An amazing thing happened to me today. I was sitting at my laptop working when, all of a sudden, the connector for the power cord that plugs into the laptop caught on fire. I yanked the cord immediately. The thing gave off a few thin tendrils of smoke and then died a quiet, peaceful death.

Had I not been at my computer when it happened I’m quite sure my computer would have burned up. Had I not been home my entire house might have burned down.

Apple makes really shitty power connectors. What are the odds that on the same day this happens to me I would pop over to read the “Cult of Mac” blog and see a discussion about a power cord melting down on a MacBook?

Different laptops, different situations. I really doubt that guy’s cat pulled the cord out of his laptop. I think the magnetic link broke once the connector caught on fire and the thing fell out on it’s own.

In my case, my connector had been previously bent when it had been yanked out of the laptop on accident. Over time the thicker part of the cable at the base of the plastic plug (the one that goes into the laptop) split open. I can’t say exactly why. It could have been a stress fracture from the new angle of use or heat from the electrical wire inside acting on a point of weakness that developed when the cord was yanked or, most likely, some combination thereof.

The split got worse but the plug still worked. I was planning on using the Ultimate Tool to Fix All Problems (duct-tape) but I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I really don’t know what the final straw for it was today but I do have some advice for people with broken power cords. This may seem like really obvious advice, but go with me here, as I made the mistake myself and I’m not a total idiot:

Don’t use broken power cords.

Bent may be okay but once the electrical wire inside of the plastic is exposed stop. It’s time to buy a new cord. It hurts. Apple charges $80 for the $%@! things. Your house or business most likely cost more than that though, so it’s worth it.

This panel defined folksonomy and the current state of tagging. During the course of the conversation there were a few suggestions on ways to improve upon the current state of affairs, which is what the panel was really about. I wanted to expand on that part of the conversation.

It seems to me that every time a cool new technology or idea comes around, we jump on the bandwagon with such enthusiasm that we leave behind everything that came before. When the discussion repeatedly turned to letting non-power-users rely on or draw from the knowledge of the group, either in the form of automatic tagging or keyword suggestions, people questioned how any one person could rely on the opinions of another. While I agree that no system is perfect (systems are, after all, created by imperfect humans), it seems to me that we’ve been developing methods of quantifying trust for a long time.

When I buy something on eBay I’m reasonably assured that I’m buying from a reputable seller. The same goes for opinions on Epinions. Does anybody remember when Epinions was the cool new kid that would empower the masses? I still use the site when making purchasing decisions. For that matter, look at any peer-to-peer network.

Simple ideas tend to be the best ideas. That’s my corollary to Occum’s Razor. Simple methods of user ranking can create a trust mechanism that would allow novice users to rely on the wisdom of experts. This could easily allow for experts in specific areas (Jazz was mentioned during the panel).

I want to repeat one suggestion that was brought up during the panel: tagging should be incorporated directly into the browser (and operating systems). Regular bookmarking should take advantage of tags. This should not replace categorization but rather be offered as an option to it. Just because you think it is better doesn’t mean it has to replace something people have already learned to use. There is something to be said for the efficiency of knowledge already learned.

That suggestion led directly to something that I have not heard mentioned by anyone despite it being extremely obvious. In fact, it hadn’t occurred to me until the panel. Tagging has been around since the early days of the web. It has been done by the experts in each subject area and it has been done to a vast quantity of what is out there. I’m talking about keywords. Remember meta-tags?

Why has nobody created a bookmark plugin or web utility bookmarklet that automatically includes meta-data with the link URL? This should be automated in every browser and bookmarking website and, at the very least, include the two most common meta-tags: description and keywords. Relying on past lessons learned: bookmark searching should be able to very easily include or exclude metadata in order to deal with keyword spamming (there we go re-using past knowledge to enhance the trust of the system…).

I’ll leave off there. Hopefully other attendees (and the panelists themselves) can offer more suggestions or point out the flaws in mine. The evolution of ideas is best accomplished through collaboration.

Related Links:
Panel Listing on SXSW
Beyond Folksonomies (great resource page)

SXSW Interactive is just over a day away. It’s my favorite time of the year. Even better than Christmas.

Great article up on Salon right now called I, Nanobot. Definitely worth a read.

I just saw a great Twilight Zone. One of the old black and white ones. Man, I didn’t realize how much better they were than the schlock they put out in the color series. I saw two great episodes really, but the second one resonated more. The all powerful state, which banned books to limit knowledge, decided if people were obsolete or not. Obsolete people were executed. The obsolete person, a librarian, got his revenge on the state by getting his judge executed as well. What’s good for the goose…

This post was written at 1 AM but due to a power shortage wasn’t posted until morning. (I only mention that so that people don’t think I sit around in my underwear watching old Twilight Zone episodes on a workday morning.)

A lot of sites have a file called “robots.txt” to tell search engines which directories and files to go into and which ones to leave alone. Typically, you don’t want search engines going through your sensitive data. A lot of sites no longer use the file because, well, it tells everyone where your sensitive data is. For those sites that do still use them, the #1 thing they tell the search engines not to read is the “robots.txt” file. Not the Whitehouse!

If you haven’t already noticed, every occurance of the word “robot,” “robots” or “robots.txt” in this post is linking to the “robots.txt” file over at the whitehouse.gov website. The file comes up on a simple Google search.

The data alluded to in that file is very interesting. It’s probably nothing, but then again, who knows with this administration. Check out some of the directories being blocked:

• /911/iraq
• /911/patriotism/iraq
• /911/remembrance/iraq
• /climatechangefactsheet/iraq
• /energy/iraq

The list goes on and on. It legitimately looks like they just tacked /iraq onto the end of everything but then you come across whole blocks of directories with no mention of Iraq, for example:

• /firstlady/photoessays/mideast2005/essay1/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/mideast2005/essay2/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/mideast2005/essay3/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/mideast2005/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/monthly/200401/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/monthly/200402/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/monthly/text
• /firstlady/photoessays/pope/text

Sure, you’re thinking “the First Lady has nothing to do with Iraq so that must be the exception.” But there are an awful lot of /iraq folders under /firstlady too. And there are folders other than /firstlady that are noticeably absent the /iraq folder. What does it mean? Was there some plot underway to link 9/11 to Iraq? Well of course there was. Energy? Well, that’s a no-brainer too. But what the hell is the deal with climate change and the 300 other /iraq folders?

Let’s not even discuss whether global warming contributed to hurricane Katrina’s fury by creating warmer waters in the Gulf or higher sea levels. Let’s instead focus on the fact that sea levels are rising and more and more areas are going to be at or below sea level in the future. What do we do to protect coastal cities?

There is no silver bullet answer to this question. It’s going to require a combination of different techniques and approaches in different areas. In New Orleans, restoring the wetlands is going to be crucial, along with a levee system. A lot more cities are going to have to build levees (or build more levees) in the future.

There are other common-sense things that can be done too. Any at-risk city should be building or raising a series of thoroughfares throughout their cities to be above the water line (by several feet to account for the upcoming rise in sea level).

Cities should also amend their building codes for all future construction. Concrete would be a much better choice. Countries like the Bahamas and Mexico already mandate concrete. (They can’t afford $100 billion to rebuild people’s houses–I’m not entirely sure we can either, but we must and will.) Concrete provides a natural insulation so you don’t have to sandwich layers together. It can withstand hurricanes much better than brick and wood. Post-flooding it isn’t prone to mold.

The human link in the chain will remain the weakest but it is also the easiest and cheapest to fix: just elect competent officials.

A common-sense approach to disaster planning, disaster management, and post-disaster management is essential to saving lives, saving property, and saving our entire economy. After all, how many Katrina’s can we take?

I’m a big fan of environmentalism that doesn’t change the way we live. Mainly because I think it’s just impossible to get the majority of people to make sacrifices for something that they can’t see as tangible. Any effort by the rest of us is pretty meaningless if the majority isn’t joining in.

I’m also a big fan of architecture and architectural engineering. And science.

That’s why I’m so fascinated by the developments that continue to take place with materials sciences and all of the interactivity between architects and other engineering fields that are working to incorporate energy producing and/or green technologies into new buildings.

A recent article in Wired called Scrubbing Bubbles Hit the Streets talks about a concrete that can break down vehicle exhaust. The “Dives in Misericordia church” in Rome is one example of a building made of self-cleaning concrete. The more expensive material was chosen not because of it’s green properties, but because of it’s self-cleaning properties that would help keep the ultra-white facade of the building pristine for years to come.

The Dives in Misercordia Church

The proposed Freedom Tower, proposed to replace the World Trade Center buildings, will have a wind farm, solar farm, and employ energy efficient technologies all in an effort to reduce it’s impact on the environment. You can read a Wired article about that here. Putting a wind farm on top of a skyscraper just makes sense. It certainly doesn’t make the skyline any less attractive, especially if the turbines are incorporated in narrow tunnels inside the building. Along with solar windows and natural lighting tubes that feed sunlight throughout the building, the impact of these buildings can be greatly reduced.

The Proposed Freedom Tower

Last week HGTV ran a show called I Want That! that featured solar roofing shingles that look like shiny shingles. They actually look more attractive than the ugly black tar shingles you typically see on most roofs and they don’t appear to reflect more light than your average tiled roof, so they won’t blind your neighbors. With subsidies you could recoup the cost of the shingles in 7-10 years and they have a lifespan of 25-30 years.

It’s always fun reading about these projects and it makes you feel good about the future. However, without widespread adoption, we are right back where we started with little to no actual benefit. Hopefully the rising costs of fossil fuels, continuing government subsidies, and some economies of scale will combine to create the perfect storm for widespread adoption of even a few of the green technologies that are out there.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a funny, tongue-in-cheeck article about the upcoming Microsoft Vista OS (formerly Longhorn) over at eWeek titled “I’m So Excited by Microsoft Vista. Not.” Here is an excerpt:

Like, wow, Microsoft’s Vista, the former Longhorn, is now only more than a year away.

With this latest beta, we’re finally going to see lots of really new, cool features.

For example, it’s going to have speech recognition! How cool is that!?

Thanks to Kottke for pointing me to this diversion, which effectively prevented me from getting work done this morning. It’s a step-by-step tutorial for teaching your Bayesian spam filter to play chess with analysis on how well it performs. It’s written in plain English (except for the code snippets) so you don’t have to have much programming knowledge to follow along.

I just read an article over at Forbes.com titled “The Lonely Apple Repairman?” that detailed the recent travails of the author, David A. Andelman, who had to wait 60 hours for his Mac to be repaired at the Apple store in NY. I can sympathize with his angst over the temporary loss of his ‘Net umbilical cord, even if I thought the article was a bit overdramatic.

The end of the article posed a question that routinely pops up from tech writers: shouldn’t computers be more stable by now? He points to one of the usual (straw man) suspects for comparison: the modern automobile. I have two arguments or comments for Mr. Andelman in response to his story:

First, cars haven’t changed all that much since they showed up a century ago. Every piece that has been added went through years of research and careful integration into the car. For safety reasons most people would argue that is a good thing. But from the standpoint of innovation, it really sucks. Computers, on the other hand, are all about innovation. Not only does the hardware continue to develop at an amazing rate, but the software may actually be outpacing the hardware.

I’m sure if we were to just stop making new bits and pieces for our computers and just spent all of our time refining what we currently have that we would have much more stable machines. But what a waste that would be. Stability is great, don’t get me wrong. And the software and hardware industries (but especially software) could certainly do a better job of creating more stable products, but there will always be a balancing act with innovation.

Second, knowing how to take care of my computer much better than I know how to take care of my car, I tend to experience more problems and sink more money into my automobile than I ever will on my computers. So it’s a spurious analogy at best.