Parade magazine today reports on the top ten names for baby boys and girls this year:

Jacob

Emily

Michael

Isabella

Ethan

Emma

Joshua

Ava

Daniel

Madison

Christopher

Sophia

Anthony

Olivia

William

Abigail

Matthew

Hannah

Andrew

Elizabeth

Ok, but I seem to meet more and more kids with one-off names. Isn’t the long tail of names getting longer every year?

[Tags: long_tail ]

Hypothesis: Entertainments in which the actors are visibly having a good time with one another, and are winking at the audience, don’t age well.

Evidence: Rat Pack movies. Burt Reynolds movies. Jimmy Fallon sketches.

Evidence to the contrary: ___________?

[Tags: entertainment movies ]

Oh, I am so about to make a fool of myself in public…

I now have a D-Link DNS-323 plugged into my home network. It’s a network storage device that I want to use as a centralized backup for my family’s various computers because some of us don’t always plug our Macs into our USB external hard drive to let the Mac Time Machine work its backup magic. Unfortunately, the hack I found on the Net to get Time Machine to recognize the DNS-323 doesn’t work for me: Time Machine lets me say I want the backup to be housed on the DNS-323, but the software craps out when it actually tries to back up to it. If there’s an easy way around that, I’d love to hear about it.

In the interim, I’ve been playing with rsync, a command-line utility included in Leopard that does backups. I’ve had no luck with rsyncX, which is a Mac specific version, but rsync is working. It took some doing to get it running on the DNS-323, including installing fun plug (the DNS-323 is a linux box) and writing a config file that specifies which machines rsync recognizes. My Linux hacker nephew Greg did that part of it for me. (Thanks, Greg.)

There’s a script that enables rsync to mimic Time Machine. It’s been working pretty well — my hourly backups go far slower than they should, so I’m undoubtedly doing something wrong — but I had a heck of a time telling it which directories I want it to back up. You gain control over the backup set by specifying a file of inclusions and exclusions. You do this in the rsync command line by saying “–exclude-from=filename” where you replace “filename” with the name of the file that has the list.

After a bunch of Internet research and way too much trial and error, I now have a list that does what I want, although I’m sure it’s laughably kludgy, and possibly fatally wrong. Nevertheless, here’s how I think it works…

The file can list both includes and excludes. You indicate which is which by prefacing each item with a + or a -. The list assumes that the root directory is whichever one you specified in the rsync command line. So, if your command line said that you want to back up “/Users/me/”, then you would tell it to exclude “/Users/me/junk” by putting the following line in your exclude-from file:

- junk/

Likewise, to include /Users/me/importantstuff/ you’d put in the line:

+ importantstuff/

But, at least in my experiments, that line will not include any subdirectories of importantstuff. After failing to understand the instructions I found on the Net, and after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found that it works if I also include the line:

+ importantstuff/**

The double stars tell it to backup all the subdirectories and all their subdirectories, ad infinitum. I’ve found I have to put in both the line without the stars and then the line with the stars. You’d think the line with the stars would be enough, but in my tries and my errors, it wasn’t.

The list of inclusions and exclusions is sensitive to the order of the list. If you have particular subdirectories you want to exclude (e.g., importantstuff/junk/), put them first:

- importantstuff/junk/**

If you want rsync to backup only designated directories, list your excludes first, then your includes, and end with

- *

which tells it to exclude anything you didn’t already tell it to include. I have the feeling that that may be an ugly hack with unintended consequences. Remember, I don’t know what I’m doing.

So, my exclude-from file looks roughly like this:

- *Azureus*/
- *Azureus*/**
- Documents/TiVo*
- Documents/Aptana*
+ Sites/
+ Sites/**
+ Pictures/
+ Pictures/**
+ Music/
+ Music/**
+ Documents
+ Documents/**
- *

Two important notes: 1. The -n parameter on the command line will run rsync in “what if” mode, showing you what it would do without actually doing it. 2. As I’ve likely made some embarrassing and awful mistakes, please read the comments in hopes that some knowledgeable and kind soul will correct me. [Tags: rsync exclude-from dangerously_wrong ]

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When I blogged about Flyp on Tuesday, I didn’t know it was about to run an article about Charlie Nesson’s poker university, a place where students learn about life by playing poker online. The article is short and showy, but it’ll give you the idea… (Charlie is the founder of the Berkman Center. [Tags: poker charlie_nesson ]

Footnote has posted the 1860 Census with its usual array of tools and goodies, some of which require a free membership. But the basic browsing and viewing is open to all. Footnote does a nice job with this stuff, including annotation tools and other social amenities.

For those who are keeping score, there were about a dozen David Weinbergers listed in the census that year, including one whom the FBI investigated I think for draft dodging. [Tags: foonote census 1860 ]

I’ve taken the title of Sharon Richardson’s post at JoiningDots because it’s so apt. She writes:

What’s weird from an information and context perspective is how remote this disaster feels, compared to other events such as the Tsunami, Hurrican Katrina and Sept 11th. (A similar effect happend with the earthquake in Pakistan.) Is that because Burma is such a closed society, meaning there are very few first-hand on-the-spot-as-it-happens pictures and videos? Research has proven that people connect more when shown a specific story rather than massive (no matter how scary) statistics. The tsunami also occured in a region with strict controls. Perhaps having a tourist spot complete with Westerners and their camcorders helped.

Maybe a more evolved consciousness would be unaffected by the particular stories and the particular videos, for rationally we know that the disaster is a disaster whether or not there happens to be film at 11. Or maybe our atavistic reaction to personal stories is a necessary part of our being moral creatures … so long as we still make the donation even when, in the absence of stories, only pure reason moves us .

[Tags: burma morality ]

Each season, 15 designers compete for the chance to showcase their designs at New York's Fashion Week and win $100,000 to fund their businesses. The competition takes place on the Emmy-winning Project Runway, a reality show all about discovering the next great American fashion designer.

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Moveon.org is recommending that we donate to the International Burmese Monks Organization, which already has a network of local people in place. Moveon.org thinks that money donated to the monks via Avaaz.org is more likely to do good quickly there. Here’s a link.

We usually like to give to groups we’ve looked into pretty closely. But those groups — e.g., Oxfam — are frustrated that they are unable to help directly and quickly. So, for now we’re placing our philanthropic bet on Avaaz.

[Tags: burma ]

The Harvard Law faculty has voted unanimously for an Open Access policy based on the one that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a few months ago. Yay!

John Palfrey, Harvard Law’s new vice dean for library and information resources (and, of course, the soon-to-be-former exec dir of the Berkman Center) gets to implement this happy policy.

[Tags: open_access harvard libraries john_palfrey ]

That’s the apt title of a post by ZA3038 that provides an interesting overview of the Open Archives Initiative, about which I know, um, let’s see, carry the one…embarrassingly nothing:

At its core, the OAI promotes interoperability between different systems by supplying a rigorous set of standards that facilitate the sharing of digital information.

The post says “the original and continued focus of the OAI is on…research and journal articles.” Why hasn’t it caught on? ZA3038 suggests a few reasons. It seems like a reasonable consideration of an interesting metadata-based aggregation service.

[Tags: open_archives_initiative oai metadata open_access ]

Flyp, an online mag, is in beta but it’s already gorgeous.

[Tags: flyp ]

David Ardia is giving a Berkman lunch talk on the Citizen Media Law Project. David begins by acknowledging his colleagues on the project, which has been student-driven to a large degree. [Caution Live-Blogging: I'm missing things, getting them wrong, etc. You will be able to see the session itself at Media Berkman. ]

David begins by looking at iBrattleboro.com, a citizen journalism, the neurodiversity weblog, and wikileaks. These sites have come to the attention of CMLP because they are citizens media sites that have little or no journalism training, little or know knowledge of media law, and not a lot of money. The CMLP grew out of a desire to provide resources for groups like these. (Dan Gillmor was one of the forces behind this, says David.)

CMLP began in April 2007, got a Knight News Challenge Award in May, published its legal threats database in Nov, launched their legal guide in Jan. 2008, and in Feb. did its first amicus filing (for Wikileaks).

The legal guide site has lots and lots of material in it, covering six topics: forming a business and getting online, dealing with online legal risks, newsgathering and privacy, access to government info, intellectual property, and risks associated with publication. There are 5-10 topics under each of these. There’s a lot there.

David walks through the site. There is a rich variety of ways of finding and browsing. In David’s example, the site explains how to create a non-profit corp., and actually steps you through the process, including the specifics for the fifteen states the guide covers so far.

The legal threats database has 25 attributes by which it can be searched. Users can contribute their own entries, although most come in through email. (They also import data from the Chilling Effects site.) The database does not make judgments about the threats. There are 467 entries in the database. Over half are law suits. They include threats to bring criminal charges (16) or to bring disciplinary action (18); that last is included because the legal system backs up the contracts that permit disciplinary action. David explains that the site takes an inclusive approach since you can easily narrow your queries to the areas that interest you. [A good "miscellaneous" principle!]

Factoids: California, which has 12% of the population, is the source of 21% of the threats. 30% of the legal claims are for defamation. Copyright infringements come in second with 8%.

93 of the law suits are pending. 40 settled. The plaintiffs got an injunction in 16 of the cases and won their cases 13 times. That’s not a lot out of more than 250 cases. David says that these sorts of results are fairly normal for law suits, although (he adds) these tend to be emotion-driven litigations, not money-driven.

David gives us a tour of the iBrattleboro case entry. It’s a very well-organized, thorough research on the topic.

David ends by posing some questions for expanding the database and opening it up. [Tags: citizen_journalism law cmlp chillingeffects ]

The latest version of Keynote exports files in Powerpoint format that the latest version of Popwerpoint can’t read. Charming.

A discussion board pointed out, however, that if you strip out all the presenter notes from your Keynote file, the exported Keynote file will indeed open in Powerpoint. I tried it on one small file, and it worked.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to strip out all those notes. And I haven’t seen anything from Keynote about an update.

[Tags: keynote powerpoint ]

I wanted to find out what Microsoft Expression Media — or, as Microsoft puts it, Microsoft® Expression® Media — is, so I did what any red-blooded Netizen would do: I googled it. The top hit is Microsoft’s home page for it. It wants to show me videos, but I don’t want to sit around while being slowly pummeled with Microsoft’s marketing messages. If I’m going to be marketed to, at least let me skim. So, I clicked on the “Why Buy?” link, thinking I’d get a features list. I just want to know what the product does.

Nope. That loads a popup that asks me to install Silverlight (oops, I mean Microsoft® Silverlight®)The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, Silverlight “updates automatically,” where “update” means I am giving Microsoft the right to load stuff onto my computer without asking or informing me. In addition, the privacy statement says Microsoft will only transfer information it gathers about me and my computer to third parties if it really wants to. (The privacy statement puts it a little more formally than that.)

So, here I am, trying to find out about a Microsoft product, yet I’m being required to install software I don’t want in the first place, and that has the right to mutate itself without my knowledge. And to get this authorized virus, I have to agree to a privacy-violation agreement that scares me.

Can you imagine the snorting that would occur if a start-up company insisted on this?

So, take this as an example of either inept marketing or implicit bullying by a dominant force. Or both. [Tags: microsoft marketing silverlight ]

Best of luck to Ethan Zuckerman, he of the big heart and huge brain, as he undergoes eye surgery…

[Tags: ethan_zuckerman ]

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Every number is special. Every one. Even you, 64, my little lowest-number-with-seven-divisors. And especially you, 6014, my little square formed by 3 squares that overlap by 1 digit.

[Tags: numbers ]