Friday, June 17, 2005

DittyBot: SMS to your Mac and hear a tune. Dig this Applescript hack that enables you to SMS your home computer and hear any tune in your iTunes collection via Skype. (Via LifeHacker) You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it's even quicker! [Smart Mobs] 11:20:19 PM    comment []

Surprises. Just came back from the Moin campaign's HQ. Everyone is sure that Moin is going to second round, butthe question is in the first or second place. Big news of the night Ahmadinejad's surprising rise. He has done much better than many expected. The other surprise is Karrubi's high vote in small cities. Former speaker of the parliament, he was the one who promised to give 500,000 Rials (some $50) to all citizens between 18 and 55. In my view they both indicate the widening income gap between upper and lower class. Voting for Ahmadinejad and Karrubi means a major... [Editor: Myself (English)] 11:15:09 PM    comment []

Dan points out that Neal Stephenson has an excellent op-ed piece in today's New York Times -- but the last two paragraphs should have come first. Here they are: Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out. If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic. Don't worry about it. Just go out and bid on that house you wish you could afford. [Dan Gillmor's blog] 11:12:28 PM    comment []

Mac-on-Mac makes it possible to run Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, OpenDarwin or Linux for PowerPC in parallel with your Mac OS X installation in a virtual machine. This could be great for developers who want to test on old versions of OS X. [Hack the Planet] 11:11:02 PM    comment []

Ex-Chief and Aide Guilty of Looting Millions at Tyco. The conviction of L. Dennis Kozlowski and his top lieutenant ends a case that came to symbolize an era of corporate scandal. By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN. [NYT > Business] 11:09:21 PM    comment []

Blogging Iran, by Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. 12:46:51 PM    comment []

Iran Votes in Presidential Election (Democracy Now) -- Listen to Segment || Download Show mp3 || Read Transcript 12:46:48 PM    comment []

From BNA News: SWEDISH ANTI-PIRACY GROUP BROKE DATA PROTECTION LAWS Sweden's anti-piracy group, Antipiratbyrån (APB), broke the personal data act in its hunt for illegal file-sharers, the country's Data Inspection Board has ruled. At the beginning of March, thousands of Swedes reported the film and games industry-backed organization for its method of tracking the downloading of copyright-protected files. APB used a piece of software to record the IP-addresses of file sharers, as well as the alias, the file name and the server through which the connection was made. 12:46:44 PM    comment []

Ricki Lewis from the World Summit on Evolution: Individuality, Evolution, and Dancing What is the unit of evolution, the level of life upon which natural selection acts? A geneticist would say the gene; Charles Darwin saw it in the unique populations on the Galapagos. On Friday, Leticia Aviles, associate professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, singled out the individual as dividing the cellular from the group level. “But what an individual is depends on one's frame of reference,” she said, and the level at which natural selection acts remains an unresolved issue. Added Sean Rice, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary and biology at Yale University, in his commentary, “Levels at which selection acts is not a philosophical question, but is a property of the biological system. You can't correctly represent evolution if you don't recognize the right level of selection.” Aviles offered an example of selection at the population level in social spiders: when the sex ratio veers from 1:1, selection begins to favor the rarer sex until the ratio is restored. But defining the individual may not be straightforward. 12:46:40 PM    comment []

Congress Reacts to Breach Onslaught, by Roy Mark, Internet News. On a day marked by another major data security breach and more tough talk from Congress, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) moved against a Fortune 500 company for its data protection practices. Testifying before a Senate panel investigating possible national legislation aimed at better data protection and a national data breach disclosure law, FTC Chairman Deborah Majoris said BJ's Wholesale Club agreed to settle FTC charges that it failed to take adequate measures to protect consumers' personal information. For the first time we allege that inadequate data security can be an unfair business practice, Majoris told a Senate panel. This action should provide clear notice to the business community to establish and maintain reasonable affirmative security measures. The settlement requires BJ's, which operates 150 warehouse stores and 78 gas stations in 16 states, to implement a comprehensive information security program while submitting to third-party security audits every other year for 20 years. 7:45:52 AM    comment []