decide whether I should feel sad, curious, or excited about tomorrow. It didn't quite feel real that tomorrow we will fire up the locomotive and it will come to life.

I'm nervous. After looking at the various levers and manometers in the cab, as well as a brief explanation from Christoph, our stoker for tomorrow, I re-read the explanations how a steam locomotive works. I hope I can get this thing to move once it's my turn, and especially get it to stop...

Later during dinner we received our engineer hats, and had a fun time discussing various railroady topics. The seminar group is quite interesting, and participants come from all over the country. I'm the youngest by far. Dad's the oldest by far. Most are in their fifties. Some came alone, others brought wives or family for moral support.

Because the Canon printer driver installation program will not recognize Mac OS X 10.6, you can't install your printer drivers even though Snow Leopard is a minor update.

To install your Canon printer drivers...

1. Download the driver disk image.
2. Mount the disk image and copy the installer package to your desktop.
3. Control-click on the package and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
4. Navigate to Contents » Resources and delete the file InstallationCheck.
5. Now double-click the package and install the drivers normally.

[robg adds: I'm not sure if future Canon updates in 10.6 will be included in Software Update or not -- that is one of the supposed features of Snow Leopard, but I'm not sure exactly how it will all work.]

Not sure if this is a hint or a warning, but if you use the old Kerberos utility in Leopard and prior to get/set tickets manually, you're seemingly out of luck in Snow Leopard. Apple just removed the utility completely -- even on an upgrade, it's just deleted.

If you have 10.5 still available, though, the Leopard Kerberos utility works just fine on Snow Leopard. I really don't know why Apple leaves ancient Bluetooth firmware updaters cluttering my Utilities folder until the end of time, but removes a perfectly usable app, even if it has a small audience.

[robg adds: According to an associate at Macworld, the Kerberos utility has been renamed Ticket Viewer, and can be found in /System » Library » CoreServices. I haven't used either app, so I'm not sure if they're identical or not.]

Mac OS X Snow Leopard adds support for Cisco IPSec VPN connections -- that is, plain IPSec with XAuth authentication and mode_cfg.

That makes it two layers of authentication: first, Machine Authentication with a password (Shared Secret) or an X509 certificate. Then a traditional username-password pair for XAuth, both of which you can enter and save in the Account Name and Password fields respectively when you set up the connection. Trouble is, even though you entered your password and it is apparently saved in the keychain properly, Mac OS X keeps nagging you to manually enter the password every time you connect. Turns out this is a just bug with a simple fix.

Open the Keychain Access Application, select the System keychain and find your saved XAuth password entry in the list. Its Kind field will say IPSec XAuth Password. Open it, then on the Access Control tab cli...

Just a short tip for those about to install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. When you insert the DVD to install 10.6, the installer does something a little different than previous installers -- it pre-installs a bunch of stuff onto the 10.4/10.5 machine before it reboots with the DVD to finish the installation. I guess this is done to speed up the installation.

Anyhow, during this process, do not be tempted to turn down the brightness of your screen while this is happening. I did that, and when the machine rebooted from the DVD, the brightness of the screen was turned down to zero and I couldn't see anything.

So, do not turn down the brightness, even one above zero (which is what I did), or you will be faced with a black screen because the brightness keys do not work in the installer boot. Fortunately, I had another drive with an installation that was able to boot my Mac, and I ...

ISBN: 0743435494 LibraryThing

This bolo book is different from the previous ones, in that it heavily focuses on the humans side of the story, instead of the bolo's inner monologue. I've seen reviews online that say this makes it a bad bolo book, but I think that's unfair. The bolos are critical to the telling of this story, and you do hear from them. More than that, ultimately a point about the relationship between bolos and humans is being made that would be a lot harder to make if the story was told from the bolo side of the fence. This was a good book and I enjoyed it. Tags for this post: book() Keith_Laumer()

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U.S. Openings AUGUST 28th: Opening This Week | Top 10 Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar
	Halloween II Director: Rob Zombie Stars: Scout Taylor-Compton, Tyler Mane, Malcolm McDowell (Full Cast) Studio: Dimension Films The Plot: Laurie Strode (Taylor-Compton) struggles to come to terms with her brother Michael's deadly return to Haddonfield, Illinois; meanwhile, Michael prepares for another reunion with his sister. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 25 | slideshow) Videos (see all 4 NEW) THE BUZZ: All that industry talk about the Weinstein Company's lack of hits (and cash-flow) should be hushed temporarily now that RZ's sequel is following on the heels of QT's best-ever opening weekend. And even though H2 probably will open behind The Final Destination, the fact that Rob Zombie will now "complete his extreme vision of the terrifying legend" (we love that marketing-speak!), it makes the FD saga seem kinda wan and opportunistic in nature. That said, I do love that the summer is ending with a horror battle at the box-office, a woefully underrepresented genre this year. Message Boards: Script  |  will there be around 30 unnecessary sex scenes again? Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Taking Woodstock Director: Ang Lee Stars: Demetri Martin (Full Cast) Studio: Focus Features The Plot: When Woodstock organizers have the plug pulled on their event, Elliot Tiber (Martin), a young man who is spending the summer working on his parents' farm, helps the event land a permit, and puts the organizers in touch with Max Yasgur (Levy), a dairy farmer whose plot of land could serve as a perfect spot for the concert. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 14 | slideshow) Videos (see all 2 NEW) THE BUZZ: A year after Milk, Ang Lee turns the clock back to the summer of 1969, when the Stonewall riots announced the season, and Woodstock ushered it out. The real Elliot Tiber was present for both events, though Lee's adaptation of his memoir (written by James Schamus, naturally) will focus more on the upstate action and less on the New York City grittiness. That isn't stopping Lee from focusing on queer themes, since the focus will also be on Tiber, who came out during the swirling weeks leading up to the concert. Wondering whether Demetri Martin can handle such a role? Read this interview and go from there. Release-week update: It seems Ang's dewy treatment of the subject matter has resulted in one of his least moving and effective projects to date, with advance reviews noting a serious lack of engagement here. Message Boards: Paul Dano in VW scene in Taking Woodstock  |  Saw it tonight at Universal Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	The Final Destination Director: David R. Ellis Stars: Nick Zano, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella (Full Cast) Studio: New Line Cinema The Plot: After Hunt's (Zano) premonition of a deadly race-car crash helps saves the lives of his peers, Death sets out to collect those who evaded their fate. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 22 | slideshow) Videos (see all 2 NEW) THE BUZZ: I admire this franchise for embracing its dumb-fun appeal by balancing out the camp/gore ratio in the third installment three years back. Here, however, I find the race-track scenario to be kind of a bore, especially in the hands of Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis (who also handled FD 2), who apparently couldn't/didn't push for a more out-there premise. Still, the footage I saw at Comic-Con -- some 9 or 10 deaths! -- lured me back in like a helpless victim of awesome marketing. Will this story be rebooted 10 or 20 years from now? Message Boards: I hate it when my head gets stuck in my sunroof while I'm at the carwash  |  so will it be the FINAL destination? Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Big Fan Director: Robert D. Siegel Stars: (Full Cast) Studio: First Independent Pictures The Plot: Paul Aufiero (Oswalt), a hardcore New York Giants football fan, struggles to deal with the consequences when he is beaten up by his favorite player. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 8 | slideshow) Videos THE BUZZ: Patton Oswalt's dramatic breakthrough with art-house audiences, or a hard-to-market misfire for First Independent Pictures, who brought Gigantic to us earlier this summer? Message Boards: Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews

A little-known feature of the iPhone is its ability to display subtitles on movides. To do this, you just need the free programs MKVtools, SubCleaner, and Subler, and aconversion program -- I recommend FilmRedux. Once those are installed on your Mac, do this:

1. Convert the file to a raw, unsubtitled .MP4 with FilmRedux
2. Extract the UTF8 subtitle file (.srt) from the original file with MKVtools
3. Clean up the .srt with subcleaner
4. Merge the .mp4 and the .srt together in subler

Then sync the movie over to your iPhone. Next to the rewind button, a new subtitle button will appear.

I noticed the Finder was consuming all of my memory and 40% of my CPU power. I found this reproducibly occurs if you leave a window open in /tmp, and have it set in Cover Flow view mode. When looking at /tmp, memory and CPU usage is higher than normal in other views as well, but Cover Flow really spikes it.

The CPU usage is not a bug, it's simply the Finder having to rapidly update the icons of the transient files flickering in and out of /tmp. As for the 3.5GB of memory usage, while this might indicate some sort of memory leak, I'd also guess it might instead be some sort of too-aggressive Finder caching that's unsuited for the transient directory behavior. (It takes a long time for the Finder to soak up all that memory, but the CPU effect is instant.)

So the hint is: don't view /tmp in Cover Flow view mode!

I use a lot of quotes for my iChat Status, and discovered that after adding a particularly long quote, it broke iChat in a couple of ways. It appears that iChat can't handle status messages over 280 characters -- the long message refuses to show in the status message, and it breaks the iChat Status menu bar feature. Messages approaching this character count cause the iChat Status menu to go all wonky, because the type doesn't wrap and just keeps extending off the screen.

Manually opening iChat and editing the status messages to delete the offending entry (or entries) fixes both your status message and the menu bar item. This is a simple hint but one that caused a bit of hair pulling because I didn't want to delete my iChat prefs file and kill all my crafted pref settings.

My cousin is in first grade and sometimes she writes short stories for class. I try to share the stories with her grandparents, but because Japanese is their first language and they don't speak English very well, it's been tough. Today we're releasing a feature for Google Docs to make this kind of multi-lingual sharing easier — you can now automatically translate documents into 42 different languages.

So for my cousin's latest story, I helped her type it up in Google Docs and then clicked "Translate document" from the "Tools" menu. In a matter of seconds, Google Docs has translated the whole story into Japanese using Google Translate's technology.



You can replace the original document with the translation or make a new translated version. I like keeping an English version for friends here and creating a separate Japanese version for her grandparents. All the formatting and layout is preserved no matter what language it's in — translations aren't perfect, but we are continuously working on improving translation quality over time. We hope this new feature helps you more easily share information without worrying about language barriers.

Posted by Rita Chen, Associate Product Manager Intern, Google Docs

07:00: Mikal shared: HTML5 Demo: geolocation

Nice HTML 5 geolocation demo. I installed Firefox 3.5 to get this to work...

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I've written a quick script to print the network interface speeds, designed for use with GeekTool. In particular, this is very useful for seeing how fast your WiFi has connected. Create a new entry in GeekTool, and set it to a Shell action (how to do this varies depending on if you're using GeekTool 2.x or 3.x). In the Command window, enter the following code:

You can download, back up, and upload documents from your Google Docs account using a little Terminal magic. Prerequisites:

1. gdata-python-client 2.0.1 - download page
2. gdatacopier 1.0.2 - download page

Installation:

1. Download the prerequisites. Decompress each of the downloads.
2. Install gdata-python-client:

   $ cd gdata-2.0.1<br>
   $ sudo python setup.py install

Patch:

The current gdatacopier download has a small bug in it, and it needs to be patched to work properly. Open the file gdatacopier.py in the app's folder, and locate line 555. On that line, change this...

item_list.append({'title': e...



  
  
  
  
  

I often ssh from one Mac to another in order to manage applications on the remote machine. Thus, I find it frustrating that Mac OS X includes no easy way to quit an application politely (allowing the app to save data, clean up after itself, etc.) from the command line. There are command line options that are easy to use, but not nice to applications, and an option that is nice to applications, but not easy to use:

1. Kill and killall are easy to use, but none of their possible signals will initiate a polite quit of an OS X application. All kill signals either force a quit without saving, or (worse) force a quit without saving and with an error message from the OS. This is because kill deals with processes, not applications.
2. Osascript can use an Applescript command to initiate a polite quit using the form osascript -e "t...
   
   
   

I have gotten used to downloading certain PDF files and then viewing them in a Preview session started by Firefox. When I upgraded Firefox to 3.5.2, this stopped working. What I got instead was a tab with a blank screen and the name of the file in the tab header. Where was my dialog box? How do I get the document?

Well, it turns out that selecting File » Save Page As will open a dialog box allowing me to save the PDF file. Then going to Finder and opening the file with Preview gets me to the place I was before. I suspect that this drop in functionality is simply a temporary bug -- but if it's bit you, too, this is how I worked around the problem.

But the good news is that my PDF issue pointed me to another hint here about viewing PDFs directly in Firefox via a plug-in. So for the cases where I don't want an archived copy of the PDF (like the monthly schedule for my local ice rink), I'll ...

Climbed on Monday with Graham. No idea what I climbed now other than two laps of the yellow 19 on the far wall.

Tonight I headed in with Corch. Climbed:

• Overhung green 16
  
• Followed by overhung black 15
  
• Far corner green 17
  
• Followed by far corner orange 18, one rest?
  
• Far wall yellow 19
  
• Followed by far wall red 15
  
• Followed by far wall red 15
  
• Steep blue 20, one fall
  
• Mid wall blue 19
  
• Right of arete yellow 16
  
• Arete red 24, DNF
  

Corch headed home and I kept climbing with Katherine, Patrick and Naomi:

• Pillar yellow 13, clean, sandshoes and not reaching above my shoulders.
  
• Steep blue 19
  
• Followed by steep green 16
  
• Right end of slab purple 21, one rest
  

So around 239... Way more than I meant to climb. I suspect I will be well sore tomorrow.

We've just concluded our fifth Google Summer of Code, our flagship global program to introduce college and university students to open source development. Once again, the results this year have been impressive. Nearly 2,000 mentors from 64 countries participated in the program. They worked to bring 1,000 students from 69 countries into the communities of 150 free and open source projects. We're particularly excited this year to have introduced several students to open source development that has a direct impact on social causes, from microfinance software to global educational initiatives to making government data more transparent and accessible. Three months and hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, 85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects. We'll be publishing more extensive program statistics and wrap up reports in the coming weeks on the Google Open Source Blog, so stay tuned there for more news about Google Summer of Code.

We'd like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer. We're excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project. Finally, our sincerest thanks to all of our mentors for volunteering their time and expertise to help these students more actively engage with open source development.


Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager, Open Source Team

Try doing a search for [Hamlet] on Google Books. The first few results you'll get are "Full View" books — which means you can read the full text. And, because the book is in the public domain, you can also download a copy of Hamlet in PDF form.

Starting today, you'll be able to download these and over one million public domain books from Google Books in an additional format. We're excited to now offer downloads in EPUB format, a free and open industry standard for electronic books. It's supported by a wide variety of applications, so once you download a book, you'll be able to read it on any device or through any reading application that supports the format. That means that people will be able to access public domain works that we've digitized from libraries around the world in more ways, including some that haven't even been built or imagined yet.

We founded Google Books on the premise that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. We began digitizing these books because we thought it was important for people to be able to find and read them, and we want them to be able to do so anywhere — not just when they happen to be at a computer. This feature takes us one step closer towards realizing that goal by helping support open standards that enable people to access these books in more places, on more devices and through more applications.

To find out more, check out our post on the Google Books blog.

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

While audio features are still lacking in Keynote, there is something that makes it better (at least in Keynote '08 and Keynote '09). When you drag an audio file onto a slide, Keynote gives you a little speaker icon to let you know there's something there that makes a noise or two. Well, make that little speaker 135px or bigger on that slide and start your presentation. You, of course, can't actually see the speaker, but know the general area of where you plopped it down. Now drag your mouse over that invisible speaker, and something appears. You'll see a little gray bar on the bottom of the speaker icon's area, with a pause button and a time scroller (the circle that goes across the bar with time, like in iTunes).

Make the speaker icon even bigger, and more controls appear. At 400px and up, everything ...

I just discovered (by accident) what the VerifiedDownloadPlugin is. My Safari app was completely broken, as I couldn't always download. This had become quite annoying, so I started looking around. I then found the /Library » Internet Plug-Ins folder, and within that, an old Speed Download plugin which was causing my Safari issues.

However, I also found something else called VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin. I took both of them out, and my Safari worked quite well again. The bonus from this change is that I actually got rid of all those dialogs that tell me that the files I downloaded came from the internet -- well, I know they came from the internet; I just downloaded them! Even plain HTML files can't be opened without clicking that stupid OK button.

But now I'm feeling so much better. It's much easier to use my Mac. Of course, there's some reason for Apple to put the safety warning there, but ... if you know downloaded the files, because you wanted to open them...

There is a way to display iTunes' Cover Flow view mode in fullscreen on a second display, and yet still use the main window in iTunes for making playlists, etc. First, get the (still available) latest version of the original CoverFlow.

This is a separate application that can display album artwork of the current playing song in iTunes. To display all songs that are played, make sure no limitations are set in the Preferences of the standalone CoverFlow application. The only downside is that CoverFlow may exit full screen mode when another application like iTunes is active. The only solution seems to be to resize the CoverFlow window on a larger display and then move it to a smaller second display (similar to BjarneDM's solution for the iTunes Visualizer).

Hope this was a helpful tip!

I only followed a handful of blogs when I first started using Google Reader, but was always on the lookout for more great stuff to read. Over time, I discovered that my friends followed lots of interesting sites, and my reading list grew from 4 to 34 sites and blogs as I incorporated their recommendations.

Since then, Reader has launched several sharing features that make it easier to find and subscribe to feeds that your friends like, and we thought that recommendations could make finding good stuff to read even easier. This time, instead of asking our friends, we approached leaders across a variety of fields and asked them what they read online. We received lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies and more. We hope this will be a good place to find great things to read, whether you already have an extensive reading list or are totally new to Google Reader.

Plus, now we can answer some questions that have interested us for years: Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of their reading lists, or to any individual items that they recommend.

A big thanks to all of the contributors who shared their reading lists with us.

Posted by Zach Yeskel, Product Marketing Manager

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

We first launched the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP) to help some of our more popular users make money from their videos on YouTube. While we've focused on accepting prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience — like Fred and ValsArtDiary — we've occasionally extended the program to include some of the site's more unforgettable videos, such as the Battle of Kruger, David after dentist and Otters holding hands. These individual video partnerships recognize the role popular "one-off" videos play on YouTube, and have helped many people earn thousands of dollars a month as their videos went viral and endured over time.

We decided it was time to spread the wealth. Today we're excited to announce that we're extending the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos on our site. Now, when you upload a video to YouTube that accumulates lots of views, we may invite you to monetize that video and start earning revenue from it. To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video's virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an "Enable Revenue Sharing" message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account:


Once you've chosen to enable revenue sharing, YouTube will sell advertising against your video and pay you a revenue share into your Google AdSense account each month. (If you don't have an AdSense account, you'll have the opportunity to create one.) Individual video partnerships will not be eligible for many of the benefits of user partnerships, like enhanced channel features or the ability to monetize other videos in your account, so we encourage you to apply to be a member of the YPP. We'll consider your individual video partnerships when reviewing your YPP application. For now individual video partnerships are available only in the United States, but we hope to roll these out internationally soon.

It's taken us some time to build out the YouTube Partnership Program, our content management tools and other infrastructure to handle expanding the YPP to so many individual users and videos. Now that we're ready to share these opportunities with a wider audience, we're excited to see how individual video partnerships will help even more people make money from their success on YouTube.

Posted by Shenaz Zack, Product Manager

This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.

What if you could do a little something to improve the world during your daily drive to work? Here are a few ideas: tell everybody in the city when you're stuck in slow-moving traffic; warn the drivers on the freeway behind you that they should consider an alternate route; tell the people still at home that they should spend another ten minutes reading the morning news before they leave for work; tell your city government that they might want to change the timing of that traffic light at the highway on-ramp. Of course, you can't just get on the phone and call everybody, and your one traffic report from your one spot on the road might not help much anyway. But if everybody on the road, all at once, could tell the world how fast their car is moving, and we could make it easy for anybody to check that information on their computer or cell phone, well — then we'd be getting somewhere.

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, that's exactly what you can do. When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part — just turn on Google Maps for mobile before starting your car — and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.


This week we're expanding our traffic layer to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available. We're able to do this thanks in no small part to the data contributed by our users. This is exactly the kind of technology that we love at Google because it's so easy for a single person to help out, but can be incredibly powerful when a lot of people use it together. Imagine if you knew the exact traffic speed on every road in the city — every intersection, backstreet and freeway on-ramp — and how that would affect the way you drive, help the environment and impact the way our government makes road planning decisions. This idea, which we geeks call "crowdsourcing," isn't new. Ever since GPS location started coming to mainstream devices, people have been thinking of ways to use it to figure out how fast the traffic is moving. But for us to really make it work, we had to solve problems of scale (because you can't get useful traffic results until you have a LOT of devices reporting their speeds) and privacy (because we don't want anybody to be able to analyze Google's traffic data to see the movement of a particular phone, even when that phone is completely anonymous).

We achieve scale by making Google Maps for mobile easy to install and use, and by making it easy for people to provide information about their own vehicle speed. There's no extra device to plug into your car and no extra software to buy. Google Maps is free and works with most cell phones, and the number of cell phones with GPS is rising every day. Some phones, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre, come with Google Maps and traffic crowdsourcing pre-installed (the iPhone Maps application, however, does not support traffic crowdsourcing). Google is fortunate to have a lot of people using our products, and that scale helps make our products better.

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went — so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it. We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you'd like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

We've already been able to provide useful traffic information with the help of our existing mobile users, but we hope that is just the start. As GPS-enabled phones and data plans get less expensive, more people will be able to participate. Crowdsourcing traffic gives us a way to harness bits of location data from our users and give it back to them in a form they can use to make impactful decisions that affect their free time, their pocketbooks and the environment. The more people use it, the better it will get. So next time you're sitting in morning traffic, turn on Google Maps for mobile and let someone else know they can hit the snooze button one more time. Tomorrow morning, they might do the same for you.

Posted by Dave Barth, Product Manager for Google Maps

Earlier today, Apple announced that Snow Leopard will be available on Friday, August 28th. So that's when we'll start running Snow Leopard hints, in their own category (as with 10.4 and 10.5). When submitting hints on Snow Leopard, it will help me if you note that it's a Snow Leopard hint somewhere in the hint or title -- just include 10.6 somewhere and I'll know to code it when we run it.

Thanks!
-rob.

Spotlight generally excludes OS X system folders (such as /etc and /bin) from its searches. But, if you know the name of the system folder you want to search, you can search in it anyway.For example, to search for a file in the /etc folder, select Go: Go to Folder in the Finder. Type /etc in the Go to field and click Go. With that folder now open in the Finder, type whatever it is you want to look for in the Finder window's Spotlight field. When the Search bar appears, select "etc" as the folder to search (instead of This Mac). If you select one of the found files and check its file path at the bottom of the search window, you'll see that the search results are indeed within one of those previously unsearchable folders.

The Apple TV is a neat little device with convenience in mind. However, its convenience falls short when it comes to supporting high bit rates. However, Ryan Pfleghaar (aka Post_Break) has found a slick way to convert the audio to AC3 instead of DTS. However, the installation of the files required to pull off the slickness isn't so slick. So with his help, I have created an AppleScript that makes installation of all those files easy with a single click.

After installation, all one simply has to do is type into Terminal:

$ mkvdts2ac3 path/to/file.mkv

If you don't want to keep the DTS track after conversion, add the -n flag to the above command:

mkvdts2ac3 -n path/to/file.mkv

[robg adds: Note that this hint requires an Apple TV that has been modifi...

I have multiple addresses associated with my IMAP account (ebay@, groups@, shopping@, etc.). When sending mail from my iPhone, the addresses associated with your account can be selected by tapping on the From field, and choosing an entry from the pop-up rolodex.

Unfortunately, while the iPhone's Mail preferences app supports multiple comma-separated From addresses in the account information (just as OS X Mail does), there is no easy way to add them. Any multiple addresses that were present on the computer when the iPhone was originally set up will have been added at that time. However, when you go to the Address field of your account, only legal SMTP characters are available for typing input, so there is no way to type the comma separator.

Now under iPhone OS 3.0, copy/paste to the rescue! To create your first additional address, just temporarily edit the Description field immediately below Address. This is a full-text field and you can enter your new address with a l...

On my way out to Stromlo this morning on the CX bike I unfortunately had more data provided to back up my theory that my CX bike is cursed. Riding into the bike path tunnel near Scrivner Dam I thought to myself on the wet bike path, hmm I may be going a bit fast here, as I finished the thought my front wheel slipped and I went sliding along the bitumen on my right hip. This is of course the same hip I went sliding on a month ago.

Right now I am seriously annoyed as it makes walking around and a lot of movements painful, I was almost back to being able to sleep on my right side, now I wont for a while. I once more will be unable to run for a few weeks, and can not put full power into the pedals for another few weeks now too. I also have this theory that the cyclocross bike is cursed. This is the only bike I have ever owned on which I have had crashes serious enough to stop me riding or doing other things.

Sure I have had other crashes, such as those involving the breaking of frames however I was still able to go out and do long hard riders or other stuff the next day without much pain. So far on the CX bike I have crashed badly 4 times, each time with the front wheel losing traction and ending up pretty badly hurt. Stitches at the hospital required from one such incident in November 2007, then last year I came off and broke my collar bone when the front wheel lost traction. The recent crash in the CX race meant a month of no running, missing some events and some serious pain. Now a repeat (though it does not feel quite so severe) today. I guess it is possible that something about my position on the bike combined with the geometry and handling of it simply does not suit my riding style and thus I just lose the front wheel badly form time to time. Or I could be blaming the tool.

I made it out to Stromlo of course and we got to work, getting closer to having all the pipes up to hold the bunting around the XC course. We put in some new rocks in a line on one section to make A and B lines, later while working near hammer head the Australian team came past. I took some photos of them practising sections (not posting online until I get faster Internet at home again). So we asked them to check out the new section later on and tell us if it worked and if the B line needed to be slowed or the A line changed. In the end we went down and fixed both up to the extent it should work well while the practised in front of us as we changed it around to ensure it was correct. As Dave said it was kind of fun to have the elites there as we built this to see how it worked at pace.

Upon getting home I showered and headed out to see a movie, Coraline in 3d. This (being a Neil Gaiman based movie) was something I had been looking forward to for a long while, everyone had said seeing it in 3d was worth it too. What can I say, it did not disappoint, scary and cool and fantastic and fun and incredible and sweet and fun and oh so worth seeing. The 3d was a cool experience too.

ISBN: 0380896850 Avon Books (Mm) (1986), Paperback LibraryThing

This is the third book in the Bio of a Space Tyrant series (following Refugee and Mercenary). I picked this series up on a whim when it was cheap in a bookstore sale, and liked the first two books, although the first was quite grim and the second a little odd. This book isn't as strong as the other two, and it took longer to read than usual because of that... I guess the plot just seemed even harder to believe than the others in the series. Tags for this post: book() Piers_Anthony()

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So a lot of my friends I regularly ride bikes with will be over in East Timor next week for the inaugural Tour de Timor, this looks like an excellent event in the making and I would love to be there. The timing however was simply too close to the Mountain Bike World Championships which start on September 1st here in Canberra at Stromlo, there is a lot of work to be done out there next week and I am having the next two weeks off work to work out there with the other CORC people who have been putting in so much time and effort to bring this event to Canberra.

Still I wish Libby, Chris, Gary, Bleeksie, Cameron, and the rest of them an excellent time over there and I look forward to hearing how much fun it was when they return from their adventure.

Vegan Tiramisu cupcakes, finished product(fullsize)

The photo on the left is of the 24 finished tiramisu cupcakes mentioned yesterday. They were a hit. Yummm.

I'm often annoyed by the confirmation dialog that pops up in Safari 4 when I try to close a window with multiple tabs open. ("Are you sure you want to close this window?") But I don't want to turn off that message altogether (by checking its "Do not warn when closing multiple pages" box). Too often, I hit the close button by mistake when minimizing windows, so that warning is sometimes nice to have. Instead, I've discovered I can bypass that warning by holding down the Option key when clicking on the close button.

This is just a quick shout out for the Who Writes Linux? report from the Linux Foundation. IT got slashdotted today, and has some interesting numbers... For example, there are over 500 companies contributing to kernel development, and the majority of code reviews are done by employees of just three companies (with Red Hat being a clear winner). Anyway, if you have some spare time and are interested in such things, its an interesting read.

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U.S. Openings AUGUST 21st: Opening This Week | Top 10 Aug | Sept | Oct | Nov | Dec | Jan | Feb | Mar
	Inglourious Basterds Director: Quentin Tarantino Stars: Brad Pitt, Diane Kruger, Eli Roth (Full Cast) Studio: Weinstein Company, The The Plot: An American-led killing squad known as "The Basterds" terrorize the Nazis in German-occupied France during World War II. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 277 | slideshow) Videos (see all 11 NEW) THE BUZZ: To put this mother of a Methuselah project into perspective, Tarantino's finished three films since he first announced this one a decade ago (yes, we're counting Kill Bill as two). Those familiar with QT's attention-to-every-effin'-detail style know that that's a long-ass time. Originally due way back in 2004, the only thing keeping us from reaching the levels excitement we shared before Grindhouse is, well, Grindhouse. Still, a killer cast and way better source material (hopefully relying on The Dirty Dozen and Guns of Navarone instead of the original, properly spelled Bastards) has us praising Inglorious, hallelujah! Update: Word from Cannes is the picture is a joyful mess, which isn't hard to imagine given that QT scrambled to have it done for the premiere. (Here's some more on all that.) It's safe to assume that three-hour runtime will be dealt with in slightly atypical Weinstein Bros. fashion. Late-July Update: Nikki Finke confirmed the film actually is one minute longer than the Cannes version! And apparently it's tracking better with older audiences than with the younger generation. What about those of us who are between 30 and 40 -- you know, the people who came of age in the Tarantino era? Release-week Update: Have you read all the speculation that the Weinsteins are relying on Tarantino to save their company from financial ruin? Even Harvey is saying it's true! Message Boards: Why constant German bashing?  |  Dare, I say the stinker of 2009! Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Post Grad Director: Vicky Jenson Stars: Alexis Bledel, Michael Keaton, Carol Burnett (Full Cast) Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures The Plot: When recent college graduate Ryden Malby (Bledel) discovers she can't land a good job because of the working world's harsh climate, she moves back in with her oddball family in order to reconsider her options. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 8 | slideshow) Videos (see all 2 NEW) THE BUZZ: Let's see: Beg for some soulless corporate job or live for free with your parents and juggle hot guys? Don't play us for fools, Rory Gilmore! Message Boards: Sounds like my life  |  Couldn't she maybe go to grad school? Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	My One and Only [limited] Director: Richard Loncraine Stars: Renée Zellweger, Logan Lerman, Mark Rendall (Full Cast) Studio: Freestyle Releasing The Plot: A 1950s-set comedy in which the glamorous Anne Deveraux (Zellweger) leaves her adulterous husband and embarks on a drive down the Eastern Seaboard on a quixotic search for a wealthy man to fund a new life for her and her sons. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 23 | slideshow) Videos THE BUZZ: I think the best shot this well-received dramatization of George Hamilton's teenage years has at success is with older audiences for whom the feeling of '50s Americana will resonate. There's also a chance that Zellweger's waning supporters might rally around her for another period biography. (Remember that she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Miss Potter?) The industry, meanwhile, is behind young Logan Lerman (he plays George here) for now, since he has Gamer on deck for later this year, then the titular role in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in 2010. Message Boards: Go Renée  |  Movie website Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Casi divas [limited] Director: Issa López Stars: Patricia Llaca, Julio Bracho, Maya Zapata (Full Cast) Studio: Maya Entertainment The Plot: A comedy centered on four women, each of them from different corners of Mexico, vying with hundreds of other aspiring actresses for roles in a movie producer's new project. Their respective missions become crystal clear once one of the country's top actresses -- who also happens to be the producer's on-again, off-again lover -- fails to get the starring role. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 36 | slideshow) Videos (see all 2 NEW) THE BUZZ: This might be the movie that introduces filmmaker Issa Lopez to U.S. audiences. Divas was one of the top 2008 releases in Mexico, and for a while there it looked like Sony was going to co-distribute the movie, but I *think* they handed full control over to Maya Entertainment, a specialized distributor who did a great job with Talento de barrio last year. Message Boards: Horrible, horrible film  |  Good luck to Issa!!! Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Five Minutes of Heaven [LA/NY] Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel Stars: Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt, Anamaria Marinca (Full Cast) Studio: IFC Films The Plot: As a youth, Alistair Little (Neeson) was a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a paramilitary group in Northern Ireland. After serving a thirty year sentence for the murder of a young Catholic man, Little prepares for his televised meeting with his victim's brother, Joe Griffin (Nesbitt), who watched as the hit was carried out. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 7 | slideshow) Videos (see all 2 NEW) THE BUZZ: "Low key" perhaps is a surprising description for a political thriller that brings together Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel and newly minted action hero Liam Neeson, and it might be the reason the picture floated in distributor limbo for so long after its Sundance debut back in January. Still, the direction, writing, and performances are all strong, reportedly, and art-house types might recognize co-star Anamaria Marinca's name from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Message Boards: Reconciliation Is Not an Option  |  Nesbitt is brilliant Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	Art & Copy [NYC] Director: Doug Pray Stars: Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Hal Riney (Full Cast) Studio: Seventh Art Releasing The Plot: A documentary on some of the mavericks of modern American advertising. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 10 | slideshow) Videos THE BUZZ: Definitely one for the Objectified set. I saw Doug Pray's latest work at Slamdance earlier this year and loved it. Mind if I quote myself? Thanks! Essentially a tribute to the men and women who revolutionized advertising -- print and TV formats, in particular -- A&C connects the trade's landmark ideas of the early 1960s to today's Apple-dominated times. Subjects interviewed are an Advertising Hall of Fame: Phyllis Robinson, the copy chief who did more than merely sloganize the "Me Generation" four decades ago; Robinson's contemporary, George Lois, whose Esquire Magazine covers turned celebrity advertising into art; Mary Wells, the first woman to run an ad agency, and the person responsible for making air travel colorful and sexy with her Braniff Airlines campaign; recently deceased San Francisco maverick Hal Riney (who to me has always been the Norman Rockwell of the ad world); Lee Clow (the "1984" MacIntosh commercial) Widen+Kennedy founders Dan Wieden and David Kennedy ("Just Do It"); Rich Silverstein and Jeff Goodby ("Got Milk?"). The portraits here are engaging, passionate, and literate; additionally, the widescreen cinematography and relaxed editing (an antidote to the jump cuts of today) result in a work whose ideas and emotions are on par with the work created by Art & Copy's subjects. And of course a bevy of the memorable imagery, slogans, and jingles are woven throughout the film. I think it would have been easy for Pray to either factor in the negatives of the advertising world, or to expand his contemporary view into Internet advertising, so I give Art & Copy top marks for its focus, which feels like the beginning of a potential series of documentaries. Message Boards: Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews
	X Games 3D: The Movie [limited] Director: Steve Lawrence Stars: Travis Pastrana, Ricky Carmichael, Shaun White (Full Cast) Studio: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures The Plot: An X Games documentary featuring behind-the-scenes stories of the athletes and the sacrifices they make in pursuit of glory and the advancement of their sports on the biggest stage in action sports. .media_strip_thumbs img { margin-right:0.2em; border:none; } .media_strip_thumbs { overflow: hidden; height: 90px; } .media_strip_thumb img { margin-right: 0.2em; } .media_strip_thumb { float: left; margin-bottom: 50px; text-align: right; font-family: Tahoma,Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; color:#333333; } Photos (see all 24 | slideshow) Videos (see all 3 NEW) THE BUZZ: ESPN Films is in high-gear these days, with a lock on the X-Games phenomenon (it's the Warped Tour of sports) and a handful of sports-legend biographies in development. Even if this documentary doesn't reach its core audience during it's one-week theatrical run, expect the TV/DVD/download numbers to justify more from the Games in the future. Message Boards: did they already do this movie?  |  This movie is sick!!! Showtimes | Trailers | Photos | Message Boards | User Comments | Reviews

So I have been hearing rumours from friends recently that the rule that means I am not allowed to give blood has recently been relaxed. Not due to my diabetes, reading the FAQ on the donate blood site mentions that insulin controlled diabetics should speak with them, however hints they probably will be able to.

The reason I (and also my Sister and Mother) are not allowed to give blood is that we lived in England for all of 1993, which is between the 1980 to 1996 period they rule out due to the lack of a vCJD test. (details here). Which it appears is definitely still a restriction. Unfortunate really.

Vegan Golden Cupcakes pre Tiramisu (fullsize)

Will anyone ever tire of a cupcake? I doubt it. Here are 24 fresh (baked this morning after I got home from swimming before going to work) vegan golden cupcakes (from the VCTOTW book), this is the plain cupcake recipe, however tonight I will be making them into vegan Tiramisu cupcakes. Last time they were spectacular so I expect similar results this time, and I was able to get the dark chocolate coated coffee beans at the ANU Food Co-Op yesterday too so they may even be better. This is of course pre preparation with the Kahlua at the ready for when I get home to do the vegan vanilla cream cheese icing and Kahlua/coffee mix. I am going over to a friend's birthday dinner tonight and offered to bring a vegan friendly dessert.

Burn folders have been around since Tiger. But I only recently realized that you can place smart folders inside them, to make smart burn folders.

For example, let's say you want to regularly burn all the documents related to a particular work project to disk. To do so, start by creating a regular burn folder in the Finder Then, create a smart folder with whatever criteria you want (for example: search for the name of one of your projects in Contents, click on the plus-sign (+) button to add another search term and set Kind to documents. Then save your smart folder inside the burn folder.

Now, when you open the burn folder and click the Burn button, the system will find every document on your machine (including any you've added recently) that contain the name of your project and burn them all to disk.

To save an entire e-mail exchange from Mail.app to a text file, select the messages you want to save. Then select File: Save As..., and save the messages as plain text or rich text wherever you want. That file will have all the selected messages ordered by date.

If you'd rather have save the messages as a PDF file, choose File: Print..., open the PDF drop-down menu and choose Save as PDF. This will save each message as a separate PDF. (You'll probably want to create a temporary folder to hold them first.) Once Mail is done saving all those PDFs, open the first one in Preview, open the Preview sidebar for that window, and drag all the remaining PDFs from the folder to the sidebar. This will create a single PDF with all of the messages ordered by date.

If you want to save an ongoing discussion periodically, you can create a smart folder in Mail that searches for the messages you want to save. Any time you want to preserve the current state of the discussion, click on t...

I've done a bit more climbing this week than I have of late and I didn't write anything down so I have no idea what I climbed on Monday or Tuesday.

Tonight I went to the Lactic Factory for a little bouldering. A little turned into a fair bit and by the end of the night I think I'd tried around two fifths of the problems in the gym perhaps getting up two thirds of those I tried. Was good to get back in to do a little power work. Must make it a more regular thing.

[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and we are very pleased to have Harold Varmus join us here. Harold is the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Public Library of Science, a non-profit publisher of open access journals committed to making scientific and medical research literature a freely accessible public resource. This announcement is also posted on the Public Library of Science website. – Ed.]

The successful development of open access publishing by organizations including the Public Library of Science (PLoS) in recent years is a dramatic illustration of how the Internet is revolutionizing scientific communication. Today, after several months of work, I’m delighted to announce that PLoS is launching PLoS Currents (Beta) — a new and experimental website for the rapid communication of research results and ideas. In response to the recent worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak, the first PLoS Currents research theme is influenza.

PLoS Currents: Influenza, which we are launching today, is built on three key components: a small expert research community that PLoS is working with to run the website; Google Knol with new features that allow content to be gathered together in collections after being vetted by expert moderators; and a new, independent database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) called Rapid Research Notes, where research targeted for rapid communication, such as the content in PLoS Currents: Influenza will be freely and permanently accessible. To ensure that researchers are properly credited for their work, PLoS Currents content will also be given a unique identifier by the NCBI so that it is citable.

PLoS Currents: Influenza welcomes contributions covering any and all aspects of research into influenza: influenza virology, genetics, immunity, structural biology, genomics, epidemiology, modeling, evolution, policy and control. Contributions might take the form of new datasets, preliminary analyses or entire manuscripts. The launch site already features new findings from some outstanding influenza researchers.

To enable contributions to PLoS Currents: Influenza to be shared as rapidly as possible, they will not be subject to in-depth peer review; however, unsuitable submissions will be screened out by a board of expert moderators led by Eddie Holmes (Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Pennsylvania State University) and Peter Palese (Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine).

The key goal of PLoS Currents is to accelerate scientific discovery by allowing researchers to share their latest findings and ideas immediately with the world’s scientific and medical communities. Google Knol’s features for community interaction, comment and discussion will enable commentary and conversations to develop around these findings. Given that the contributions to PLoS Currents are not peer-reviewed in detail, however, the results and conclusions must be regarded as preliminary. In time, it is therefore likely that PLoS Currents contributors will submit their work for publication in a formal journal, and the PLoS Journals will welcome these submissions.

PLoS Currents: Influenza is an experiment and a prototype for further PLoS Currents sites. It reflects our commitment to using online tools to the fullest extent possible for the open sharing of research results. As with any new project, we will be listening carefully to the reactions within and beyond the scientific and medical communities and welcoming suggestions for improvements.

Posted by Harold Varmus, Chairman and Co-Founder, Public Library of Science

A brief update mostly linking to other things.

I’ve been thinking it’d be fun to try developing code in a wiki environment — ie, web based, reasonably pretty, simple markup, potentially collaborative, and with text/links as first class elements; basically my idea of what LitProg2.0 might look like. As such, I’ve been poking at some hackable wikis — particularly ikiwiki and sputnik. Anyway, as the previous link explains I decided sputnik was the way to go, so now I have a junkcode wiki. A bit of hacking also means I have an RSS feed of new junkcode roughly as I add it, which hackers reading this might find interesting to follow. (There’s a few problems with the RSS generation — it’s not terribly efficient, but that’s probably okay with feedburner as a middleman; and sputnik seems to miscorrect for the TZ, giving timestamps 10 hours too earlier than reality, or so. But hey, it has pretty colours!)

01:00: Mikal shared: Crazy multi-processor ARM-based Arduino system

Not only is this nerdy, I suspect there are practical uses as well. Imagine for instance an home automation system where a bunch of these are connected by a simple bus. Want to update just one node? Inject the code anywhere and let it propagate.

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01:00: Mikal shared: Destroying Market Overcapacity -- Literally

The GFC results in too much container ship capacity, so what do you do? Its obvious! Scrap ships.

02:00: Mikal shared: Hackers Break Into Police Computer | Australian Federal Police

The headline is a bit sensational, but its still an interesting article.

19:00: Mikal shared: Barney Frank pwns crazy lady at "town hall" meeting, effectively invoking Godwin's law.

Crazy lady smack down. I am increasingly disappointed by the standard of political debate in the US... I wonder if these people are really crazy, or are paid to do stuff like this.

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I'm in an office with a very tight IT budget so I try to push open source wherever possible. For basic image editing, I've turned some people onto Gimp. One frustrating aspect of Gimp—because it runs under X11 and is not a native Cocoa application—is that ever time you want to choose a tool from the toolbox, you have to click the toolbox to select it, and then click again to select the tool. It's frustrating when all I want to do is make a simple edit. I've just located this solution:

1. Start X11
2. In X11, select "Preferences...".
3. In the resulting X11 Preferences window, select the "Windows" tab
4. Check the "Click-through Inactive Windows" check-box and close the Preferences window.

You should now be able to click directly on a tool in the toolbox to select it, and then start working with the tool immediately in the image. No more having to first click back on the image to start your editing.

Last year my wife and I returned from Thailand with some Bollywood movies we bought at a market. They aren't on DVD—some are on regular CD-ROMs (a mix of VCDs and regular CDs), complete with .avi files and .srt subtitle files, which we can play with VLC Player. However, I noticed that if the .avi and .srt files are in the same folder, and you press the space bar to preview the movie, Quick Look will show the subtitles in the movie. Previously I thought only VLC Player & QuickTime could do this. Quick Look even does this after I convert the .avi files to .m4v files.

[Editor's note: This hint has not been tested.]

People use search to find what they need, and the same holds true in the business world. We want searching your company intranet to be comparable to searching on Google.com, and the Google Search Appliance (GSA) to have the most relevant, high quality results possible. That's why today we're announcing two new tools for Google Enterprise Search: Side-by-Side search comparison and new connectors for the GSA, both in Enterprise Labs. Enterprise Labs is where you can find the latest-and-greatest tips and tools for better enterprise searching — tools like Side-by-Side.

Side-by-Side lets employees test and rate results from two different search queries on the same body of data, to see which gives better results. In the example below, the admin has set up two different GSA configurations to search [google].


Employees can then vote on their preferred results, by choosing the Policy A or B buttons, and the administrator can then use that information to choose and set up the right search solution for the business. Product manager (and Enterprise Labs guru) Cyrus Mistry explains more:



In the enterprise, search engines crawl more than just the Internet — they're also searching across all sorts of data stores and offline content. Today we're also announcing GSA connector updates to the major content management systems, as well as a cool new GSA connector for Salesforce data, so the GSA can search and provide employees access to the internal Salesforce info they need in search results. Connectors integrate data from all different kinds of file and content systems (like SharePoint, FileNet, Documentum) so an employee searching their company intranet can see a single, unified search results page, even if the results are drawn from a wide variety of company data systems.

Enterprise search is about the fundamentals: organizing information so that people can do their jobs more easily. You can read more about today's launches on the Google Enterprise Blog, and download Side-by-Side and other search tools in Google Enterprise Labs.

Posted by Michael Parker and Salmaan Rashid, Engineering team

I just finished writing an AppleScript that will let you run Firefox with a clean profile. If Firefox isn't already running when you run this script, it'll open Firefox normally, but load a clean profile instead of the default one. If Firefox is running, the script will open a new instance of Firefox alongside the current one and load the clean profile in that. If you already have both your default profile and the clean profile open, it'll just bring the clean one into focus. Before we get to the actual script, you'll need to open Firefox's profile manager and create a new profile. Open a new Terminal window and type this:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

...then hit Return. This assumes that Firefox is in the Applications folder; if you have it somewhere else, change the path to wherever you put it. When the Profile Manager opens, click Create Profile, and name it whatever you want (I used "Clean"). If your profile name is longe...

I just bought an eReader that supports PDFs and have been saving articles I find online as PDFs to read later. However, I wanted to have a designated directory on my Mac for my PDFs.

To add this as an additional option to the PDF drop down menu in the print dialog, go to home ~/Library/PDF Services and drop in an alias of the directory where you want save your files.

Alternatively, you can create a symbolic link with terminal in that directory like this:

ln -s ~/Documents/Readinglist/ "Save PDF to Reading List"

Now you have a quick easy way to save your articles for reading later.

On Friday I packed the car and drove to Albert Park to pick up Sol, a guy I found on Chockstone who was looking for a lift to Arapiles for the weekend. We put his stuff in the car, dropped past his house to pick up some things he'd forgotten and then drove up to Arapiles and set up camp for the night. Had a glass of wine and wandered around the pines, meeting more people from Chockstone.

Saturday morning we got up and ate and I met Sarah, another Chockstone member, and Ed February from South Africa [Edit: Turns out he's a famous climber: link ]. I headed off with Ed to Right Watchtower Face:

I decided have a crack at something down the right hand end that I'd seconded before but hadn't plucked up the courage to lead yet, Omaha Beach:

Omaha Beach 80m 18
1)30m 18 Start 10m Left of Panzer. Move up and right around broken bulge with marginal pro (bolt runner now). Committing moves lead to easier ground. Move back L and straight up through weakness in undercut bulge. Belay as for Panzer.
2) 30m 16 Up Panzer's corner crack then traverse L following the flake. At the top of the flake go straight up and belay in V corner.
3) 20m 8 Scrabble to the top following crack up and L. FA: Yosef Murphy, Shaun Kratzer 4-4-5

The route begins stepping up onto a small ledge and shimmying up a vertical wall a little till you can just stretch up and clip the bolt. With that out of the way I set about trying to get up the first two moves and peeled off and lowered a few times. Eventually I decided to try committing to the crap left hand and bumping my right up to a small, first knuckle only, two finger pocket.

The move stuck and I was away, and within a few seconds I was a metre above the bolt and looking for somewhere to place more gear. There were some small wire placements well out left but I figured I'd probably fall trying to get across to them and continued up the face, happy that the angle had eased a little with allowed me to take my time. I gained the first ledge and took my time placing a couple of not so great pieces.

After a few minutes of checking the gear and composing myself, I started off again up the slab, immediately finding an awesome .75 cam placement. With some decent gear between myself and the ground I headed off again. Fairly thin, delicate movements up the slab and eventually you reach an overlap. Here again I stopped for a while while I figured out some gear before committing to the bulge and pulling onto the thin stance under the final bulge

I placed a #3 cam at my feet and wiggled a small #4 nut into a thin vertical crack. The nut wasn't spectacular so I placed a second nut in a horizontal crack and clipped them together, each holding the other in place. With that bit of jiggery pokery out of the way, I went about finding enough grip on the less than good hand holds to be able to get my left foot up around armpit height. Once my foot was up I could reach over the final bulge and mantle onto the bushy ledge to set a belay.

Ed followed without any problems and joined me on the ledge shortly after. We removed the belay anchor and walked across the ledge to the base of the corner crack. Ed scooted up the corner and then traversed out left under the roof/flake system, placing a few pieces here and there. Once he was out of sight I sat patiently paying out rope waiting for him to reach the belay. Eventually the shout of 'off belay' came down and I took Ed off belay. I seconded up the pitch without too many problems though I still find that corner crack a more difficult piece of climbing than the slab below. The slab above however has very little protection

I joined Ed and the belay and then led the last scrambling little pitch. We walked off and had some lunch. I was very pleased with my morning's effort, having just lead something about 3 grades harder than anything I'd led on gear before.

More later...

[Edit: Not much else to add. Went and seconded Ed up The Rack and called it a day. Went to Simon Mentz's place for a beer and a chat with him and his folks. Storm was pretty fucking cool that night though a little full on in a small tent at times. Next day the weather wasn't so good so we hid in a cave and did a few climbs when the sun was shining. Sol put a tree branch in has hand and we went to hospital. Drove home.]

I had to take a flight a few weeks ago, and I thought I'd do the financially (and environmentally) sensible thing and use an airport shuttle service. Especially because the airport train in Sydney is so expensive and slow. I found Jetbus online, and paid with PayPal. The first time I used them they were just fine, but the second time was extremely frustrating. So frustrating that I wont be using their service again, as I value actually getting on my plane.

Interestingly, Jetbus' Sydney office is across the road from my pickup location, so how badly can it go?

I had a 4pm booking. I arrived at the pickup location 15 minutes early. The bus drove past me at the speed limit approximately on time. It did not slow down or stop. I rang the dispatch number to inform them of the error. The bus drove past about 10 minutes later, again without slowing down or stopping. I rang again. The bus didn't reappear. In total, I rang dispatch 5 times in an attempt to be collected. After the bus was 45 minutes late, I took a taxi to the airport instead, which cost $47, and arrived with only 15 minutes to spare.

The only part of this whole thing which makes me happy? This is the first time I have had to use PayPal's dispute resolution system as I am not a big PayPal user. It was pain free, and gave me the outcome I wanted. That's interesting given that I hear so many bad things from other PayPal users.

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New Panasonic DMC-FT1 (fullsize) Old Panasonic DMC-LZ5 (fullsize)

So I bought myself a 6MP, 6x optical zoom, panasonic dmc-lz5 in January 2007. It has been a good camera and has worked well for 2.5 years now. I guess one thing I found a little bit jarring is it seemed to have more sensor induced noise (it looked like a painting up close) in many photos. However on the whole I liked it. When I have it with me in an event I tend to carry it in my jersey pocket, in a padded bag inside a dry bag. This makes the camera quite bulky (and heavier), it also makes it a lot harder to whip it out for a photo (have to undo the bags, get it out, put it back etc). At geoquest this year one of my team mates had a Panasonic DMC-FT1 (called the TS1 in US and possibly Europe) which is waterproof to 3 metres and shock proof to 1.5 metre drop. He was swimming with it in his pocket and getting it out to take shots in the ocean and simply kept it there where it could easily get banged up. One of my housemates already had an Olympus camera she uses in races that is similar (waterproof and shock proof), this Panasonic one I was looking at came out this year and has some nice features, as I am still somewhat partial to Panasonic cameras (Crash's influence) I decided this is the one I wanted. 4.8 optical zoom, 12 MP, AVCHD (1080p) video recording, no moving parts externally. So I ordered it last Wednesday night and it came on Friday morning. When water used to get into the drybag/camera bag while racing the camera would fog up and be useless for taking photos, this camera I can now keep in a pocket or neoprene pouch and let it get wet and it will still work fine. Also My test photos so far do not have the painted looking noise as the LZ5 did and the photos appear crisper. I like it, I also think Jane may like the purchase as I will give her the old camera as I no longer need it. Of the photos on the left, the photo of the new camera was taken with the LZ5 and the photo of the LZ5 was taken with the new camera. A few other photos taken this weekend (3 paddling on Saturday afternoon and one at the Gravity XC race at Stromlo yesterday also turned out well). The new camera is effectively the same size as the old one, however as I do not need the camera bag or dry bag it will be more compact and easier to deal with.

20:00: Mikal shared: 90 percent of U.S. bills carry traces of cocaine

I've heard rumours about this before...

20:00: Mikal shared: Heathrow gets driverless car of tomorrow, today

I'm in London in October. I think I'll need to catch one of these if they go anywhere I can find an excuse to go.

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Since launching Google Insights for Search a year ago, we've been providing daily insight into what the world is searching for. Whether you're an advertiser looking to expand keyword lists, an economist analyzing economic trends or just looking to settle a popularity contest, Google Insights for Search can help provide the answers.

Looking at search trends helps you understand when, where and how the world's interests have changed. Simply type in search terms to see how search query volume has evolved over time, in which geographic regions search interest is greatest and other related searches.

Today, we are proud to announce that Insights for Search is now available in 39 languages around the world. We're also introducing a forecasting feature for some queries based on an extrapolation of the historical trends and search patterns. And to help you visualize these changes and trends, we've also added an animated map so you can watch how search interest changes over time in different locations.

You can check out some of these cool features in our video below.



Visit Google Insights for Search and see what the world is searching for. You can also keep on top of the latest trends by adding a customizable gadget to your iGoogle page or embedding a gadget directly on your website.

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel R&D Center

As more and more businesses and organizations "go Google," we find that many of the features we develop based on feedback from large enterprises end up benefiting all of our users. We recently rolled out improvements to the way Google Groups interacts with several of our applications. Now, sharing calendars, sites and documents with multiple people is easy — instead of adding people one at a time, you can simply share with an entire Google Group.

As an example, imagine you're organizing a local intramural softball team tournament. You use Google Docs to keep track of the rosters for each team as well as each team's performance.


You want all the players, but only the players, to have editing access. You already have a Google Group set up with the tournament participants, so you simply share the spreadsheet with the group itself, granting the group members permission to edit.



Now, when people join or leave the Google Group, they will automatically gain or lose editing access to the spreadsheet. It's that easy.

This was a feature that people wanted to "just work" — and now it does. Go ahead and try it out with your sites, calendars and documents!

Posted by Jeffrey Chang, Associate Product Manager, Google Groups

One of the few things I like about Powerpoint is its ability to print large posters. You can do the same thing in Keynote 09, but it isn't immediately obvious how. Select a new file with whatever screen-size you want. Next, click on the Document icon (at far left) in the Inspector. On the Document tab, select Custom slide size... from the Slide Size drop-down. Enter whatever size poster you want, in pixels. Figure that the printout will be at 72 pixels per inch, so a 4- by 3-foot poster would be 3456 x 2592 pixels. When you're ready to print, export to whatever file type your poster printer accepts.